Rachel Saint

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Rachel Saint (1914 – November 1994) was an evangelical Christian missionary from the United States who worked in Ecuador.

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[edit] Biography

Rachel Saint was born in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. She attended the Philadelphia School of the Bible and then worked at the Keswick Colony of Mercy in New Jersey.

Rachel Saint was trained by the Wycliffe Bible Translators / Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International). Her first missionary assignment was to the Piro and Shapra in Peru, but she had an interest in the Huaorani. In February 1955 she and Catherine Pike went to a missionary station near Huaorani territory, where Rachel Saint's brother was working. Rachel Saint started learning the Huaorani language with the help of Dayuma, a Huaorani woman who had left her people after a dispute and was sheltered by missionaries.

In January 1956, five missionaries in the area were killed by Huaorani people, including her brother Nate Saint, who had come to Ecuador in 1948. As a result, Rachel Saint considered herself spiritually bonded to the tribe. In 1957 she embarked on a tour of the United States together with Dayuma, appearing with Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden and on Ralph Edwards' television show This Is Your Life.

In the summer of 1958 Rachel Saint returned to the Huaorani in Ecuador and, together with Elisabeth Elliot, the wife of James (Jim) Elliot, who had been killed by the Huaorani, continued to evangelise. In February 1959 they were able to move into a Huaorani settlement. Where the five American men had failed to gain entrance into the Huaorani society, these 2 unarmed women (as well as Elliot's little daughter) were not perceived as a threat. Rachel continued in her labor to create a dictionary of the Huaorani language that she had begun before the death of the five missionaries.

The government of Ecuador gave the Summer Institute of Linguistics a contract to create a reservation for the Huaorani on an area of less than a tenth of their traditional territory. The land was to be administered by SIL directly, neither by the government nor the Huaorani. With support from U.S. oil companies (Texaco and Gulf Oil) and the government of Ecuador, Rachel Saint helped relocate the tribe to the reservation.[citation needed]

While conversion to Christianity ended a fierce war between quickly shrinking clans (a war which was threatening to wipe them out all together), a few critics charge that the contact with the American missionaries had a profound and destructive impact on traditional Huaorani culture. The teaching of evangelical Christianity has been criticised as changing Huaorani religious and cultural distinctives, along with the enforcement of new ideals such as monogamy, use of clothing provided by the mission, and labour under mission supervision. The missionaries encouraged the Huaorani to give up communal living and had them build houses for each married couple. Concentration of the population and the inevitable contact with Europeans led to a series of epidemics — the most devastating was a polio epidemic in 1969 — which killed many Huaorani and left many more crippled.

When criticism of Rachel Saint's actions at the missionary reservation emerged, in 1973, the SIL sent the anthropologist and missionary James Yost to investigate. Yost had worked for more than ten years among the Huaorani. His report was highly critical of Saint's work and in 1976, SIL ordered her to retire. Rachel Saint decided to leave the SIL but to continue her work with the support of the oil companies.[citation needed] In 1981, SIL was expelled from the country. Rachel Saint went back to the USA, raised funds and returned to Ecuador to work with the Huaroani.

Maxus, a US oil company based in Houston, Texas, purchased exploration rights in Huaorani territory. Maxus' leadership consisted of evangelical Christians (including its president William Hutton), who immediately established very close relationships with Rachel Saint and other American missionaries in the area. School buildings in the missionary reservation were built or repaired by the oil companies and are painted with their logos, including Maxus and Petroecuador.

Rachel Saint died in Toñampade, Ecuador in November 1994.

[edit] Works

  • with Kenneth L. Pike. (1959). Notas sobre fonémica huarani (‘Auca’).
  • with Kenneth L. Pike. (1962). Auca phonemics.
  • with Kenneth L. Pike (1975). Fonémica del idioma de los huaurani (auca).
  • with Evelyn G. Pike (1988). Workpapers concerning Waorani discourse features, ISBN 0-88312-625-7.

[edit] Film

  • Trinkets and beads. Documentary, Ecuador/USA 1996, 52 minutes; Director: Chris Walker; Producer: Tony Avirgan. “Chris Walker and Tony Avirgan’s films tells the tragi-comic story of the unlikely links between Maxus - a Texas-based ‘evangelical’ oil company - the 79-year old Wycliffe Bible Translators missionary Rachel Saint, and the Huaorani people of the Ecuadorian Orient, the most fiercely isolated tribe in the Amazon. First introduced to the Indians by the missionaries, Maxus is guilty of poisoning Huaorani land and rivers with its drills and flares and leaking pipelines.”[1]

[edit] References

  • Anderson, Gerald H. (1998). Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids / Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans. ISBN 0-8028-4680-7. 
  • Cabodevilla, Miguel Angel (1994). Los Huaorani en la historia de los pueblos del oriente. Coca: CICAME. 
  • Goffin, Alvin M. (1994). The rise of Protestant Evangelism in Ecuador, 1895-1990. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 
  • Howe, Robert W (2003). Tigres of the night: The true story of Juan and Amalia Arcos, naturalists and lay missionaries in the jungle of eastern Ecuador, 1922-2003. Xlibris. ISBN 1-4134-1503-2. 
  • Kimerling, Judith (1991). Amazon crude. Natural Resource Defense. ISBN 0-9609358-5-1. 
  • Kingsland, Rosemary (1980). A Saint among Savages. Collins. ISBN 0-00-216740-9. 
  • Rowell, Andrew (1996). Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environment Movement. London / New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-12827-7. 
  • Stoll, David (1982). Fishers of men or founders of empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America. xx: xx. ISBN 1-57181-448-5. 
  • Stowell, Joseph M. (19xx). Following Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. ISBN 0-310-21934-5. 
  • Tucker, Ruth A. (2004). From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. ISBN 0-310-23937-0. 
  • United States Congress, House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on International Operations (1977). Protection of Americans Abroad: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Operations. Washington: US Government Printing Office. ISBN 1-57181-448-5. 
  • Wallis, Ethel E. (1960). The Dayuma story: Life under Auca spears. New York: Harper. 

[edit] External links

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