Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Why was infanticide so upsetting if everyone was convinced the Ay-
oreo were truly spiritual degenerates? Such imagery confirmed Ayoreo
savagery and called for the intensification of missionary efforts. Yet it
legitimated further contact work only if the mission itself had nothing
to do with creating a situation that was so extreme that mothers felt
compelled to bury their own infant children alive, which by all accounts
occurred on a dramatic scale. The figure of savagery in need of contact
was thus amplified not because the missions functioned smoothly but
precisely because they did not. This leads to the uncomfortable conclu-
sion that the ever-increasing drive to hunt Indians was at least partly a
response to the overwhelming contradictions of running missions that
resembled death camps.
Likewise, the pervasive missionary horror and fear of Ayoreo was ar-
ticulated not primarily in terms of their own constant fears of being mur-
dered by the Indians as they slept but as the fear they attributed to the
uncontacted
Indios bárbaros
.
51
This notion of Indian fear was repeated
over and over again in missionary writings until it became the guiding
chant of the Indian hunt. “They lived in constant fear of each other and
of their terrible Bird God. . . . Was there no escape from Asojna and her
anger? Must it always be this way? Would she always reign supreme in
the country of the Ayores?”
52
The point, of course, is that this imagery described not the savages but
the missionaries who had to terrorize the terrifying barbarians in order
to tame terror itself. Ayoreo had to first become the missionary image of
the walking dead to become savable life. Only then could Indian souls
be reaped and redeemed.
Indian Hunt as Colonial Becoming
Does this all mean that the pursuit and capture and enslavement and
conversion of forest Indians can be considered the crucial ritual by which
the missionary project was sustained? New Tribes missionaries may have
claimed that they led regular wild man hunts because they wanted “to
give the Pig People the chance to hear the Bible, cause if they don't they'll
all go to hell and suffer eternal damnation,” but the stakes were never
limited to Ayoreo well-being.
53
It was only by the constant creation and extermination of savages
through the creation and alleviation of terror that the staged scene of
death could figure as an ordered collection of Indian souls and con-
jure lifesaving Grace. This nonlinear system worked not through its
