View of the World by Norman Lewis

Author:Norman Lewis [Norman Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780600376
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

The conclusion of all those who have lived among and studied the Indian beyond the reach of civilisation is that he is the perfect human product of his environment – from which it should follow that he cannot be removed without calamitous results. Ensconced in the forest in which his ancestors have lived for thousands of years, he is as much a component of it as the tapir and the jaguar: self-sufficient, the artificer of all his requirements, at terms with his surroundings, deeply conscious of his place in the living patterns of the visible and invisible universe.

It is admitted now that the average Indian Protection Service official recruited to deal with this complicated but satisfactory human being was all too often venal, ignorant and witless, and it was natural that he should call to his aid the missionaries who were in Brazil by the thousand, and were backed by resources that he himself lacked. But the missionary record was not an imposing one, and even those incomparable colonisers of the faith, the Jesuits, had little to show but failure.

In the early days they had put their luckless converts into long white robes, segregated the sexes, and set them to ‘godly labours’, lightened by the chanting of psalms in Latin, mind-developing exercises in mnemonics, and speculative discussions on such topics as the number of angels able to perch on the point of a pin. It was offered as a foretaste of the delights of the Christian heaven, complete with its absence of marrying or giving in marriage, and many of the converts died of melancholy. After a while demoralisation spread to the fathers themselves and some of them went off the rails to the extent of dabbling in the slave trade. When these settlements were finally overrun by the bloodthirsty pioneers and frontiersmen from São Paolo, death can hardly have been more than a happy release for the listless and bewildered Indian flock.

When the Indian Protection Service was formed the missionaries of the various Catholic orders were rapidly being outnumbered by nonconformists, mostly from the United States. These were a very different order of man, no longer armed only with hellfire and damnation, but with up-to-date techniques of salesmanship in their approach to the problems of conversion. By 1968 the Jornal de Brasil could state:

In reality, those in command of these Indian Protection posts are North American missionaries – they are in all the posts – and they disfigure the original Indian culture and enforce the acceptance of Protestantism.

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