Picture with a Thousand Pieces:
Archival Research on Missionaries and the Waorani
(2017 BGC Archival Research Lecture, delivered by Dr. Kathryn Long on October 5, 2017 at the Billy Graham Center n Wheaton, Illinois, USA. Abridged
for online readers)
Introduction
Thanks to
the BGC Archives for the invitation, also for prayers and encouragement from
many in the audience during a challenging year.
Tonight, I
want to talk about using archives, and specifically the Graham Center Archives,
to do research for a book I’ve written that is in the final stages of editing
(I hope!). Its title is God in the Rainforest: Missionaries Among
the Waorani in Amazonian Ecuador. It traces the story of missionary
interaction with the Waorani, an isolated group of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian
Amazon, between 1956 and about 1994.
Contact between missionaries and the Waorani, then called “aucas,” began
with an event familiar to many people in this room: the deaths of five young
missionaries in 1956, speared as they tried to make peaceful contact with the
Waorani. Two years later, two missionary women—Elisabeth Elliot, the widow of one
of the slain men and Rachel Saint, the sister of an another, with the help of a
Waorani woman named Dayuma—successfully contacted the Waorani and began efforts
to introduce them to Christianity and to help end the violence that was
destroying their culture.
[Slide 1] The
sacrificial deaths of the five men and subsequent efforts to Christianize the
Waorani became the defining missionary narrative for American evangelicals
during the second half of the twentieth century. It certainly was the most
widely publicized. Here are a few of the books, and, more recently, the films,
that told the story. Looking back 40 years later, Christianity Today magazine described the story as serving at the
time as a “primary narrative for the young evangelical movement, reinforcing
and illustrating to the world our core ideals.” CT, Sept. 16, 1996.
[Slide 2] While
many evangelicals—certainly not all, but many—cherished this inspirational
narrative, a significant number of people outside the evangelical fold
criticized the missionaries. They viewed
what happened in Ecuador, especially efforts to Christianize the Waorani, as
“Exhibit A” of how missionaries destroyed indigenous cultures. There was a need for a book that would
address these issues and update the missionary/Waorani story. Also, there were
missionaries, especially staff from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, but
others as well, who had worked with the Waorani between the late 1960s and the
mid-1990s, whom most people had never heard of.
Before I
launch into the main part of the lecture, let me quickly go over a few
important terms: [terms on S3]
I wanted the
story to be based on original sources, for the most part unpublished, to get a
fresh perspective. T his wasn’t always possible—in the end the book is based on published
sources, interviews, private papers, and archival materials. Still archival
sources played an important role. Fortunately for me, many the sources I needed
were housed here at the Graham Center Archives and a few at the Wheaton College
archives. Here, for example, is a sample of some materials housed here that
include sources related to missionaries and the Waorani:
Collection 136: Records of Mission Aviation Fellowship
Collection 277: Papers of Jim Elliot
Collection 278: Papers of Elisabeth Howard Elliot
Collection 349: Papers of Clarence Wesley Jones
Collection 599: Ephemera of the “Auca Incident
Collection 657: Papers of Kenneth Fleming
Collection 670: Papers of Kathryn (Rogers) Deering
Collection 684: Papers of Herbert I. and Colleen Collison Elliot
Collection 687: Papers of Theophilus Edward Jr. "Ed" and Marilou G. Hobolth McCully
Collection 701: Papers of Olive Ainslie Fleming Liefeld
Accession 08-36: Papers of M. Catherine Peeke (closed)
For the book, I
also did research in collections that are not here at Wheaton, especially the
archives of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the papers of SIL’s
founder, William Cameron Townsend.
I never
tried to total up the number of actual documents that I read from these and
other collections—counting letters, reports, notes, transcribed interviews—I
would guess the total would easily be more than 2,000 unpublished documents.
[S5] This
brings me to tonight’s lecture, “Picture with a Thousand Pieces.” I chose this
title because for me the process of using archival materials to shape a historical
narrative, to tell a story, seemed a lot like putting together a large and
complicated jigsaw puzzle—the contents of a letter might represent one piece of
the puzzle. The response to that letter from someone else might be another
piece. A memo from other people could be yet another. What I’d like to do tonight is to sample a
few sections of this puzzle that is the history of missionaries (and American
Evangelicals more broadly) with the Waorani to show you some of the rewards as
well as the frustrations and challenges, of this kind of archival research.
1. Records of Mission Aviation
Fellowship
The first
example comes from the Records of Mission Aviation Fellowship and involves
reports and letters from two pilots: Johnny Keenan and Hobey Lowrance. If you
know this story, you probably knew Nate Saint was a part of Mission Aviation
Fellowship. What you may not have known
was that MAF continued to play a significant role in the Waorani project even
after Saint had been killed.
{S6]
Pilots did
fly overs and dropped gifts every couple of weeks between February 1956 and September
1958. This picture was taken by MAF
pilot Hobey Lowrance, not Nate Saint. The letterabove summarizes some
of the activities during the first six or seven months after the men’s
deaths. Publicity brought a lot of
people to the rainforest.
The above slide [S7] highlights a handwritten letter Johnny Keenan sent to MAF
headquarters about meeting the Waorani in December 1958 when Elisabeth Elliot
and Rachel came out of the rainforest for a break after making peaceful
contact. A few Waorani came with
them. Keenan had an opportunity to meet
some of the Waorani whose clearing he had flown over so often. This is a .pdf
of his original letter.
The paragraph below
[S8] shows how, given some context, that letter became a part of my manuscript.
God in the Rainforest:Two days after they [the Waorani] arrived, pilot Johnny Keenan, accompanied by his wife, Ruth, made the regular “vegetable run” to Arajuno. Despite official MAF reluctance, in May 1957 Keenan had invited Elliot to fly with him on a gift drop over the Wao clearing, an experience that had strengthened her desire to meet the Waorani face to face. Now it was Keenan’s turn for a close encounter with the Waorani he had flown over so often.
“Kill a Cow but not People”
“They were all laughing and eager to know our names,” he reported, “especially [the name of] the one who flew the big ebo (‘beetle’).” Dabo and Monca followed the pilot wherever he went, Dabo talking almost constantly, completely unfazed by Keenan’s inability to understand anything he said. Before the Keenans left, Betty gave Johnny a spear Monca had made, telling him it was the last one the group had left. As Keenan walked out the door of the house, carrying the spear, Dabo spoke to him (Elliot translating). “You be very careful with that thing and don’t kill anyone with it,” he said. “It’s alright [sic] to kill a cow but not people.” Dabo’s statement was widely publicized in the missionary community and later in the US. To evangelicals it was a miracle—and sign of answered prayer—to hear a savage Waorani saying, in effect, “Thou shalt not kill” to an American missionary pilot.
This is a
small sample of what I wrote about MAF’s involvement in the Waorani mission,
but I hope these examples help to show how the MAF’s records provided the
information to more fully develop MAF’s role in the Waorani project.
II. The Elisabeth Howard Elliot
Papers
[S9] A
second BGCA collection that I consulted extensively were the papers of
Elisabeth Howard Elliot, a key figure in the early years of missionary outreach
to the Waorani and one of the most significant authors in shaping public
understanding of the Missionary/Waorani encounter, particularly through her
books, especially Through Gates of
Splendor, Shadow of the Almighty,
and The Savage My Kinsman.
Elisabeth
Elliot gave the first of her papers to the BGC Archives in 1985. Initially the
collection consisted mainly of materials related to her books, supplemented by
an oral history interview with Elliot conducted by Bob Shuster. At the time, copyright
to the manuscripts and other materials in this collection was retained by
Elisabeth Elliot, with her permission required until 2006. Additional
materials—most important among them, Elliot’s personal letters to her parents
and other family members—were added to her papers between 2004 and 2016.
Elliot’s
papers are important, among other things, because she was an astute observer
and a great writer. But to understand the challenges in using them, it’s
important to understand the basics of U.S. copyright law. Copyright law determines
whether the pieces the historian finds in archives can be used in the puzzle. Here are the basics:
• All letters, no matter who writes
them, are protected by U. S. copyright laws to a minimum of 70 years after the
author’s death.
• Copyright for unpublished materials
can be held by: (1) the author; (2) his/her heirs or the executor of the
estate; (3) the organization for whom he/she worked (“work for hire”); (4) the
archive where the letter is housed.
• The criteria for “Fair Use” are difficult
to apply to unpublished letters. “Fair use” refers to the guidelines that
enable writers or researchers to publish some copyright materials without
permission.
• The historian cannot quote from
letters without permission; he or she can paraphrase.
MAF papers
are records of an organization; most letters were written between various staff
members as part of their jobs and so were considered “work for hire,” copyright
MAF. Also, when MAF put their records in
the BGC archives, they gave the archive limited ability to grant copyright
permission. With permission, researchers like myself can quote from those
letters.
In
contrast to the MAF Records, Elliot’s papers are a personal collection, belonging
to her or her estate, not work for hire. There are a couple of reasons for this:
1)
Elliot
wrote most of her letters to family and friends, and personal letters are
usually not considered “work for hire.”
2)
Also, because of the influence of her first
husband, Jim Elliot, Elisabeth went to the mission field under the sponsorship
of Christian Missions in Many Lands, the sending agency for a loose coalition
of independent gatherings or assemblies that came to be known as the Plymouth
Brethren. The Brethren rejected traditional denominations or any other
organizational structure that they didn’t find in the New Testament.
Missionaries were responsible to their home assemblies, but for all practical
purposes were independent agents on the mission field. So Elisabeth Elliot was not a part of an
administrative structure such as that of Mission Aviation Fellowship.
As
a result, the papers belonged to EE, and even when she chose to house them in
the BGC archives, she retained the copyright.
At the time of Elliot’s death in 2015,
copyright to her papers shifted to her estate. That left the executor of the
estate with the authority to grant copyright permission. My hope was to get
permission from Mr. Gren to quote his late wife’s letters.
Most of my
research involved the letters EE wrote during the six-year-period between her
husband’s death in 1956 and her decision to leave the mission to the Waorani in
1961. Elliot wrote about her sense of calling to the Waorani after Jim’s death;
about life among the Waorani during the first years after contact; and about
her relationship with missionary colleague Rachel Saint, Nate Saint’s older
sister.
Meals were another challenge in cultural adaptation. The Waorani ate rapidly and with plenty of sound—“a great slurping and sucking.” In three or four minutes a group of men could demolish a pile of plantains and a pot of meat, without even a bare minimum of the social niceties expected by Westerners. When men we re in the clearing and the hunting was good, monkey meat was standard fare. Elliot found it disconcerting to watch the creatures, shot with blow gun and poison darts, first singed to remove the hair, then boiled. They looked too human. The Waorani considered monkey heads a great delicacy, and skulls were licked and sucked with enthusiasm, including in a “mouth to mouth” position. After five or six weeks, Rachel confessed she had overcome her “prejudices” enough to eat some of the brains herself. However, she still “left the sucking of the eyes to Acawo.”
From God in the Rainforest.
Kinsman, 120; Dayuma Story, 238, 239.
III. Papers of M. Catherine Peeke
Finally, I want to talk
about Catherine Peeke and her papers. She was the linguist whose photograph was
on the postcards and other materials advertising this lecture.
[S11] Catherine is
little known outside of the Summer Institute of Linguistics circles—and even by
many within SIL—but she was one of two linguists (along with German healthcare
worker and linguist, Rosi Jung) who translated the New Testament into Wao Tededo.
By the end of her life
Peeke also was one of perhaps a handful of outsiders fluent in the Wao language
and who really understood the Waorani and their culture, although she always
downplayed her ability. She served with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and
the Wycliffe Bible Translators for more than forty years, and spent at least
twenty-five years working directly with the Waorani. She was with Rachel Saint
in 1955 when Rachel met Dayuma; she was eyewitness to more of
Waorani/missionary interaction than anyone except Rachel Saint.
She was part of a team
of SIL staff members who worked with the Waorani beginning in the early 1970s.
Catherine Peeke and
Elisabeth Elliot were contemporaries—Cathie was two years older than Betty and
died two years earlier. Elliot was famous among evangelicals in the US and
elsewhere for her courage and faith; Peeke accomplished what Elliot originally
had hoped to do as a linguist/missionary living and working among the Waorani.
In the context of constructing a picture with
a thousand pieces—if the MAF Records and Elisabeth Elliot’s papers each
represents a portion of the picture, Catherine Peeke’s papers represent maybe
half the box of puzzle pieces, and they help to create a part of the picture
few people have seen.
Cathie Peeke was born
and raised on a farm outside of Weaverville, North Carolina, not far from
Asheville. She was a quiet, introverted person, who laughed about what she
described as her “hillbilly accent” from the North Carolina mountains. In 1949,
she joined the Wycliffe Bible Translators.
After training, and then a few years in Peru, Catherine was assigned to
Ecuador in 1953 and helped to establish SIL in that country. She had a gift for languages, and she quickly
became a language consultant for the Ecuador SIL—she would visit the different
translation teams in the country and help them to trouble-shoot their problems
with indigenous languages. In the early 1960s, she decided to pursue a Ph.D. in
anthropological linguistics at Indiana University.
Her dissertation was a
grammatical analysis of the Wao/Waorani language. She had learned a little of
the language from Dayuma and Rachel.
Elisabeth Elliot gave Peeke her language notes, and while Peeke was in
grad school, she did linguistic research in Ecuador among the Waorani in
Tewaeno, where Rachel Saint lived.
[S12] It turned out
that Wao tededo (“the people’s
speech”) is a linguistic isolate—unrelated to any of the other Amazonian
languages around it, or any other language anywhere. Catherine figured out how
the language worked, analyzing its grammar. She usually downplayed her
accomplishment, saying it was easier to understand Wao tededo than to speak it, although she did that well, too. She
received her Ph.D. in June 1968. From then until her retirement in 1992 she
worked full-time with the Waorani. For the last twelve or 13 years, Catherine
and her co-worker, German linguist Rosi Jung, and about twelve Waorani
assistants translated the New Testament into Wao tededo.
Her story and the
collection of papers that tell much of that story illustrate, among other
things, how archives provide a place to preserve the records of people whose
papers traditionally have not been considered worth saving. There’s a difference between Cathie Peeke and
the MAF pilots I mentioned earlier.
Hobey Lowrance and Johnny Keenan may not have been fully included in
earlier versions of this history, but their letters were available. In
Catherine’s case, nobody thought her papers—or the papers of other pioneering
missionary women like her—had much value.
Like Elisabeth Elliot—although their styles
were different--Catherine Peeke was a good writer. And she wrote a lot. During the years she was in Ecuador, Peeke
wrote a letter home to her family in North Carolina every week, usually to her
mother or her sisters. Of course, they contained family news, but also news
about her life and work. At some point—I don’t have the date, she wrote a
personal “psalm” expressing the importance of the letters home to her identity,
alongside her calling to translate the New Testament [S13].
Shy country girl, Committed Christian, Linguist and Translator
To Glorify God
Catherine’s papers are
a rich record of what it was like to live among the Waorani; what it was like
to be a single woman and a missionary linguist in the Ecuadorian Amazon; what
it was like to be a little-known participant in one of the most famous . . .
and on occasion controversial . . . missionary ventures of the twentieth
century. . .. what it was like to translate the New Testament into the Wao
language . . .
Here are some samples
of the many kinds of materials in the Peeke Papers:
·
Report on translation and on the spiritual response among the
Waorani.
Translation choices in deciding on a word for God, then communicating that this was the one, supreme God
·
Explanations of translation work. [S14]
·
Translation memory cards. [S15]
·
Prayer requests that included balanced descriptions of Wao
believers. Catherine respected the Waorani and knew some of them quite
well. Her observations and descriptions
help make the Waorani multi-dimensional human beings
Peeke's reflections on Wao culture, in response to outside inquiries
Reflections on Wao culture. [S16]
The good news is that
Catherine kept everything. The bad news was that she wasn’t particularly
organized. When I first met Catherine,
her papers were in boxes, file cabinets, drawers—wherever she could put them in
the upstairs bedrooms of family farmhouse where she lived. She put most things
in file folders or manila envelopes but, again, often in no order or subject,
and the label on the folder didn’t necessarily match what was in the folder.
I spent a week at
Catherine’s home in 2005, going through papers and taking notes like crazy. We
corresponded by email over the next few years.
Then in 2008, she sent me an email saying she was downsizing. Did I want any of her papers? Otherwise—apart
from a few things she might give to colleagues, the bulk of the papers would
probably end up tossed in a ditch. At that point, the Summer Institute of
Linguistics had a linguistics archive—a place to keep documents related to the
academic and scientific aspects of translation work—but they did not collect
the papers of individual staff members (that has changed in recent years).
I contacted Bob Shuster
and asked him if the BGC Archives would be willing to give the Peeke Papers a
temporary or, if needed, a permanent home (they would). Bob gave me eight or
nine archive quality storage boxes, and my sister and I made a quick trip to
North Carolina to collect Catherine’s papers. They’ve been here in the archives
ever since with the stipulation that I could use them as long as I needed to (neither
Catherine nor I ever imagined it would be this long). At that point, if SIL had
a place for them, they would be sent there. If not, they would stay in the
Graham Center. Based on the accession agreement with Peeke, these papers are
not yet open to the public. Probably the
Summer Institute of Linguistics will determine when that will happen.
Nonetheless, even if Catherine’s papers aren’t yet open, they are safe. They’ve been preserved.
* * *
I want to conclude with
two brief documents, each of which represents a small piece of the
missionary/Waorani puzzle but an important one.
They also offer insights into mission work and the value of archives.
Particularly during the
1970s and the 1980s, SIL staff were criticized for their work among the Waorani,
criticisms that fed into the broader debates about missionaries and indigenous
cultures. In more recent years, scholars and others have begun to appreciate
the positive contributions missionaries have made.
Still, even some
Christians have raised questions about the genuineness of Wao Christianity
because aspects of their ecclesiology or doctrine don’t seem quite right, at
least in the eye of the observer.
What struck me in reading Catherine’s papers—apart
from all the information that’s there—is that sometimes, with no fanfare,
missionaries and indigenous people simply become friends and love each other.
This was the experience
of Catherine and one of her language assistants Oba, Yowe’s wife. Yowe and Oba
were among the first Waorani to become Christians. Catherine and Oba worked together for
years—Catherine praised Oba’s efforts to make sure Catherine’s translation was
grammatically correct, even if Oba wasn’t as strong with comprehension. When
Catherine retired and left the Wao village of Tewaeno after the New Testament
was translated, Oba was so upset to see her go that she couldn’t come to the
airplane to say good-bye. A few years
later, it was Peeke’s turn to grieve when news came that Oba had died in a
chicken pox epidemic. Remembering her friend and the years they had known each
other, Catherine wrote the rough draft of a poem. [S17]
Cathy and Oba: Friends who loved each other:
It was a lament for a dear
friend . . .remembering Oba as a young mother, a hard worker, a prayerful
translation assistant, a dear person, a woman certain about cosmology as the
Waorani understood it.
The poem ended with the
cry, “O Lord, I should have gone first” from the 69-year-old Peeke before
Catherine surrendered her grief to God’s perfect will.
“They will know that
you are my disciples if you love one another,” Jesus said. This love can be a reality on the mission
field as well as at home.
Finally, here is an
excerpt from an e-mail Catherine Peeke sent, thanking my sister and me for
helping to preserve her papers. It
summarizes some of my own gratitude for places like the BGC Archives:
[S18]
Catherine Peeke’s life
was much more than her papers, of course, but the BGC Archives and the SIL
archives have made (and will make) it possible for the record of her life and
of the Waorani she worked with to be preserved for future researchers and
historians.
Many “pictures” remain to be assembled.
Thank you.
--Kathryn Long