Voyage By Dhow (16 page)

The question now was how far the missionary labours had progressed. Evangelists rush to cover the unclothed human form, and the spectacle of Indians dressed in shapeless and often grubby Western cast-offs is frequently a glum reminder of their presence. Apart from the barbed-wire fence, Guanama was free from the ugliness too often associated with the disruption of belief. We preferred not to abandon hope, and Paul Henley, the British anthropologist who was with us, who has lived, off and on, among the Panare since 1975 and speaks their language fluently, now put the fatal question. ‘When is your initiation ceremony to be held?’ The reply was a depressing one, confirming our worst fears. ‘There will be no ceremony. God is against it. We have turned our backs on all these things.’

It was a breach with the past indeed. The
Katayinto
, the great male initiation ceremony, held in the dry season when food is most plentiful, is for the Panare the culmination of the annual cycle, and to them the equivalent of all the religious and secular feasts of the West rolled into one. Weeks of food-gathering and general preparations are called for, and the festival itself, involving dramatic episodes and three major and a number of minor dances, may stretch over six weeks. It ends with the boys’ investiture with the loincloths signifying their attainment of adult status. To the Panare the loincloth represents what the turban does to the Sikhs, and to destroy the
Katayinto
ceremony is to remove the cornerstone and expunge the future of a culture believed by those who have studied it to have developed over thousands of years. No one understands this better than the missionaries, for whom all such ceremonies, and the wearing of the loincloth itself, shackles the Indian—as they see it—to the heathen past. From time to time
Brown Gold
, house magazine of the New Tribes Mission, prints a jubilant notice of a tribe that has been persuaded to change loincloths for trousers, evidence that it is at last on a road from which there is no turning back. Thus in Tanjung Maju: ‘The first time we entered the village they were wearing loincloths and very primitive … see how they have grown in the Lord.’

The New Tribes Mission, now continuing its implacable advance in those parts of the world where ‘uncontacted’ tribal people remain to be swept into the evangelical net, was founded in 1941 in El Chico, California, and now has some 1,500 missionaries working with 125 tribes in 16 countries. In South America, which it has divided up with its missionary rival, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and where it is represented in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, it has rolled over the Catholic opposition. The Catholic Fathers, sometimes reproaching their flock with desertion, are discouraged by the reply, ‘You have no aeroplanes. You are not in touch with God by radio.’ To the outsider both fundamentalist missions are identical in their aim and the methods employed, but the New Tribes Mission criticizes the Summer Institute of Linguistics as ‘too liberal’. Both view Catholics with distaste, and their converts as hardly better placed in the salvation stakes than outright pagans.

Mission finances, according to its prospectus, depend upon public donations. These do not necessarily take the form of cash. Survival International (1980) reports an offering of 2,500 hectares of land by the government of Paraguay, and in 1975 a missionary spoke to me of ‘a heck of a piece of land given to the Mission by a company in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco engaged in the extraction of tannin. They figured we could help with the Indians.’ The Mission does not hold itself aloof from engaging in commerce, acting frequently as middleman in the supply of goods to the Indians or the resale of their artefacts. Survival International mentions that they are in the fur trade in Paraguay, dealing in jaguar skins, which fetch high prices since the jaguar elsewhere is an internationally protected animal.

Impressive technical equipment and abundant funds give the New Tribes Mission more than a head start in the race for souls. Thereafter its work is carried forward by the zeal of its ‘born-again’ fundamentalist missionaries recruited from those areas of the United States where Darwin is excluded from the school curriculum, fossils are explained away as Devil’s devices implanted in the rocks to cause confusion among the servants of God, and the reappearance of the witches of Salem would cause no great surprise. The Mission proclaims with fervour and enthusiasm the imminent Second Coming of Christ and the destruction of this world, and its doctrinal statement includes the belief in the ‘unending punishment of the unsaved’, thus committing to the flames of hell all adherents of Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, besides several thousand minor religious faiths and all the great and good men of all races whose misfortune it was to be born before the coming of Christ.

Two thousand tribes remain to be contacted, all of them under a threat of everlasting fire, so conversion is a task of utmost urgency. It is this sense of time being so short that tends to outweigh all considerations of the convert’s welfare in this life, provided that his soul is saved for eternity. ‘He saves the souls of men,’ runs the New Tribes Mission doctrine, ‘not that they might continue to live in the world, but that they might live forever with Him, in the world to come.’

Missionary tactics have undergone little change since the Jesuits first accompanied the Spanish to the conquest of the New World, although they are now reinforced by techniques of persuasion used with success by such sects as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity under the leadership of the Reverend Moon. The first task is to establish the dependence of the newly contacted native, and this is a matter of invariable routine. Here is a missionary speaking: ‘We leave gifts … knives, axes, mirrors, the kind of things Indians can’t resist … After a while the relationship develops. We have to break their dependence on us next. Naturally they want to go on receiving all these desirable things we’ve been giving them, and sometimes it comes as a surprise when we explain that from now on if they want to possess them they must work for money … We can usually fix them up with something on the local farms. They settle down to it when they realize that there’s no going back.’

The manoeuvre never fails to work, accomplishing in the end the inevitable tragic result. There’s no going back. The trap baited with the fatal gifts is sprung and conversion follows with its long catalogue of prohibitions. The evangelized Indian is forbidden to drink, sing, dance, wear traditional ornaments, paint his body, take part in any of the old ceremonies, marry a non-believing wife. A stern and pleasure-hating deity speaking through the missionary’s mouth lists his embargoes, backed by awful descriptions of the lake brimming with fire and brimstone. Too often, ‘something on the local farms’, whose owners may themselves be close to the poverty line, is hardly distinguishable from slavery, and in the end the detribalized Indian drifts away to his last refuge, the slums of a town where his wife’s prostitution provides the money to buy rum and oblivion.

Military dictatorships are the natural supporters of the New Tribes Mission, with whom they share similar views. Les Pederson, a director, illustrates this identity of outlook in his autobiography
Poisoned Arrows: ‘…
the President of the Republic of Paraguay, don Alfredo Stroessner … assured me of his appreciation of what we are doing among the indigenous peoples of the country.’ Elsewhere efforts to get rid of the missionaries have been frequent, strenuous, and sometimes crowned with temporary success. The clamour has been loudest in Venezuela, where a united front of jurists, anthropologists and churchmen has accused the Mission of infringement of the Indians’ human rights, of coercion and forcible conversion. Public opinion has led to the creation of two Congressional investigations. The latter of these opened in 1979, and remained in session for some two years, filling the Venezuelan press with bizarre accounts of missionary goings-on.

Naval Captain Mariño Blanco, charged with keeping an eye on the doings of foreigners in the country’s remote regions, spoke of scientific espionage. He noted that the missionaries inevitably installed themselves in areas known to contain strategic minerals such as cobalt and uranium, and claimed to have proved that they were in the pay of American multinationals, naming two of them as Westinghouse and General Dynamics. He noted that the Mission had been in trouble in Colombia, suffering expulsion for ‘damage to national interests and for having assisted illicit explorations carried out by transnational companies in areas likely to contain deposits of strategic materials’. The captain had found missionary baggage labelled ‘combustible materials’ to contain military uniforms and ‘other articles’—this being taken by the press to refer to Geiger counters. The uniforms were explained away by the missionaries as intended to impress the Indians. Captain Blanco said that the head of the New Tribes Mission had tried to bribe him. He gave his opinion that the missionaries’ involvement with the Indians was only a cover for their other activities.

A Ye’cuana Indian, Simeón Jiménez, speaking defective Spanish with much eloquence, appeared to describe the prohibitions imposed upon his people as soon as the missionaries had taken hold. They included the drinking of fermented juices, dancing, singing, the use of musical instruments, tribal medicines and tobacco, and the tribal custom of arranging marriages within the framework of kinship groups.

Jiménez stressed the psychological terror the Ye’cuanas were subjected to to force them to become converted. In particular he cited the appearance of a comet, described by the chief missionary in the area as heralding the end of the world. The missionary had gathered the Ye’cuanas together and given them three days, on pain of suffering a fiery extinction, to break with their wicked past. They were later warned by the same men of a communist plot to drive the missionaries out of the country, saying that if this were to happen U.S. Airforce planes would be sent to bomb Ye’cuana villages.

I was unable to see Simeón himself and listen to an account of their traumatic experience from his own lips, because he was seven days away by canoe in the Orinoco jungle. Instead I called on his wife, Dr Nelly Arvelo, a distinguished anthropologist who had set a seal on her approval of the life-style of primitive hunters and gatherers by marrying one. She confirmed all her husband had had to say, including an incident when Simeón’s aged grandmother had come to him in tears, imploring him to give up his struggle before they were all reduced to ashes.

Terror apart, Dr Arvelo said, the missionaries had worked out a new kind of punishment for those who resisted conversion. ‘Indians,’ she said, ‘like to do everything together. They share everything, particularly their food. They’re very close to each other. The missionaries understood this so they worked out that the best way to punish those who didn’t want to be converted was by isolation. As soon as they had a strong following in a village they would order the converts to have nothing more to do with those who held out. No one, not even their own parents, was allowed to talk to them, and they were obliged to eat apart from the rest. It was the worst punishment an Indian could imagine, and often it worked.’

Simeón Jiménez was followed into the Congressional hearing by more Indians, some of them discreetly smeared with vermilion as if for a ceremony and wearing loincloths under their trousers, who described what life was like under the thumb of the huge fair-haired men who had dropped into their midst out of the sky. A planeload of converts with short-back-and-side haircuts, baseball caps and bumper boots was flown in from the jungle, but their offer of a hymn session was turned down by the commission. An airforce general who had become a born-again Christian and had worked closely with the New Tribes Mission described Captain Blanco as a crazy fellow who wanted to draw attention to himself, and it was learned that, shortly afterwards, pressure had been brought to bear resulting in Blanco’s dismissal from the service.

In the meantime the press had been delving into the Mission’s history, noting that in Paraguay they had been involved in manhunts carried out against the Aché Indians and in more manhunts, enforced relocation and enslavement of ‘wild’ Ayoreos (Survival International, 1980). It was further noted that a description of such an armed manhunt, when Indian fugitives were taken as slaves, had actually appeared in a Mission publication. A group of foreign anthropologists, three of them British, wrote a letter to a Caracas newspaper calling for the Mission’s expulsion, and two American signatories were immediately summoned to their embassy to receive an ambassadorial rebuke. According to Captain Blanco there was at least one other intervention by the U.S. Embassy in support of the New Tribes Mission. ‘I ordered the arrest of two American engineers named Ward and Curry, who were carrying out (illegal) scientific investigations … Later it was proved that James Bou (head of the New Tribes Mission in Venezuela) had organized their journey … Mr Bou telephoned the U.S. Embassy, and the Counsellor of the Embassy then called me, asking me to release the two men.’

The feelings of the Venezuelans as a whole were summed up by the Apostolic Vicar of Puerto Ayacucho, the Amazonian capital, who said: ‘These people have created a terrible confusion in the Indian’s mind. They have no conception of Indian culture. When you forbid the Indian to dance, drink his
yarake
or eat the ashes of his dead ones, you destroy his culture. One doesn’t spread God’s message by terror. The New Tribes Mission relies on force and if the native allows himself to be converted he does so not out of conviction, but fear.’

The methods used by the New Tribes Mission to deal with the Ye’cuana seemed to have proved successful, as a high percentage of the tribe—perhaps as much as 75 per cent—had been induced to accept conversion and to renounce their old customs. Attention was now focused on the Panare, who had been least receptive of all Venezuela’s twenty Indian tribes to the evangelical message. Henry Corradini, a Venezuelan anthropologist who has worked with the Panare for a number of years and speaks their language, began an investigation of books of scriptural stories translated by the Mission into the Panare language, which he suspected might have embodied manipulations of the holy text.