Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
early missionaries. In her remarkable memoir
God Planted Five Seeds
, she
writes that locals at first thought the missionaries were gold seekers.
19
Gold. What else could these men be seeking in the Green Hell so far
from the temperate soil of Indiana, or Michigan or California or wherever
it was from whence they came in the DC-3 plane with a stenciled face of
a “tribesman” on the tail—a plane only recently returned from the killing
fields of Europe? That alluring substance was the only thing that could
compel these men to behavior like aerial pursuit of the barbarians. In
eastern Bolivia, as in many other places, gold was considered dangerous,
capable of creating desire so excessive that men would risk their lives to
acquire it. In such cases, it was considered to be a substance not of God
but of the Devil.
The missionaries laughed at such attitudes. Yes, they answered. “We
are after gold—but brown gold.”
For so did these missionaries refer to Indian souls, “worth far more
to God than any nugget on earth.” This image became a serious mantra
for missionary work among Ayoreo-speaking groups. One Ayoreo soul,
they wrote, was “more precious even than gold that perisheth,” and “one
brown tribal person is worth all the monetary wealth of the world.”
20
Indian souls were the only coin by which eternal salvation could be pur-
chased. As such, they required the intertwined labors of transgression and
extraction. Fleming named the official New Tribes newsletter
Brown Gold
because he was convinced that Indian souls were as valuable as spiritual
gold to their finders seeking to achieve heavenly paradise
21
: “If there is
any such thing as eternal gold, these brown men and women are it!”
22
What is the value of a soul? seldom do we as missionaries ourselves sense the great
value, but Jesus christ paid a great price to win these men! Truly these men were
“brown gold” that would not fade or canker, and there were eternal values for the
winning of such men for the glory of god . . . [“Brown gold”] seemed more and more
to be the most adequate way to describe these men—like a priceless treasure that had
not been found.
23
The Indian-soul-as-gold metaphor is found over and over in missionary
writings from the 1940s and 1950s and then cited until the late 1990s.
Cecil Dye, a former Michigan businessman, even wrote a song about
brown gold. He and his brother Bob sang the song during prayer meet-
ings in Roboré. They were singing it when they walked into the jungle in
late 1943 to contact the barbarians, and one wonders if it was on their lips
when a Jnupedogosode band speared them and their three companions
to death several weeks later:
