A Book About A TRŪe Amazon Adventure - "Beyond The Call" By Harry G. Flinner (retired) Missionary of the Church of the Nazarene

A Glimpse Of

Chapter Five   Pages 117-140

 “MEET A TRIBE OF JIVARO INDIANS.”

Our Amazon Jivaro Indian neighbors	The blowgun
More Amazon Jivaro Indian neighbors

            Allow me to introduce the Aguaruna Indians.  I want you to know who they are and where I took my family.  We were in northern Peru on the Ecuador border, about 3 degrees south of the Equator. Sixty miles north of where I was building my house is the Curaray River where the Auca Indians murdered Jim Elliot, Nate Saint and their fellow workers.  You must remember that tragedy in Ecuador happened only two years earlier.  I was constantly aware of that proximity. The Aucas and Aguarunas are blood kin. They are both Jivaros. They were both headhunters   The Aguarunas would kill me as quick as those Aucas killed those five missionaries in Ecuador.  Every day I lived with that realization.

Most men have more than one wife – sometimes as many as six or eight. The father lives in a large thatched roof house that looks to be about 30 feet wide and 60 feet long.  The roof, made of palm leaves, reaches nearly to the ground to keep the rain from blowing in.  The entrance is at either end.  The doorway is only about four feet high.  The opening has a board across the bottom to keep the pigs out.  It is difficult for a six-foot gringo to get into one of their houses.  You had better be certain you are welcome before you even attempt to enter.  The Aguarunas don’t take to strangers.

It will take several minutes for your eyes to get accustomed to the darkness and smoke.  Eventually you will see around the perimeter of the room beds for each of the wives and children.  There will be other beds for the sons and their wives and their children.  They are not what we would call a bed.  They are bamboo racks about four feet long.

 

A typical Aguaruna home.  Meet the man of the house and his five wives.

 

           At the foot of every bed is a fire for cooking.  They place three logs end to end and where the logs meet they build their fire.  To cool the fire down they pull the logs apart.  To get more heat they push them together.  Those fires never go out.  There is no chimney.  The house is filled with the smoke of 20 fires.  You are aware of the darkness when you enter the low narrow doorway.  It is not just the darkness of the black, smoke charred roof.  It is an evil darkness.  An Indian man never turns his back to anyone.  They stand with their backs to the wall.  They will not allow even their own brother to walk behind them.  That is the evil darkness of heathenism.   You sense the foreboding spirit in the way they treat their children.  I have never seen a man pick up a little child and put her on his knee and tell me this is my daughter or granddaughter.  I have seen a father kick a little child across the room as if she were a soccer ball.

 
            Shrunken head

 

          One day I saw a shrunken head hanging from the palm roof ceiling of one of the homes I visited.   “Do they still shrink heads?” you ask.  When I first went into the Amazon rain forest fifty years ago headhunting and head shrinking was a common practice.  It was not unusual back then to find a shrunken head in the home of a Jivaro Indian.  Don’t go back into the jungle expecting to find one.  As far as I know the practice has stopped. 

 

          Their marriage customs were a cause of many killings.  Listen to this.   Before an Aguaruna girl is three years old she is already married and living with her husband.  I said three years old.  An Aguaruna man is supposed to marry a specific girl.  He must marry the daughter of his father’s sister.  A man who has seven or eight wives will soon have 40 or 50 babies.  They don’t want those kids.  They are not going to raise them.  If the woman cannot abort that pregnancy they will kill many of those babies the day they are born. 

          With such inbred marriages of first cousins I would expect to find all kinds of abnormalities – such as six fingers on each hand or an eye in the middle of their forehead.   I have never seen any such deformity in the jungle. When you sense how depraved that culture was, maybe you begin to share with me the urgency I felt to show them the love of God.  God is not mad at the mothers for killing their babies. He loves them.  God is not angry with the murderer who killed that man along the trail.  The Lord told me to go back to those jungle homes and tell them that Jesus loves them.  These people were included in John 3:16 –-“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”   Chapter four is devoted to meeting the Jivaro Indians.  Raising our family with that tribe of aboriginals was a fascinating experience.