Do Destroy Cultures?

Don Richardson

ames Michener’s austere Abner Hale, a in the novel (and movie) Hawaii, has become the archetype Jof an odious bigot. In the book, Hale shouts hellfire ser- mons against the “vile abominations” of the pagan Ha- waiians. He even forbids Hawaiian midwives to help a mis- sionary mother at the birth of “a Christian baby.” As a result, the mother dies. Hale forbids Hawaiians to help his wife with housework lest his children learn the “heathen Hawai- ian language;” his wife works herself into an early grave. And when Buddhist Chinese settle in the islands, Michener has Hale barging into their temples to smash their idols. It makes an interesting plot, but, unfortunately, “Abner Hale” came to be synonymous with “missionary” for many North Americans—and missionaries have been carrying him on their backs ever since. Anthropologist Alan Tippett of the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission once re- searched hundreds of early missionary sermons stored in the Honolulu archives. None of them had the ranting style Michener suggests as typical of that time. It will serve us all to examine the actual record rather than to circulate distorted stereotypes. There have indeed been occasions when missionaries were responsible for needless destruction of culture. When Fray Diego de Landa, a Catholic missionary accompanying Spanish forces in the New World, discovered extensive Maya li- braries, he knew what to do. He burned them all, an event, he said, the Maya “regretted to an amazing degree, Don Richardson and which caused them much affliction.” The books, in pioneered work his opinion, were all of “superstition and lies of the for Regions Be- devil.” And so, in 1562, the poetry, history, literature, yond Missionary mathematics, and astronomy of an entire civilization went Union (RBMU) up in smoke. Only three documents survived de Landa’s among the Sawi tribe of Irian Jaya misguided zeal. in 1962. Author of Peace Child, Magnificent totem poles once towered in Indian villages Lords of the Earth, and Eternity in along Canada’s Pacific coast. By 1900 virtually all such na- Their Hearts, Richardson is now tive art had been chopped down, either by missionaries Minister-at-Large for WORLD who mistook them for idols, or by converts zealously carry- TEAM (formerly RBMU). He ing out the directives of missionaries. speaks frequently at missions con- These incidents and many more show that we missionar- ferences and Perspectives Study ies have sometimes acted in a culture-destroying manner. Program classes. Whether through misinterpreting the Great Commission, Used by permission of Don pride, culture shock, or simple inability to comprehend the Richardson. values of others, we have needlessly opposed customs we

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did not understand. Some, had we under- strict procedures for “staying right” with it. stood them, might have served as communi- When arrogant outsiders ridicule a tribe’s cation keys for the gospel! beliefs—or shatter its mechanisms for stay- Critics seem to suggest that if only mis- ing right—severe disorientation sets in. Be- sionaries stay home, primitive people will be lieving they are cursed for abandoning the left undisturbed to live out the myth of old ways, tribespeople become morose and Rousseau’s “noble savage.” In fact, David apathetic. Believing they are doomed to die Livingstone was preceded by Arab slave as a people, they act out a self-fulfilling traders; Amy Carmichael by victimizers who prophecy. dragged boys and girls to the terrors of child Materialistic social workers and scientists prostitution in the temples. At times, evil can’t help these people. The tribespeople can forces like these have destroyed entire sense even an unspoken denial of the super- peoples. In North America, not only natural, and it causes them to grow further California’s Yahi but also the Hurons—and depressed. Who then can best serve such possibly 20 other Indian tribes—were pushed people as spiritual ombudsmen? None other into extinction by land-hungry settlers. On than the ones popular myth has maligned as one occasion, pioneers sent gifts to a tribe, their number one enemy—the Bible-guided, wagonloads of blankets known to be infected Christ-honoring missionary. with smallpox. Only 200,000 Indians remain in Brazil from Two Case Histories an original population estimated at four mil- 1. According to Robert Bell of the lion. More than one tribe per year has disap- Unevangelized Fields Mission, less than a peared in the past 75 years. People may as- generation ago Brazil’s Wai Wai tribe had sume that the missing tribes have been been reduced to its last sixty members. This absorbed into society, but this is not the case. was due largely to foreign diseases and the Thousands have been brutally poisoned, ma- Wai Wai custom of sacrificing babies to de- chine-gunned, or dynamited from low-flying mons in attempts to prevent these diseases. aircraft. Thousands more have succumbed to a Then a handful of UFM missionaries identi- slower, more agonizing death—death by apa- fied themselves with the tribe, learned their thy. Indian men have even been known to language, gave it an alphabet, translated the cause their wives to miscarry. As encroach- Word of God, taught Wai Wai to read, and ment caused their cultures to disintegrate, they brought modern medical care. have refused to bring children into a world Far from denying the supernatural world, they no longer understand. the missionaries showed the Wai Wai that a Similar tragedies are unfolding through- God of love reigned supreme over it and had out the world. Concern is widespread today prepared a way for them to “stay right,” on a for endangered animal species, and justly so, deeper level than they had ever dreamed. but hundreds of our own human species are The Wai Wai now had a rational, even de- in even greater danger. It may be a conserva- lightful, basis for not sacrificing babies to de- tive figure to put the loss at five or six lin- mons. The tribe began to grow, and today is guistically distinct tribes per year. fast becoming one of Brazil’s more stable The “enlightened” policy of “leave them tribes. Wai Wai Christians are now teaching alone” clearly isn’t working. What then, can other dwindling groups of Indians how to halt the march of tribal cultures toward ex- cope with the 20th century through faith in tinction? Land grants and secular welfare Jesus Christ. programs may help on a physical level, but 2. In 1796, near Stockbridge, in what is the greatest danger to tribal people is one now Massachusetts, early American mission- that such programs cannot touch. The great- ary John Sargent and his associates estab- est danger is the breakdown of the lished a community to preserve Indian rights, aboriginal’s sense of “right” relationship preparing them for survival among encroach- with the supernatural. Every aboriginal cul- ing Europeans. Before ethnocentrism was ture acknowledges the supernatural and has named a social evil, and before the birth of 462 Chapter 67 DO MISSIONARIES DESTROY CULTURES? as a science, Sargent and his ago, the ceded Irian Jaya, then helpers tilled the soil side by side with their called , to . Now over Indian friends. Practicing what anthropolo- 100,000 have migrated to Irian gists now call “directed change,” they also Jaya. Will the tribal people be prepared to shared their Christian faith and the Indians cope with their more enterprising migrant received it as their own. neighbors? Or will they become extinct? Scattered throughout Irian Jaya, more than 250 We risk our lives to get to them first because evangelical missionaries (all we believe we are more sympathetic agents of too few) are ministering the gospel to both races. Knowl- change than profit-hungry commercialists. edgeable in Indonesian as well as in many of Irian’s That faith, and the love of their spiritual 400 tribal languages, they are helping mem- paracletes, sustained the tribe through more bers of clashing cultures to understand each than a century of suffering. Greedy settlers other. With the sympathetic help of the In- soon decided that the land was too good for donesian government, the missionaries are “mere Indians” and evicted them. After an optimistic that major culture shock may be unsuccessful protest, Sargent obtained guar- averted. Already, through faith in Christ, antees of land further west. A few years later tens of thousands of Irianese have begun a the community was uprooted again by other smooth transition into the 20th century. settlers. And again. Fifteen times they were Surely ethnic crises of this magnitude are forced to move. Each time the missionaries too sensitive to be left to the dubious mercy moved with them, wresting concessions for of purely commercial interests. Missionaries, new land and holding the community to- whose hearts overflow with the love of gether. At last the community settled in Christ, are the key. Michigan where it was allowed to rest, and it survives to this day. In both cases, the missionaries introduced culture change, but it was not arbitrary nor was it imposed by force. The missionaries brought only changes required for New Tes- tament ethics and for the survival of the people. Often the two requirements overlap. Once an interviewer chided me, perhaps facetiously, for persuading the Sawi tribe in Indonesia to renounce cannibalism. “What’s wrong with cannibalism?” he asked. “The Sawi practiced it for thousands of years. Why should they give it up now?” “Can a people who practice cannibalism survive in the world today?” I asked in reply. “No, they cannot. The Sawi are now citizens of the Republic of Indonesia. The Indonesian Republic does not permit its citizens to eat other people. Therefore, part of my task was to give the Sawi a rational basis for voluntar- ily renouncing cannibalism before the guns of the police decided the issue.” The Sawi are among perhaps 400 black- skinned Melanesian tribes just emerging from the Stone Age in Irian Jaya. Some years DON RICHARDSON 463

Are missionaries cultural or “faith” Christians. Their central characteris- imperialists? You decide. tic is belief in the literal truth of the Bible. Consider one journalist’s charges against mis- In recent years they have set up several mis- sionaries. When Hamish McDonald visited Irian sions in the Jayawijaya mountains, an un- Jaya to cover the effects of a severe earthquake in mapped and little-known area that had its first June 1976, he turned his attention instead to what outside contact only about twenty years ago. he thought he observed in the relationship be- The Melanesian people there learned the use of tween tribespeople and missionaries. The result- metal only recently. They live on sweet pota- ing article appeared in the Washington Post on toes, sugar cane, and bananas, supplemented August 3, 1976: by pork and occasional small marsupials or JAYAPURA, Irian Jaya: Fundamentalist birds that they hunt with bows and arrows. Christian missionaries are provoking hostile Their only domestic animals are their pigs, and occasionally murderous reactions from which they regard as having souls. When I primitive tribespeople in mountain areas asked an anthropologist there why they ate south of here. In the most savage of recent in- such close friends, he said: “It doesn’t matter. cidents, about eighteen months ago, 13 local They eat people, too.” assistants of a mission were killed and eaten The men wear only the koteka, a penis as soon as the European missionary went gourd, and the women small tufts of grass away on leave. fore and aft. Divided by rugged terrain and The missionaries are also coming under at- language from even close neighbors, they tack by anthropologists and other observers feud periodically in set-piece confrontations. for attempting the almost total destruction of Although their culture recognizes personal local cultures in the areas they evangelize. and family property, they are remarkable for This is seen as the basic cause of recent violent their willingness to share. Tobacco is their outbreaks, and is contrasted with the more only vice, imported from the coast somehow adaptive policies of Roman Catholic and in the forgotten past. Cowrie shells are the mainstream Protestant missionary groups. only currency resembling money. The fundamentalists are working in the re- Their culture and traditional religion ex- mote Jayawijaya mountains where they are press the most basic human concepts. They now carrying the brunt of relief work follow- and the other nine hundred thousand people ing recent severe earthquakes believed to in Irian Jaya produce dazzling works of art in have killed as many as a thousand people. traditional carvings and handicrafts. They belong to five missionary groups: the Typically, a newly arrived missionary Christian and Missionary Alliance, the builds his house by itself, next to a grass air- Unevangelized Fields Mission, the Regions strip. One told me: “The first thing is to move Beyond Missionary Union, The Evangelical in and live with the people. You must prove Alliance Mission, and the Asia-Pacific Chris- that you want to help them, by giving them tian Mission banded together in an organiza- food, medicine and shelter, teaching them, tion called The Missionary Alliance. They are and learning their language. Often it takes joined by a technical missionary group, the two to four years to learn the language. I Missionary Aviation Fellowship, an efficient guess what you are looking for is the cultural air service with 15 light aircraft and a heli- key, the key that unlocks the culture and copter essential in a territory where the long- opens the way for the gospel.” est paved road is the 25-mile drive from But many missionaries appear to regard the Jayapura, the provincial capital, to the air- gospel as totally incompatible with the tradi- port. They are well backed by Congregation- tional culture, in which they see no deep value. alist, Baptist, and nondenominational Bible One missionary from the New Guinea groups in North America, , and Aus- border region referred to the old men who tralia, although most members and funds stayed aloof from his mission as “having no in- come from the . terest in spiritual things.” The first action of a Sometimes rejecting the label “fundamen- missionary who stayed awhile in Valley X re- talist,” they describe themselves as “orthodox” cently was to hand out shirts to tribesmen. At 464 Chapter 67 DO MISSIONARIES DESTROY CULTURES?

Nalca Mission, women have been persuaded Asmat people inaugurate their own com- to lengthen their grass skirts to knee length, munal buildings. apparently to satisfy missionary modesty. Nearly all Catholic missionaries in Irian Smoking tobacco is condemned and for- Jaya are required to hold degrees in anthro- bidden as sinful. Until recently, the mission pology before beginning their calling. air service searched baggage and refused to Many have published articles and writings fly anyone found carrying tobacco or alcohol. on the local peoples. “The basis of our ap- In 1968 two Western missionaries were proach is that we believe God is already killed on the south slope of the Jayawijaya working through the existing culture, range. Three months ago an American mis- which follows from the belief that God cre- sionary was virtually chased out of the Fa- ated all things and is present in all of Malinkele Valley because of his manner. them,” one priest said. The incident of cannibalism occurred at a mission called Nipsan, where the Dutch mis- On September 21, 1976, I sent a letter to the sionary had been using local Irianese assistants Post. It never appeared in the “letters to the editor” from the longer evangelized area near column, nor, to my knowledge, was it used to offer Wamena, further west. When the missionary any sort of counterbalance to Hamish McDonald’s went on leave, the tribespeople turned on 15 assertions of what he thought he observed in Irian assistants, killing and eating 13. Two escaped Jaya. It has, however, been included as a chapter in to the jungle. An Indonesian army unit later John H. Bodley’s widely-used anthropology text- entered but dropped the case because of the book, Tribal Peoples and Development Issues: baffling problems of law involved. A Global Overview (Mayfield Publishing, Moun- The Dutch missionary subsequently made tain View, CA, 1988, pp 116-21) Here, slightly con- a fund-raising tour of Europe and North densed, is my open letter: America to buy a helicopter from which he proposed to conduct aerial evangelization Dear Sirs: through a loudspeaker. But the first time this A few weeks ago journalist Hamish was tried, a month ago, volleys of arrows re- McDonald arrived in Irian Jaya to report on portedly greeted the airborne preacher. the earthquake which recently devastated a The fundamentalists are compared unfa- mountainous region here. At least that’s what vorably with the Roman Catholic missionar- he told the missionaries whose help he ies who operate on the southern side of Irian needed to reach the area. Jaya under a territorial division initiated by The earthquake was of particular interest the Dutch and maintained by the Indonesians because it struck the habitat of a number of after the 1963 transfer of administration. the earth’s last remaining Stone Age tribes, “The difference between them is quite some of whom still practice cannibalism. simple,” said one source at Jayapura. “The Triggering literally thousands of landslides, Protestants try to destroy the culture. The the upheaval wiped out fifteen tribal villages, Catholics try to preserve it.” killed more than a thousand people, and left At a mission called Jaosakor near the fifteen thousand survivors with only fifteen southern coast, the Catholics recently conse- percent of their gardens. The missionaries crated a church largely designed by the lo- McDonald approached were busy staging an cal people and incorporating traditional urgent food airlift. Still, they graciously of- Asmat carvings around the walls. Bishop fered him space on one of their overloaded Alphonse Sowada, of the Nebraska-cen- mercy flights from Jayapura into the interior. tered Crosier Fathers, carried out the cer- The world might never have known that emony in Episcopal robes accompanied by these tribes exist, nor would relief agencies local leaders in full regalia of paint, tooth have been informed of their plight, had not a necklaces, and nose-bones. The method of dozen or more evangelical Protestant mission- dedication was to scatter lime, made from aries explored their uncharted mountainous fired seashells, from bamboo containers habitat during the past fifteen years. At risk to over walls, floors, and altars in the way the their own lives, the evangelicals succeeded in DON RICHARDSON 465

befriending several thousand of these highly It has been replaced by a more practical suspicious, unpredictable tribesmen. Meticu- question: “Will the most sympathetic persons lously, they learned and analyzed unwritten get there first?” To make the shock of coming tribal languages, a task so agonizing that less out of the Stone Age as easy as possible. To motivated persons would have had no time for see that tribals gain new ideals to replace it. They also carved out the four airstrips those they must lose in order to survive. To which now make relief operations possible teach them the national language so they can and, as a sidelight, enabled McDonald to carry defend themselves in disputes with out his assignment on location. “civilizados.” And yet produce literature in The missionary aircraft taxied to a halt on their own language so it will not be forgotten. one of these airstrips. McDonald leaped out To teach them the value of money, so that un- and began snapping pictures.... scrupulous traders cannot easily cheat them. There are reasons why the missionaries And better yet, set some of them up in busi- had to go into isolated areas like Irian Jaya as ness so that commerce in their areas will not soon as they could. History has taught them fall entirely into the hands of outsiders. To that even the most isolated minority cultures care for them when epidemics sweep through must eventually be overwhelmed by the or when earthquakes strike. And better yet, commercial and political expansion of major- train some of them as nurses and doctors to ity peoples. Naive academics in ivy-covered carry on when we are gone. We go as om- towers may protest that the world’s remain- budsmen who help clashing cultures under- ing primitive cultures should be left undis- stand each other. turbed, but farmers, lumbermen, land specu- We missionaries are advocates not only of lators, miners, hunters, military leaders, road spiritual truth, but also of physical survival. builders, art collectors, tourists, and drug And we have enjoyed astonishing success in peddlers aren’t listening. Irian Jaya and elsewhere. Among the Ekari, They are going in anyway. Often to destroy. Damal, Dani, Ndugwa, and other tribes, Cheat. Exploit. Victimize. Corrupt. Taking, more than one hundred thousand Stone and giving little other than diseases for which Agers welcomed our gospel as the fulfillment primitives have no immunity or medicine. of something their respective cultures had This is why, since the turn of the century, anticipated for hundreds of years. The Ekari more than ninety tribes have become extinct called it aji. To the Damal, it was hai. To the in Brazil alone. Many other Latin American, Dani, nabelan-kabelan, an immortal message African, and Asian countries show a similar which one day would restrain tribal war and high extinction rate for their primitive mi- ease human suffering. norities. A grim toll of five or six tribes per The result: cultural fulfillment of the deep- year is probably a conservative worldwide est possible kind. And it opened the door to estimate. faith in Jesus Christ for tens of thousands. We missionaries don’t want the same fate Along with our successes, there have to befall these magnificent tribes in Irian Jaya. been setbacks. Nearly two years ago one of We risk our lives to get to them first because our colleagues from a European mission, we believe we are more sympathetic agents Gerrit Kuijt, left some coastal helpers in of change than profit-hungry commercialists. charge of a new outpost while he returned Like our predecessor John Sargent, who in to Holland. In his absence, a few of the 1796 launched a program which saved the coastals began to molest the surrounding Mohican tribe from extinction in North tribespeople for private reasons. Thirteen America, and like our colleagues in Brazil coastals were killed in retaliation. who just one generation ago saved the Wai Sympathize. Sometimes it is not easy to Wai from a similar fate, we believe we know find responsible helpers willing to venture how to precondition tribes in Irian Jaya for with us into these wild areas. At times you survival in the modern world. The question, have to trust someone; you have no choice. “Should anyone go in?” is obsolete because Earlier, in 1968, two of our buddies, Phil obviously someone will. Masters and Stan Dale, died together while 466 Chapter 67 DO MISSIONARIES DESTROY CULTURES? probing a new area of the Yali tribe. But then and they have not warned us of any such at- Kusaho, a Yali elder, rebuked the young men tack by members of their discipline. We have who had killed them, saying: “Neither of cooperated with a number of anthropologists these men ever harmed any of us, nor did in Irian Jaya over the past 20 years and have they even resist while you killed them. had good mutual understanding with them. Surely they came in peace and you have Perhaps McDonald is referring to the three made a terrible mistake. If ever any more of remaining members of a German scientific this kind of men come into our valley, we team he met on one of his helicopter stops in must welcome them.“ the interior. Some of them, reportedly, have And so a door of acceptance opened been critical toward us, not on the basis of through the wounds of our friends. It was a wide knowledge of our work, but because of costly victory. Stan’s and Phil’s widows were anti-missionary sentiments they brought each left with five small children to raise with them to Irian Jaya. alone. Yet neither widow blamed anyone for Their problem is that they hold to an old the death of her husband, and one of them school of anthropology, still current in some still serves with us in Irian Jaya today. areas, which favors isolating primitive tribes Ours is a great work, and a very difficult from all change in zoo-like reserves. A new one. It is not subsidized by any government, school, now rising in America, has at last rec- and can succeed only as it has sympathetic ognized the futility of this approach, and ad- support from churches, private individuals, vocates instead that primitive tribes be ex- and the public in general. That is where corre- posed to survival-related “directed change,” spondent McDonald could have helped. in order that they may learn to cope with en- Instead McDonald now transferred to a croachment, now seen as inevitable. Mission Aviation Fellowship helicopter loaded Directed change is exactly what evangeli- with sweet potatoes contributed by Christians cal missionary John Sargent practiced back from the Dani tribe and rice from Indonesian in 1796 and what we are practicing now. In government stores. Pilot Jeff Heritage thought fact, missionaries are virtually the only per- McDonald seemed surprisingly uninterested sons who do. Anthropologists don’t remain in the many tribal hamlets stranded like is- with tribesmen long enough. And human- lands in the midst of uncrossable landslides, ists aren’t sufficiently motivated. But if, in- their inhabitants on the edge of starvation. Af- deed, we are under attack, a careful reporter ter only a few hours in the interior, he re- should have asked us for our defense, if any. turned to the coast and wrote his report. McDonald did not do this, though he had Wielding the cliché “fundamentalist” opportunity. What evidence does he present with obvious intent to stigmatize and nettle for his charge that we are “attempting the us, McDonald launched a scathing yet almost total destruction of local cultures in baseless attack which appeared as a major Irian Jaya?” article in the Washington Post and was re- He writes: “The first action of a mission- layed by wire service to hundreds of news- ary… in Valley X recently was to hand out papers around the world. Citing the loss of shirts to the tribesmen.” The tribesmen con- Gerrit Kuijt’s 13 helpers and the murder of cerned had just lost most of their homes in Phil and Stan eight years ago, he made the the earthquake. Indonesian officials had pro- absurd accusation that we are “provoking vided shirts to help them stay warm at night hostile and occasionally murderous reac- in their crude temporary shelters at mile-high tions from primitive tribesmen.” He contin- elevations. No one wanted a rash of pneumo- ued: “The missionaries are also coming un- nia cases complicating the relief operation. der attack by anthropologists and other Johnny Benzel, the missionary, cooperated observers for attempting the almost total with the government directive by handing destruction of cultures….” out the shirts. Who are the anthropologists and other ob- Nowhere have we ever provided Indone- servers? Within our ranks we have a number sian or Western-style clothing until demand of men who hold degrees in anthropology, for it arose among the tribal people them- DON RICHARDSON 467

selves. This usually took from seven to fif- to stop the fighting by emphasizing little-used teen years. Tribal church elders preached in peace-making mechanisms within the cultures the open or under grass-roofed shelters, themselves. Or we simply provide the third- wearing their penis gourds, and no one person presence which enables antagonists to thought anything of it. Even today the vast see their problems in a new light. majority of men still wear gourds and We are against witchcraft, suspicion of women wear grass skirts. which is a major cause of war. Killing by It is the Indonesian government, not mis- witchcraft is contrary, not only to Christian sionaries, which tries to shame tribals into concepts of goodness, but also to those of the exchanging gourds and grass skirts for humanists, isn’t it? shorts and dresses under Operation Koteka. We are against sexual promiscuity, and not But they do it for understandable reasons. for religious reasons only. In 1903, Chinese They want the tribesmen to become part of traders seeking bird-of-paradise plumes Indonesian society as soon as possible, find landed on the south coast of Irian Jaya. They employment, etc. introduced a venereal disease called lym- At Nalca, McDonald snapped a photo of a phogranuloma venereum among the one native with a ball-point pen stuck through hundred thousand members of the Merind the pierced septum of his nose. This photo tribes. Since group sex was widely accepted, appeared in some newspapers with the ludi- the disease spread like wildfire. It wiped out crous caption: “Ball-point pen replaces 90,000 lives in ten years. Had missionaries in- nosebone; fundamentalist preachers destroy troduced a different sexual ethic before the culture.” A native forages a used ball-point chinese traders arrived, unnumbered lives pen out of Johnny Benzel’s wastepaper bas- could have been spared. ket, sticks it through his nose, and presto! McDonald attempts to antagonize us Johnny is accused of destroying culture. Very still further by comparing our methods un- tricky, McDonald. favorably with “the more adaptive policies McDonald slams Johnny again: “At Nalca of Roman Catholic and mainstream Protes- mission, women have been persuaded to tant groups.” lengthen their grass skirts to knee-length….” Only one mainstream Protestant mission What actually happens is that families of the works in interior Irian Jaya, and they have Dani tribe follow missionaries to places like experienced the same problems McDonald Nalca, and over a period of years the Nalca uses as grounds to incriminate us. For ex- women begin to imitate the style of their ample, that mission’s director was seriously Dani counterparts, which happens to be the wounded with three arrows eight years ago, longer skirts. and eight of his carriers were killed while Do we, then, approve of everything in the trekking through a wild area. Such incidents local cultures? No, we do not, just as no one are merely an occupational hazard and in our own Western culture automatically ap- should not be used to levy blame. proves of everything in it. As far as I know, Roman Catholic mis- We are out to destroy cannibalism, but so sionaries have not been wounded or slain by also is the Indonesian government. The dif- tribals in Irian Jaya. This is due, not to ference is, we use moral persuasion, and if “more adaptive policies,” but to the fact that we fail, the government will eventually use they limit their work mainly to areas already physical force. Our task is to give the tribals a well-controlled by the government. But this rational basis for giving it up voluntarily be- is no shame to them as they have counted fore the guns of the police decide the issue their martyrs across the border in Papua with traumatic effect. New Guinea. We also want to stop the intertribal warfare If McDonald had taken time to visit Ro- that has gone on for centuries. In view of all man Catholic and evangelical Protestant ar- they have to go through in the next 50 years, it eas of operation and compare them, he is imperative that the tribes stop killing and would have found the degree of culture wounding each other now. Often we are able change at least as great if not greater in the 468 Chapter 67 DO MISSIONARIES DESTROY CULTURES?

Roman Catholic areas. For example, in all Ro- tribe’s nabelan-kabelan are you getting close to man Catholic areas primitives are expected to the heart of a people. As one of our members give up their tribal names and take Latin said to McDonald, “What we are looking for names, like Pius or Constantius, whereas in is the cultural key….” McDonald quoted his evangelical Protestant areas they still use words, yet failed totally to appreciate them. their Irianese names, like Isai or Yana. But Another point of McDonald’s article calls here again, if it is survival-related directed for refutation: Gerrit Kuijt raised funds for a change, it cannot be faulted on anthropologi- helicopter for general service to all tribal cal grounds. peoples in Irian Jaya, not for “aerial evange- McDonald continues, “Nearly all Roman lism.” In fact, it was this helicopter which Catholic missionaries in Irian Jaya are re- was on hand just in time to help in the earth- quired to hold degrees in anthropology.” Ac- quake relief operation and which bore tually, the percentage of Roman Catholic and McDonald on his reporting mission. Thank evangelical Protestant missionaries holding you, Gerrit, for your foresight. The rest of us degrees in anthropology is approximately are not unappreciative like McDonald. equal, and when it comes to prowess in McDonald, your article was erroneous, in- learning tribal dialects, the evangelicals excel ept, and irresponsible. You have made a per- by far. The majority of Roman Catholic fect nuisance of yourself. You and the Wash- priests teach in Indonesian even where it is ington Post owe us a printed apology. not understood. Sincerely, McDonald describes the lime-scattering Don Richardson dedication of a new at Jaosakor. Surely if this is the limit of their cul- Do missionaries destroy cultures? It’s true tural penetration, our Catholic friends must that we destroy certain things in cultures, just be far from satisfied. Cultural penetration, to as doctors sometimes must destroy certain be effective, must go far deeper than mere ex- things in a human body if a patient is to live. ternals like scattering lime. Not until you But as we grow in experience and God-given come to grips with internal concepts in the wisdom, we must not—and will not—de- category of the Ekari tribe’s aji or the Dani stroy cultures themselves.

Study Questions 1. What variations on McDonald’s criticisms have you read or heard? Do you think these criticisms of missionaries are justified or not? Why? 2. Does Richardson adequately answer McDonald’s criticisms? What would you add to or subtract from Richardson’s response? 3. Do you see any better policy than that of directed change in tribal societies? Why or why not?