Jungle Identity Crisis: Auca Country Revisited

Missionary work continues among the Aucas, the Ecuadorian Indians who, 24 years ago this month, killed five American missionaries: Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Nate Saint. Assistant news editor John Maust recently visited the jungle clearing where Wycliffe Bible Translators began, and maintains its Auca outreach.

Al Meehan is navigating Wycliffe’s Helio Courier airplane through heavy rain-clouds en route to the jungle airstrip clearing that is Tiwaeno. Bad weather has delayed the 45-minute flight from Wycliffe’s jungle center of operations, Limón Cocha. Meehan seems relaxed, despite the fact that he is behind schedule.

He is among those whose lives were changed by the martyred missionaries. While a policeman in Baltimore, Maryland, Meehan read Russell Hitt’s biography of slain pilot Nate Saint and was inspired to attend Moody Bible Institute’s Aviation School. Now as a Wycliffe pilot in Ecuador, he makes deliveries of people and supplies to at least a dozen jungle airstrips.

Meehan eases the small craft into a landing pattern. The narrow, grassy clearing doubles as a soccer field, and Auca children interrupt their game long enough to back off. When the plane touches down, they chase after it like an errant ball.

Wycliffe personnel approach the plane. Translators Catherine Peeke and Rosi Jung expect a parcel of roofing nails for their new hut. Jim Yost, the bearded anthropological consultant, his wife Kathie, and three children, hope for mail. This time Meehan’s only shipment is an American journalist.

All seem happy to see Al, their airborne (and only) link to the outside. They wave as the plane takes off, then return to their work.

Mere mention of the word “Auca” creates vivid memories for many Christians. The Aucas’ killing of the five missionaries, so thoroughly documented in church basement movies and several biographies, led to this era’s most publicized missionary success story, in which Christianity crossed cultures and killers became church leaders.

Tiwaeno personnel are aware of the “Auca mystique.” However, they know more about slugging out a day-to-day, often lonely, ministry in the jungle. They are not missionaries in the formal, preaching sense. But their work contributes to the same goal of evangelization.

Auca culture and ministry have changed since Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot established the Tiwaeno settlement in 1958. Yost says these Indians no longer are called Auca. The term means “savage” or “barbarian” in the Quichua Indian language. The tribe now goes by the less derogatory name “Waorani,” meaning, simply, “the people.”

Yost says the Indians have learned they are on the bottom of the Ecuadorian social strata—beneath the Hispanics, mestizos, Quichuas, and various other jungle Indian groups. “The Quichuas regard them [Waorani] as less than human,” says Yost, an off-and-on Tiwaeno resident since 1974.

The Waorani are in an identity crisis, common to primitive cultures that rush suddenly into the twentieth century. “These people want desperately to be accepted,” says Jung, who came to Tiwaeno in 1969 as a health worker. She and Catherine Peeke, who had done mostly linguistic analysis in periodic stays at Tiwaeno since 1962, have been doing translation work on their own ever since Rachel Saint returned to the United States a year ago for eye surgery.

Seeking cultural acceptance, the Waorani in many cases have abandoned time-honored social customs. An example is the Wao (the singular form, pronounced Wog) male, who greets the airplane.

A broad smile reaches almost to his ears, which are striking because of the large hole in each ear lobe. Like many other Waorani, he has removed the traditional ear ornaments, not realizing he may look just as conspicuous without them. He also has forsaken the traditional Waorani haircut, and style of undress. This friendly Wao wears a missionary-barrel “Six Million Dollar Man” T-shirt and gray shorts.

The first Waorani Christian, Dayuma, who moved from Tiwaeno several years ago to establish another airstrip clearing settlement nearby, has been leading the Waoranis into this new age. She and several other Waorani women had fled the spearing vendettas of their tribe more than 25 years ago. They returned to their people enthusiastic about the modern world and with a knowledge of the Quichua and Spanish languages. They also helped introduce Christianity.

They are “cultural brokers” for their people, says Yost, who recently completed a three-year anthropological study of the Waorani. (Such reports are required by the Ecuadorian government in its contract with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Wycliffe’s sister organization, with administrative offices in the capital city, Quito.) Since the women are able to communicate with Quichua and Hispanic tradesmen, who have guns and other modern gadgets so desired now by the Waorani, the women have gained unprecedented influence in the tribe, says Yost. The Waorani previously had no formal leadership structures.

Yost regretfully admits that in some cases there have been abuses of that influence. In addition, he says, some Waorani have been confused into thinking that by becoming Christian, one becomes materially rich. These problems commonly confront missionaries working in primitive cultures, he says.

(Dayuma’s settlement, located near the “Palm Beach” massacre sight, has a trilingual government school. About 30 believers live there. She still helps with translation work, and earns a small income by cooking meals for the private tour groups that pass by the settlement as often as three times a month.)

SIL and other mission agencies sometimes have been criticized by foreign officials for wrecking native cultures. The Tiwaeno personnel say that Westernization was bound to reach the Waorani eventually. It is better that Christian workers, rather than exploitative oil companies, first expose the Indians to this culture, they say.

(At its administrative headquarters in Quito, SIL monitors the Ecuadorian press, from which some of the criticisms come. Staff worker Judy Maxwell noted a recent Colombian newspaper headline, which hinted at a link between Wycliffe founder Cameron Townsend and Jim Jones of People’s Temple.)

In a telephone interview, Rachel Saint defended the Summer Institute of Linguistics against the charges of “culture wrecking.” Since Wycliffe entered the scene, she said, the Waorani have stopped “burying people alive, throwing babies in the river, and the spearings,” she says. She questioned how anyone could call that “disrupting the culture.”

Saint, who with Dayuma completed a Waorani translation of the Gospel of Mark in 1965, said “I don’t know of any better method of preserving the culture than putting the language in written form.”

The Waorani’s adoption of Christianity for the most part has stopped the killings. (The last reported spearings were of oil company workers in 1977.) Yost notes that even today the church’s most effective appeal to the Waorani is its injunction “to stop killing one another.”

Two of the men who killed the five missionaries now are local church leaders. Tementa, son of one of the killers, is Catherine Peeke’s most accomplished translation helper. About 150 to 200 Waorani have been baptized—nearly a third of the 600-member tribe.

At suppertime, translators Peeke and Jung prepare a stew of rice, vegetables, and agouti, a jungle rodent with a chewy, earthy texture.

Then, by candlelight and over coffee with cookies, they discuss their work. There are few diversions at Tiwaeno: Jung’s only complaint is “too much sameness.” After a day’s translation work, they are too tired for recreation. They sometimes read a bit or listen to the short-wave radio before bedtime.

They describe problems with back translation. In this process, the women read a portion of Scripture in elementary Waorani, then ask their translation helpers to retell that same story in their own words.

The Waorani translation helpers so far have not understood. Eager to please the translators, they instead repeat back word for word, even imitating the women’s American accents and intonations. “We tell them to ‘tell it like your ancestors would,’ ” says Peeke, “but they still don’t understand.”

Peeke, 55, is one of Wycliffe’s most respected linguists. She recently finished a 40-page Waorani pedagogical grammar, of which Wycliffe printed 1,000 copies last summer.

At present she is working on a Waorani translation of Acts. Jung is translating stories about Joseph. So far, the only published Waorani Scripture is Mark. (Matthew is translated, but not yet published.)

Since many of the Waorani Christians have memorized all of Mark, some think “they know it all [about the Christian faith],” says Peeke. This has partly caused a declining interest in spiritual growth among the Waorani Christians, say the women. They complain that Waorani church leaders lack “spiritual hunger.”

The women are particularly concerned about the 80 or so “downriver Aucas,” a more primitive group living to the east of the 620-square-mile protectorate (akin to an American Indian reservation) in which most of the Waorani are located. For the most part, this group has not heard the gospel. (Ecuadorian Catholics have a small outreach in the area, however.) This group speared the first Waorani missionary, Toña.

Later the same evening, the Yosts are having a bedtime snack of bananas and raw peanuts. A former professor in the University of Colorado mountain recreation department, Yost is an outdoorsman and has thrived on the jungle life. His wife, Kathie, raised on an Iowa farm, has made comfortable the family’s thatched roof hut. She is helping at the settlement’s school, while Wycliffe’s literacy consultant, Pat Kelley, is away temporarily. The couple’s three children, Rochelle, 7; Natasha, 4; and Brandon, 2; have plenty of Indian playmates and probably speak the language better than their parents.

Yost has visited nearly every Waorani family in the protectorate. He records Waorani activities and family structure in a small notebook. He often lends his rifle to the Waorani men, who are noted for the breakneck pace of their hunting treks on the muddy, winding trails. His payment often is game, food for the Yost table.

Yost calls himself an “applied anthropologist,” saying that he uses his anthropological insights “to help these people maintain a sense of identity, self-esteem, and, more important, the ability to cope with the outside world without being dependent on outsiders like myself.”

Don Johnson, SIL’s Ecuadorian director, has taken steps to curtail the number of Christian “pilgrims” to Tiwaeno. Yost says it is none too soon. The well-meaning visitors probably do more harm than good, he says. Some of the “more sophisticated” Waorani, aware of the increasing number of tourists entering the Amazonian jungles, have the impression that he gets paid for bringing visitors to Tiwaeno, says Yost.

Despite these problems, the Waorani are a “neat people,” he says. Because their primitive culture compares to that in Bible times, they have a better capacity for understanding Scripture than American Christians, Yost says. Like the women, he believes it is important for the Waorani to have Scripture in their own language structure, without “cultural distortions.”

Once he stayed overnight in a Waorani hut where no white man previously had visited. Before retiring, the Indian host had washed Yost’s muddy feet, then dried them with wood shavings.

“He was trying to serve me … to make me more comfortable,” said Yost. “This was an act of total acceptance. The experience gave me a tremendous new view of the New Testament Scripture about foot washing.”

During the next two days, work continues as usual at Tiwaeno. When the journalist leaves, the Tiwaeno group knows there will be another article written about the Aucas. They expect to endure even more interviews, as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the killings approaches.

Some critics say that too much attention has been given to the Waorani—that equally important missionary work is being done in other Indian tribes. While that may be the case, perhaps the Waorani story is worth noting as representative of missionary dedication overall—a zeal that sometimes has ended in death.

Rosi Jung’s parting request is for prayer for the Waorani Christians. If only the people would exhibit a renewed hunger for Scripture, “we would walk on our heads to help them,” she says.

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