Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
meet to reconcile our differences. I hoped he would give me a clue about
missionary perceptions of Ayoreo humanity.
He arrived in a faded baseball cap, a lean sunburnt man in his early
forties who looked like my own midwestern kin. After such buildup, the
conversation was anticlimactic. He preferred to talk in Ayoreo with En-
glish sprinkled in and didn't have much to say. He compared Campo
Loro Ayoreo to the recently contacted Totobiegosode at Chaidi. Those at
Campo Loro, he said, were really “straddling the line” with their faith,
while those at Chaidi were more focused on Jesus, because they had less
distraction from “outside influences.” But he was tense and abruptly
ended the interview with an observation. “Outsiders show up and
think they understand the Ayoré,” he said, looking away. “But they get
it all wrong. There is no community here. Each person is out only for
themselves.”
I left disappointed but not sure why. Had I expected some easy way to
reconcile devastation and death with the faith of this guy who wasn't as
different from me as I wanted to imagine? A man who could have been
me and was my opposing double, instead. I wondered if Bobby might be
frustrated too. Struggling to distinguish the doomed and the redeemed
in a shady house over cold lemonade, did he also yearn to fight a clear
battle against a Devil incarnate who appeared one afternoon on a bor-
rowed motorcycle with tape recorder in hand?
As I motored slowly back through the desolation of the Ayoreo camp in
the evening shadows, I saw clusters of faceless figures silhouetted against
cookfires. It was like riding through a battlefield in which incantation was
the weapon and the terrain to be contested was life itself and we had all
already lost something whether here at its end or in fealty to our creed or
before the journey began.
The noninterview with Bobby meant I had little choice but to back-
track the allure of the Indian hunt further, to the missionary imaginary
of Ayoreo humanity stored in the archives. Perhaps in their writings I
could find some preliminary clues about the images these evangelicals
constructed of themselves, their labor, and their ideal object: the Ayoreo
soul.
The Bride of Christ
The story the New Tribes Mission tells about itself goes something like
this. Three middle-class men founded the New Tribes Mission in August
1942. Their leader was a young charismatic man named Paul Fleming.
