These three verses should be seen as the conclusion to Enos’s entry about his prayer. They describe the aftermath of his conversation with Jehovah. His impulse was to go among the people of Nephi and prophesy of things to come. This suggests that there was more to the prayer than what he recorded, and that it included a call as a prophet. As with his grandfather, Lehi, he was not a court-appointed prophet or teacher, In the tradition of the Old Testament, Enos was a prophet from the outside who was called to teach the people without official governmental appointment.
In verse 20 Enos says that “the people of Nephi did seek diligently to restore the Lamanites unto the true faith in God.” That certainly indicates that there were still righteous Nephites who were attempting to do good, contrary to the implications we have seen from the end of 2 Nephi, the book of Jacob, and the inferences in the book of Enos. That number of righteous Nephites perhaps was the reason that the Nephite destruction came much later, even though Jacob had threatened them with it.
Perhaps the mission, or missions, to the Lamanites were aided by Jacob’s indication that the Lamanites were more righteous than the Nephites (see Jacob 3:5). Whatever the motivation, the result was not encouraging. Enos declares that “our labors were vain; their hatred was fixed.”
The rest of the catalog of the terrible things that the Lamanites did was a standard ethnocentric complaint. The demonstration that this is a cultural description is verified in verse 21. Where the Lamanites are savages, the Nephites are civilized. The proof is in the savage way the Lamanites provide for themselves as opposed to the civilized Nephite agriculture and herding. Lamanites deal with the wild, Nephites with the cultivated.
Even if it were true at one point in time, the larger numbers of the Lamanites and what we see of them later in the text, tells us that this was not an accurate picture.