Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of hell seems to be getting across to them.”
39
It meant communicating
a moral order by parsing humanity into binaries of opposed elements.
Yet this order was constantly unraveling, and the elements never stayed
in their proper place:
Jean has never been able to get hold of a word for sin. The word she thought she had,
turned out to be fish, for the slave girl did not know the difference between the two
spanish words. (Fish,
pescado
, sin,
pecado.
) The captive believes all Jean dye has told
her of the Bible, etc., but so far she seems to have no sense of her own sin. To her the
bad people are those who kill people.
40
What is most striking about early missionary self-reporting is the de-
gree to which Ayoreo-speaking people were seen as already dying or as
the walking dead. They were “those whose manner of living is more like
animals than men.”
41
Their bodies, language, and practices were a veneer
of apparent health concealing a fallen state and a profound spiritual de-
generacy. “Always we are amazed how normal human beings could sink
so low as to be so much like the forest from which they came.”
42
“In the
natural, it would be hard to love them, but when we realize that they are
wandering around in darkness and dying without Christ, his love fills
our heart and goes out to them.”
43
Indeed, the physical life of the Indian
was irrelevant.
The terrible irony, of course, is that missionaries had to first intensify
or create the savage realities they aimed to alleviate and transcend. They
thanked God when he “opened doors” through devastating epidemics of
smallpox, measles, and influenza that swept missions in the 1950s and
1960s. “Sickness entered as before and even caused the death of some
who had so confidently carved out the little poles. It has given us the op-
portunity to witness to him because of their act, and we have likened their
poles to the graven images that God spoke against in Exodus.”
44
Ayoreo
people began to take Western medicine when they saw “that those who
died were those who wouldn't take it.”
45
Missionaries noted the “miracu-
lous” effects of antibiotics and even aspirin on the
Bárbaros
, as well as
the extremely rapid deaths, often in less than twenty-four hours, from
diseases such as the common cold or measles. When medicine was scarce,
they reportedly gave first attention to Christian converts.
Missionaries used these epidemics to stage demonstrations of the
power of God's Grace over satanic witchcraft. Yet stopping Satan at times
required mimicking him. Bill Pencille led the Ayoreo work of the South
American Indian Mission in the 1950s and 1960s. His outsized role in
these early contacts was mythologized in a 1967 topic called
The Defeat
