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lar, were required to attend. They were publicly interrogated about Bible
verses and scripture and most of them seemed to take it very seriously.
Siquei was discredited as a leader. Bobby took two of the men on preach-
ing trips to Campo Loro and even to the New Tribes Mission of Puesto
Paz in Bolivia. There were rumors he was trying to convince Jotai and the
others to hunt down and contact the last Totobiegosode band remain-
ing in the forest, led by Jotai's father, Jotaine. Twice a week, the New
Tribes missionaries hosted a program in which Ayoreo preachers from
Campo Loro broadcast fifteen-minute Ayoreo-language sermons on the
Mennonite radio station. When they aired, the village hushed. Adults
in every household huddled near their battery-powered radios. I learned
that these sermons were strikingly creative interpretations of Christian
scripture, such as the following by Refresco'daye:
We know that the stars, the moon, the sun, the night and the day are very different.
We know that up to this day. We know that because we have these stories in our hands
[in the Bible]. It will be the same for the Ayoreo. Those that die will come back to life
again, even though they were dead. When they live again, they will have another body.
Their old bodies will stay underneath the earth. . . . They will have a new Body when it
happens. . . . our old bodies are very ugly and dirty. . . . our new body will never die.
It will never die because we believe in God. The dead ones will come back to life again.
They will have a new body. They will change to another body. Their new body will be
very beautiful. It will be clean and white.
Such themes, I discovered, were not the exception but the rule. In-
deed, the performances of Christian faith so common in Chaidi invari-
ably invoked the end and rebirth of social time. Many Totobiegosode
were convinced that believers would soon be transformed into prosper-
ous, white-skinned, celestial beings. Redemptive transformation was an
appealing vision in this land of bulldozers and blood. As Siquei put it,
“We have to leave behind all those bad things from before. Only then
will Jesus take us to His village when the world ends. They say our
ayipie
souls have to become new.”
Anthropologists of Chaco peoples have long reacted to such statements
with skepticism or despair. Widespread Ayoreo professions of faith are
either lamented as evidence of evangelical ethnocide or dismissed as a
misleading appearance of change that conceals an unchanging core of
continuous and pure cultural difference. That is, it is often presumed
that Ayoreo traditional culture and evangelical Christianity are funda-
mentally opposed and mutually exclusive. In such models, “indigenous
