An anthropologist examines faith and deception in End of the Spear, this spring’s evangelical film controversy.

By Lucas Bessire

Regardless of your sympathy for the evangelical missionary project or knowledge of the Huaorani Indians of eastern Ecuador — and anthropologists like me often have strong opinions on both — the idea that a handful of American churchgoers from the 1950s Midwest would decide to risk life and limb clambering through unmapped, Amazonian wilderness in order to convert a fiercely independent indigenous group they knew nothing about makes for riveting human drama. Religious content aside, something about the scale of the ambition, the power of such faith, the complete lack of cultural understanding, or just the sheer moxy of the whole twisted thing, is breathtaking even for an anthropologist. And this is just the beginning of the truly dramatic, real-life plot of murder, greed, salvation and romance that is both the context for the recent film End of the Spear, and the subject of its revisionist message.

What some believers refer to as “the greatest missionary story of the 20th Century” began when five young American missionaries, led by Nate Saint, were speared during their attempts to contact the Huaorani in 1956. Despite this bloody start, the wives and sister of these “martyrs” returned to contact and convert the same Huaorani to evangelical Christianity. Immortalized in a 1956 Life magazine report, and brought to nation-wide television audiences in the 1960s, this narrative is credited with inspiring thousands of young Americans to become “warriors for Christ” in foreign mission fields, and over the years this triumphant tale has taken on shades of Gospel truth.

The plot was given a new twist in the mid ’90s by the son of one of the five slain men: the media-savvy, businessman-turned-missionary Steve Saint. In a widely publicized stunt, Steve returned to Ecuador and made peace with his father’s indigenous killer, Mincaye, a process dramatized in Jim Hanon’s 2004 documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor, and later incorporated into several best-selling Christian books as a model modern morality tale.

It’s the stuff of enduring mythology, deep emotions, and contemporary box office success. End of the Spear, the first feature from Every Tribe Productions and director Hanon, aspires to bring this “real-life” story of Steve Saint and the Huaorani to wider movie-going publics. The dramatized film is narrated from Steve’s perspective and uses the relationships between Nate Saint, Steve Saint and Mincayani to depict the mechanics of the evangelizing process. As the website proclaims: “Together, Mincayani and Steve find that what Nate accomplished in his death gave them both a new life, and Steve’s family becomes part of Mincayani’s family.”

With a marketing budget of $10 million, producer Mart Green (heir to the multibillion-dollar Hobby Lobby fortune) tried to emulate the unorthodox distribution strategy of Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster The Passion of the Christ by hosting free pre-release screenings to Christian groups, widely self-distributing when studios balked at the lack of big-name talent, and promoting the related Hanon documentary as well as a collection of “Spear Gear” t-shirts and hats for Christian hipsters. Green’s strategy paid off with $4.22 million in box office revenues the opening weekend of January 20 (making it the 9th highest grossing film currently playing after only three days; the film rose to #8 nationwide before sinking to respectable independent film rankings). While non-evangelical critics blasted the film, many internet blogs and Christian reviewers gushed about its spiritual power. Despite a growing controversy caused by casting a “homosexual” actor in the lead role, End of the Spear is opening hearts, minds and wallets in the Bible Belt and beyond.

The film’s ambivalent success isn’t surprising. But the film itself is — in the scope of its ambitious attempt to solidify Christian claims to mainstream mass media, in its narrative reliance on encoded cues to mystify secular audiences and satisfy evangelical ones, and in the vantage it provides on the missionary imaginations that continue to shape an all-too-often forgotten sphere of our nation’s past and present. Hanon, however, flattens the fantastically rich story into the archetypal categories that both horrify anthropologists and resonate with many Christians.

End of the Spear opens with intimate, throaty narration read over an idyllic aerial shot of an Amazonian forest. “People claim that we live in a world of irreconcilable differences, that peace, lasting peace can’t be obtained because there is no way to change the human heart.” But the story of this film, a journey down a remote river, will “challenge what a lot of people say.” This introduces Steve Saint, our guide through the surreal and earnest world of the missionary imagination. We travel with Steve to the Ecuadorian rainforest of 1943. A sleeping house of “Waodani” indians (portrayed by non-Waodani actors) are attacked and murdered by ruthless enemy warriors in a nighttime raid, one of whom stops to hack apart a baby. We follow two child protagonists, a boy named Mincayani and a little girl, Dayumae, as they flee.

Next narrator Steve Saint takes us to his own childhood in 1956, eerily staged to resemble the overly-tranquil domestic images from a 1950s sit-com, replete with Roy Rogers cowboy hats, model planes, an apron-wearing mother, and a Lassie-like dog. We meet his enthusiastic, bright-eyed father, Nate Saint (Chad Allen), and four goofy American sidekicks (the freakish energy of their unimaginative portrayals was one of the few things that seemed to ring true in this coherent missionary Wonderland). It is a full twenty minutes before we are told that they are missionaries, “closer than blood family,” and that they plan to contact the Waodani, for vague, partially-articulated reasons (Are they hoping to save them from intertribal ”extinction”? Are they worried about government troops, or their own violent nature? Or are they seeking to release them from a Satanic “prison”?)

The score, ranging from “tribal” drum beats and chants when the Waodani appear to angelic choral arrangements and pastoral string progressions for the missionaries, leave no doubt as to when we should feel what. At first, the blatant emotionality of the music is appreciated as a much-needed aid to follow the mechanical, unrelentingly dramatic script that assumes, rather than creates, its power. When Nate Saint says, “Son, the Waodani are not ready for Heaven. We are,” we know we are supposed to simply believe.

We then meet the grown, rippling Mincayani (played by Louie Leonardo, a New Yorker of Dominican descent, in body paint), followed by a flashback to Mincaayani’s first encounter the missionaries, who land on a beach, play opera music, embrace one another enthusiastically and holler gospel at the trees. Three young Waodani attack; Nate Saint dies in a slow-motion, passionate sequence, arms-outstretched, and may as well have murmured “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”

If the character of his son, Steve Saint, is meant to resonate with child viewers, and Nate Saint with adult men, the film’s portrayal of missionary women will surely play well for many progressive Christians. The filmmakers replace patriarchy with a more politically correct image of feminine strength. Courageous women on both sides enable the peaceful, long-term contact to eventually occur, as Rachel Saint, Nate’s sister, inspired by the martyrdom, sets out to contact the Waodani. Rachel is guided by Dayumae, the childhood playmate of Mincayani, who now represents the Waodani potential for redemption. It’s Dayumae who does the real work of contact, bravely confronts Mincayani with her new beliefs, and teaches the child Steve Saint the Wao phrase for “I am your sincere friend.” Dayumae also does the only preaching in the film, telling the Waodani about the vague deity “Waengongi,” and his son, that let himself be speared in order to give new life to his assailants.

At one point, I wondered if such progressive gestures would make End of the Spear just as offensive to some evangelical sensibilities as it is to my anthropologically-inflected ones. But any gestures toward complexity are overwhelmed by the Manichean universe constructed by the film. It’s a world of dark, sooty Indians living in shadows and storms, opposed to the sun-drenched, well-scrubbed and joyful missionaries. The “pre-contact,” benighted Waodani are portrayed as uber-savages, including mothers who want to kill their own children and warriors who murder other natives to get women, whom they drag about by their hair, cave-man style. They live in fear of various spirits like the “Great Boa,” and actually get eaten by snakes.The only time we see Indians living in well-lit normalcy is after they’ve survived an epidemic by using western medicine and converting to Christianity. The missionaries, meanwhile, strike picture perfect poses of hygienic, technological superiority.

As the film progresses, classic Christian imagery and cues take an even more central role. Faith, rather than narrative integrity, is supposed to carry the evocative and thematic weight. Unexplained natural events plague the resistant Mincayani and benefit the missionaries. A disastrous polio epidemic is presented as the eventual vehicle for the successful conversion of the Waodani, who later dance about happily. The film eventually succumbs to the demands of its primary audience, the “Prayer Partners” and “God Followers” thanked in the end credits,

But what seems like “bad filmmaking” to a secular audience can be a chance to reaffirm the faith of Christian viewers. Such cues have resonated strongly with many viewers:

“I saw this movie with my wife last night. The movie is profound. It is uplifting and wonderful. The anointing it carries is heavy with the presence of the Holy Spirit. The portrayal of the story brought greater revelation of Paul’s word’s “…to live is Christ, to die gain.” How joyous it is to use your life to present life and freedom to those that are “not ready for heaven”…. This is a movie I can take non-believers to.”

Can such a poorly designed and executed film be an effective vehicle for the Christian message? Can faith hold it together? Surely not for secular audiences. End of the Spear’s Indians are too wicked, the Saints are too good and the emotional climaxes come too fast. By the time we learn that Nate Saint supposedly ascended directly into Heaven, and actually watch the missionary’s plane fly away into the sunset, the little anthropologist inside all of us is more amused than enraged.

End of the Spear is more fiction than fact, more Judas than Jesus. If there were no stakes to this kind of project — no real Huaorani, no real missionaries, and no real anthropologists — then this review could end here. But this film does decidedly serious work in the real world by erasing the actual conditions and consequences of the evangelical missionary work that’s still occurring all over lowland South America today, largely financed by the well-meaning constituents of North American churches. It does a disservice to the Huaorani, anthropology, and missionaries by flattening out the ambiguous, anxious relationships of such riveting moments into tired dogma.

It also hides a darker story of racism and greed. As with most indigenous groups in lowland South America, the terrible violence that preceded peaceful relations between Huaorani and missionaries was a consequence of contact with diseases and outsiders. It was never the “natural” state of these groups. The approximately 700 Huaorani, called Auca (Savages), that survived into the 20th century were only able to do so by fiercely defending their homeland on the south banks of the Rio Napo against explorers and colonists. In return, they were hunted down like animals, enslaved, and murdered whenever possible. As anthropologist Laura Rival and others have demonstrated, this violence was legitimated by exaggerated reports of their violent, aggressive nature; one suspects End of the Spear would play well for an audience seeking reassurance for such images.

The missionizing endeavor among the Huaorani, as for many groups, was possible because of the convergence of corporate and state interests in taking possession of territory and resources that belonged to native people; in this case, rubber and oil. Missionaries were given exclusive state license to “contact,” round up and sedentize particularly troublesome groups who were not sufficiently terrorized to surrender. All of this is erased from End of the Spear.

The movie replaces the all-too-human fallacies of the missionary heroes with grotesque European imaginings of indigenous savagery. This is a widespread colonial fantasy of indigenous nature that has consistently been used to legitimize violence and savage behavior by “civilized” populations against native peoples. The film’s core narrative and ultimate goal is to repeat this trope as justification for the creation of a new, western-oriented indigenous world. In doing so, the film seeks to translate one of the foundational fictions of the 20th century evangelical missionary project into a contemporary medium. But, as in real life, such efforts are never completely convincing.

Contrary to the isolated jungle world of End of the Spear, outside interest in subduing the Huaorani had grown so intense that several missionary groups were competing to contact them by the mid-50s. Rachel Saint led one group affiliated with the infamous Summer Institute of Linguistics (a pseudo-scientific Christian organization notoriously implicated in the CIA’s anti-communist activities of the 1960s and 70s by David Stoll, among others). Her brother Nate was a competitor for indigenous souls, and his diaries show that he went to exhaustive lengths to conceal his activities. Glory, personal salvation and cold hard cash were among the Saints’ goals. Today, evangelicals are still racing to reach the few remaining isolated peoples across the Americas for just such reasons.

The film’s Christ-like portrayal of Nate Saint is complicated by reports from the anthropologist Lawrence Ziegler-Otero, who conducted fieldwork with the Huaorani in 1995-1996. Contrary to the film’s core message (of the missionaries’ Jesus-like non-violence), he reports unanimous indigenous claims that missionaries shot and killed a native man in the 1956 encounter. The film’s portrayal of Dayumae’s relationship with the missionaries is also intentionally misleading. The filmmakers conceal an unsettling characteristic that is typical of early “contact” work in lowland South America. Missionary success depended on linguistic and cultural translation, and they enlisted captive Indians for this purpose. In order to access these individuals, however, missionaries had to become complicit in local systems of slavery.

Their violence did not end there. For instance, native survivors of the “contact” period across Latin America remember that missionaries did not administer precious medicine to all the afflicted, but only those who converted to Christianity. Since then, evangelical missionaries have often actively worked against indigenous initiatives for self-determination.

The actual Rachel Saint was the primary benefactor of the fantastic spike in revenues caused by the death and subsequent apotheosis of her brother and former competitor. Ziegler-Otero reports that Rachel and Dayuma became international celebrities, appearing with Billy-Graham’s Crusade, and on Ralph Edwards “This is Your Life” television program, as excerpted in Christopher Walker’s stunning 1996 documentary Trinkets and Beads. Ziegler-Otero and Walker show how Rachel and the Summer Institute of Linguistics accepted payments from Texaco-Gulf in exchange for luring Huaorani groups onto a small reserve, and off petroleum-rich lands later opened for drilling. Oil money directly sponsored her work through the SIL. In her later life, Rachel Saint became a controversial figure. She was ordered into retirement in 1976 after criticism for fostering Huaorani dependence on missionaries.

Are the filmic erasures and narrative defects of the film simply bad filmmaking? Or is End of the Spear a conscious effort to duplicate the fund-raising strategy that was once so effective for Rachel Saint, a filmic version of the 1956 Life magazine story, seeking to use cinema to turn the pure water of faith into the intoxicating wine of money for Steve Saint’s mission?

Like the children of many of these first missionaries, Steve Saint returned to Ecuador in the mid 1990s to take over what has now become the family business. Zeigler-Otero writes:

“One missionary who continues in Huaorani territory is Stephan Saint, the son of Nate Saint, who grew up with the Huaorani but has adopted an attitude of superiority toward them. He has established himself as the leader of a small community of Huaorani, where he, like his aunt before him, makes all of the rules. He is the minister of the church in the community, and does not seem to have made any effort to establish indigenous church leadership…. In his community, he has stressed the importance of capitalist relations of production and distribution. He has established his own store and sells everything in it….”

He reports that Mincaye (the real-life Mincayani) was working in debt peonage on the mission in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, Cal Thomas stated on January 18th that “Director Hanon says the Waodani at first refused to cooperate,” with acting out a violent representation of themselves, despite financial incentives. Where, then, does the true story lie? Perhaps with the several small bands of Huaorani that live in strenuously-maintained, voluntary isolation in Ecuador. Let us hope that the surreal fantasies of End of the Spear do not continue to shape the future realities of these extremely vulnerable people.

Lucas Bessire, a doctoral candidate in New York University’s Department of Anthropology, is the director of Asking Ayahai: An Ayoreo Story, a 2004 documentary about a group of South American Indians moving from traditional life to wage labor.