by Norman Lewis
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.
In April 1972, a Mr and Mrs Price of the New Tribes Mission had carried out an aerial survey of the Panare region and decided on establishing a mission in the Colorado valley, where an easily accessible Indian settlement had been observed. A jeep was sent to the spot, where they were well received. ‘The Lord provided us with a Panare guide, without whom we would not have known where to go.’ Although they had been told before that the Panare never worked for anyone, such was the native hospitality that ‘the Indians seemed willing to have us come to live there and to build a house for us … the Panare fellows pitched in and worked really hard.’ Clearly there was satisfactory human material for the missionary labours here, and only a small note of disapproval obtrudes. ‘On the other side of the clearing could be seen a large, hollowed-out log in which they had their drink, made of mashed corn, sugar cane and sweet potato. The tracks where they had danced were still visible.’
Thereafter progress towards salvation went at a snail’s pace. The Indians were helpful and friendly in every way but they had had contacts with missionaries—Jesuits and Franciscans—in the past, and had clearly not enjoyed the experience. Five years after the Lord had ‘impressed upon the hearts’ of the original three missionaries to settle where they did, the Panare continued to lead their same old easy-going lives, to drink and to dance, to share their food and do as little work as they had to. They remained eager recipients of trade goods, using the missionaries’ iron tools to increase the size of the communal houses the missionaries so much disliked, and of their gardens where far too much of the produce went into the preparation of liquor. In matters relating to the acceptance of the new faith they remained as wary and unreceptive as ever.
Two books based on what purported to be stories from the Bible were soon available in translation, the first Learning about God (1975), the second The Panare Learn About the Devil (1976). The creation of these had presented certain linguistic problems, solved in the end in a resolute fashion. Difficulties arose from the fact that like many other Indian languages there are no equivalents in Panare for many words held as basic to the concepts of the Christian religion. There are none, for example, for sin, punishment or redemption. God cannot be thanked or praised, only congratulated. Above all, Panare lacks any word for guilt.
This was a situation that had to be rectified. A way had to be found to manufacture the sense of guilt upon which repentance and salvation depended, and the missionary translators may have decided that the best way of tackling this was by re-editing the scriptures in such a way as to implicate the Panare in Christ’s death. Henry Corradini soon discovered that the New Tribes Mission’s version of the Crucifixion as arranged for Indian consumption was at striking variance with that of the Bible. Gone were the Romans, the Last Supper, the trial and Pontius Pilate turning away to wash his hands. He read on:
The Panare killed Jesus Christ
because they were wicked.
&n
bsp; Let’s kill Jesus Christ,
said the Panare.
The Panare seized Jesus Christ.
The Panare killed in this way.
They laid a cross on the ground.
They fastened his hands and his feet
against the wooden beams, with nails.
They raised him straight up, nailed.
The man died like that, nailed.
Thus the Panare killed Jesus Christ.
If this could not create feelings of guilt, nothing could. Now there was talk of God’s vengeance for the dreadful deed.
God will burn you all,
burn all the animals, burn also the earth,
the heavens, absolutely everything.
He will burn also the Panare themselves.
God will exterminate the Panare
by throwing them on to the fire.
It is a huge fire.
I’m going to hurl the Panare into the fire, said God.
The comet had come and gone but the frightening memory of it remained. God had relented once but might not a second time.
God is good.
Do you want to be roasted in the fire?
asks God.
Do you have something to pay me with
so that I won’t roast you in the fire?
What is it you’re going to pay me with?
The nature of the payment demanded is a foregone conclusion; unquestioning submission to the missionaries’ demands, the abandonment of their traditional life and their customs, their culture. The pressure proved too much even for the well-tried nerves of the Panare, and within months the first results began to come in. The following, headed ‘Panare Breakthrough’, is quoted from Brown Gold, dated 1977: ‘… I finished stressing the need for each one to ask God for the payment of their own sins … A few hours later Achen (a Panare woman) came by the house, she said, “I asked God like this: I want my payment for my sin (sic). I don’t want to burn in the big fire. I love Jesus.”
‘… Here we had sat for almost a year teaching one believer and nothing else happened and then all of a sudden, WOW!’
The Colorado valley, where it had all started, came as a surprise. It gave a feeling of being in the Orient rather than the West, a landscape sketched in briefly by a Chinese artist, red earth with angular trees set among immense black boulders, backed by a recession of low hills afloat in the mist. Communal houses showed among the trees down by the river like delicately woven straw hats, and we could see the Panare women moving about, walking with quick, strutting steps, and wearing nothing but G-strings, tassels and beads. The course of the river was marked by a tight border of forest, full of noisy birds and great dark, blundering butterflies. In this arcadian setting the missionary building, solid and rectangular at the head of the airstrip, seemed austere and aloof.
Paul Henley presented us to the thirty-two adult men and women of the extended family who had adopted him. We had brought gifts for them all, and in accordance with egalitarian principles each man received an identical nylon fishing line, and each woman a garishly decorated enamel bowl. In addition we handed over a sack of rice in return for our share in communal meals we might be invited to join. We were then directed to hang our hammocks in an empty house at the highest point of the village, recommended as being relatively free from mosquitoes. It was a traditional thatched construction, well swept and free in Panare style from litter of any kind. Following a perfunctory inspection to make sure that there were no rattlesnakes about we installed ourselves. Soon after, Panare of all ages and both sexes began their visits, examining and commenting in soft, clucking monosyllables on our persons and our equipment, dropping into unoccupied hammocks, and just standing about in companionable groups long after darkness had fallen, clearly trying to make us feel at home.
Next day the news, as in Guanama, turned out to be discouraging. Two years before when the Katayinto ceremony was last held, it had been truncated by the omission of its most dramatic component: a piece of theatre involving the ritual appearance at the height of the dancing by a group of strangers who behave in a hostile and menacing manner, but who are finally pacified and induced to join in the general merriment. This episode seemed to symbolize the young initiates’ necessity for arriving at a pacific arrangement with the threatening outside world. The Panare said that they had been obliged to cut it out ‘because God did not like it’.
In the following year, 1982, there had been no initiation ceremony at all, and Paul had assumed that this had been no more than a postponement. Now we were to hear that again God had raised objections, and that the Katayinto would not take place once more, although it ‘might’ be held next year. It seemed likely that the missionaries’ strategy was to encourage indefinite postponement. The Mission had been careful to keep a low profile while the Congressional investigation was going on. Now there were signs it was moving to the counterattack. In February 1982, Elizabeth Stucky, one of the missionaries at Colorado, wrote in Brown Gold: ‘On the surface it seems as though they (the Panare) have the least interest in spiritual things.’ She defends current Mission strategy, anticipating the possibility of the American evangelists’ eventual expulsion. ‘Santos Casanova is one of the six men who Maurice was teaching … and who in turn teaches his own people. His group is the largest in the valley who meet together, numbering 100.’ This suggests that about half the Panare of Colorado have been evangelized, and if it is true, the Katayinto is at an end. Maria Villalón described a native evangelist, trained perhaps by Mr Stucky, at work in a remote Panare community they had visited by helicopter for the census. ‘The village children were made to kneel down in a row. No one could understand what was going on, nor could the Panare evangelist make them understand. In the end he said, “every time I say the word Jesus, you must bang your head on the ground”, and this they did.’
In the past it had been possible to organize what the Panare call a ‘for nothing’, a watered-down version of the Katayinto, devoid of any ritual significance—certain to have called down the missionaries’ ban. The Panare stage a ‘for nothing’ whenever they can, purely because they like to drink and dance, and they can normally be induced to go through a full repertoire of dances if provided with a sack of sugar with which to brew the very mild, sweet beer obtainable from only three days’ fermentation. In preparation for this, a day or so is spent in cutting down a tree and hollowing out from it the ‘canoe’ to contain the beer—in itself a traditional community exercise in which everyone takes part, and seen as contributing to the fun. We asked if a ‘for nothing’ could be arranged, but there was always a doubt at the back of the mind. The first sign of fermentation can be detected in a warm climate in any sweetened juice only hours after it has been exposed to the air, and we had heard of native ‘deacons’ keeping a stern watch to see that all such drinks were jettisoned as soon as the first bubbles appeared on the surface.
While this proposal was under consideration we settled down to give the Panare the chance to get to know us, and to familiarize ourselves with the village scene.
Missionary propaganda has taken a new turn recently, assuring us that peoples not reached by their message have a miserable time in this world as well as being doomed to perdition in the next. ‘In the Panare way of life before the Gospel was shared with them, everything was bad. It was their way of life to expect the worst. Misfortunes hung over their heads. Constant fears were always in their hearts. This ever-present fear seems to be the very pulsation of life itself.’ Thus Mrs Linda Myers, writing about our hosts shortly before our visit.
All that we saw of them ourselves or from the enquiries made presented a strikingly less dismal picture. We had previously noticed that the Indians’ physique was superior to that of the local whites, and now it seemed likely that they enjoyed better health in general. A number of families had produced six or more children, all of whom seemed lively and intelligent. I heard of a man of eighty-two waiting for a thirteen-year-old girl to reach puberty before claiming h
er as his bride, and no one doubted that there would be issue of the union. By way of comparison a newspaper assured us that a prosperous white had one chance in three of dropping dead by the time he reached fifty. The Panare claim that before introduced diseases such as influenza, measles and malaria took their toll, they suffered from no illnesses at all. Their mental health appeared equally robust. The close-knit communal life of the Panare protects them from most of the pressures familiar in our society, and the crime rate is nil.
The missionaries supply tools and consumer goods to the Panare which have to be paid for in cash. Aspirin and penicillin are now driving out effective remedies derived from local plants, and Western medicines cost money. Sales promotions, sometimes divinely backed, can seem unnecessary; one in particular infuriated Henry Corradini, who had now joined us. ‘God wants us to use soap. He wants us to eliminate unpleasant odours; to wash under the armpits and round the anal area.’ Corradini said, ‘The Indians are never out of the water. Without exception they’re the cleanest people in the world. How dare these gringos tell them they stink?’
Cash for these purchases has to be found, so the Panare make decorative baskets which they sell to the local whites. It was part of an evangelical manoeuvre to settle the Indians in the vicinity of the missions, wean them away from the barter system, persuade them to buy more and more inessential goods, converting them in this way into wage-earners working a 48-hour week. It has been calculated that with all their household, horticultural and other chores, the Panare work on average only three hours a day, and the missionary effort to rescue them from the evil effects of sloth has in this case misfired, for basket-weaving is easily done while lying in a hammock, in a state of the almost trance-like Panare reverie.
