The first Sunday Genny was with me on the Cusu we decided to have a church service even if nobody came but us. I had to remind myself that we didn’t go to a Third World country just to build a house and see how we could survive as a family in the Peruvian rain forest. We’d gone there to take the message of the Gospel to a primitive tribe of Indians. I did not go to the Amazon as an anthropologist trained to study the culture of Jivaro Indians. I went as a missionary to be a minister and Bible teacher. Today I could find 10,000 websites on my computer to research Jivaro Indians of the Amazon rain forest, but when I took my family to the jungle fifty years ago there were no computers and no Google search engines. No one had made a study of those tribes. The morning I woke up in my sleeping bag that first night I spent on the banks of the Cusu River and I looked into the eyes of those Aguaruna Indians, I was the first White Man they had ever seen. What I write in this book is what I saw, what I felt and what I understood as a fledgling missionary.
I knew nothing about this tribe’s religious beliefs, but I soon began to observe, study and learn about them. In college religion classes I learned that anthropologists classify the religion of all Jivaro Indians as animism, which is the belief that inanimate objects have a soul. The Jivaro tribes believe everything inanimate has a soul. Rocks, trees and rivers have souls. A few older Aguarunas I talked to had a vague belief in reincarnation. They told me they might come back in the form of some animal. Some Indians told me they didn’t eat deer meat because the deer might be their grandmother. I did not observe that reincarnation was a major part of the Aguarunas’ belief system.
I did not find any consensus thinking about religion, the spirit world, or life after death. Most of those spiritual concepts were passed on orally from grandfather, to father to son. They were not tribal beliefs but family traditions. What the sons of the families at the Cusu were taught was totally different from the beliefs of our neighbor family an hour or so upriver at Chipe.
In college and graduate school I took courses in comparative religion. I learned the definition of animism and what I learned was helpful and enlightening, but I didn’t have a single class that taught me how to present the Gospel to a primitive culture steeped in animism. I wasn’t taught in college what the Aguaruna believed concerning spiritual concepts, but from what I observed in the ten years I lived with those people they didn’t seem to see themselves as a special creation different from the animals in the jungle. I never discerned that they had any belief in a creator. They had no concept of a person having an eternal soul. Although some old-timers had an ambiguous belief in some kind of incarnation, for the most part the younger Indians didn’t believe in life after death. When a person died that was it. They’d never dreamed of any place like heaven or hell. Their fear of Inwach wasn’t that he was the devil who would punish them eternally after death but that he was responsible for all their pain, misery and misfortune right here on earth.
Where Genny and I established the Cusu mission we were so deep in the jungle that the Indians in our area had never heard of any missionary work. In fact, most of the families where we lived had never seen a White Man. They had never seen a Bible and had never heard the name of Jesus. They had no word in their language for love and no word for God. There was no way to say in the Aguaruna language, "God loves you."
Shortly after we got there the American Bible Society and the Wycliffe Bible Translators told us to introduce a new word, Tatayus, to be the Aguaruna God. Tatayus was a foreign word to the Indians. It came from the Quechua language of Southern Peru. No Aguaruna had any idea what the word Tatayus meant. Can you imagine how hard it was to define God to a primitive mind? How do you introduce our God?
How do you define sin? Was I to start a list of "do's and don'ts" for those Indians? Nearly every man had more than one wife. Is that a sin? 60% of the babies were killed at the birthing site the day they were born. Was that sin? The nearest word I found for SIN was pekegenchau which means bad, or rotten, or broken. A broken canoe is pekegenchau. A rotten banana is pekegenchau. When something bad happens, it is pekegenchau. My knowledge of theology was totally inadequate. Rather than make a list of bad things they were doing -- like nakedness, fornication, murder, lying, drunkenness. child abuse -- I told them that God is pekeg (good) but all of us are pekegenchau (we are bad, we are broken, we are rotten) and that makes us do bad things that displease God. I said, God will tell you what those bad things are. Defining sin for that tribe of heathen was God's job, not mine. I had trouble enough defining who is God.
