Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Direquednejnaigosode elders often told of how this former Minnesota
farmboy began to strip bare and don the jaguar-skin
ayoi
headdress re-
served for
dacasute
warriors during his contact work.
Slaves and converts, missionaries and slave owners, shamans and
farmers, Christians and barbarians, sin and fish, illness and piety, hunt-
ing and saving: every image created and threatened to blur into its own
opposite. The paradox is that the power of missionaries was not dimin-
ished by these contradictions. Rather, it seemed to grow from this tension
of creation and transgression and collapse of the limits between savage
and civilized, sacred and profane, Jesus and Devil, White and Indian,
human and nonhuman that were both immutable and instrumentally
unclear for everyone involved.
One gets the sense when reading missionary writings that this dialecti-
cal game of terror and salvation, however, almost immediately spiraled
out of control. Missionaries arrived in the field expecting a certain kind
of confrontation with Satan. But what if conversion, and hence the entire
economy of salvation, required becoming complicit in a mortal sin?
We had a real shock this morning. A woman killed her little girl, probably about five
years old, just because she didn't want her anymore. When we found out about it
Evelyn and some of the others dug her up, but she was dead. We sent the woman out
of the camp, a hard thing to do, and told the others in no uncertain terms that we
were going to have nothing like that here. We know that unless we stand out firmly
against their evil practices that they will not see the sin in them, though it would be
easier to do otherwise.
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The horror occasioned by the common Ayoreo practice of burying
unwanted infants threatened to overwhelm missionaries with rage, im-
potence, and shame.
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Missionaries of both genders who confronted such
scenes reported turning white, vomiting, or fainting. They later wrote of
suffering nervous spells, insomnia, and long sessions of uncontrollable
“bawling.”
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Such experiences could be so upsetting as to plunge mis-
sionaries into confusion about their capacity to control and guide the
endeavor they had worked so hard to create:
We're here too late for many of these and only those living here and seeing these
people day after day and these things happening could quite understand the distress
in this heart and life for more of christ. I don't know how I could ever take seeing some
of these things we have had to with these folks. . . . I know satan is dragging as many as
he can into christless hell before they can hear. . . . As the devil stands and sneers, we as
sons of god are failing so pitifully in declaring and living spirit-filled lives of power.
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