Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
for not handing these people out among the townspeople for them to
raise as slaves!” When in town, missionaries commonly filled the roles
reserved for slave owners. Missionary Joe Moreno reported in the August
1946 edition of Brown Gold that he was “developing the contact with
some captured jungle people in San Juan,” and missionaries had identi-
fied “a captive Bárbaro woman in San Jose,” who believed that a particular
band who appeared on the railroad tracks “is the one from which she
came. She is of the opinion that if she could talk with her father, who is
the chief of her tribe, we could make friends with them.”
This Ayoreo-speaking woman was called Inez in Spanish and Aroide
or Guto'date in Ayoreo. A rancher named Ignacio Paz captured her in
1929 near San Jose with a group of other women, including her two teen-
age daughters. Paz gave Guto'date and her lone surviving daughter to his
son, Ubil, shortly thereafter. When Jean Johnson met her in 1945, this
“Ayore woman servant whose master would permit me to take time with
her,” lived with her daughter, who by then had been impregnated by
her captor, in a “rude shack of poles, covered with woven palm leaves.”
She was a “short, chunky, dark-haired woman nearing forty years. She
seemed awed and puzzled” at the missionary's interest but agreed to teach
Jean her language and eventually came to live in her house. 36
From Guto'date, missionaries learned that the Bárbaros called them-
selves “Ayore” or “Ayoreode.” Guto'date recounted “customs, living pat-
terns, and the likes and dislikes of [her] fellow tribesmen.” From her, Jean
learned how to lure Indians by gifts of steel-leaf spring, instead of mirrors,
and that the best twisting footpaths for hunting Indians were those that
led to the salt pans. 37 Despite the love that Jean expressed for Inez in her
topic, she soon returned to the United States. Guto'date married a man
from one of the recently contacted bands and reportedly died of tubercu-
losis at the Catholic mission of Santa Teresita sometime after 1956. 38
There are so many of these contradictions—flashes of light within
darkness that created darkness within light—that it is difficult to imagine
them as evidence of a missionary failure or hypocrisy. Rather, it is more
likely that such ambiguity was precisely the aim, technique, and motor
of the missionary project.
The Dangers of Proximity
According to missionary writings, one of the first tasks of the missionary
in the field was to create a sense of internal sin and the idea of Hell: “It has
been so hard to get words to give them the gospel. Little by little the idea
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