Elisabeth Elliot once commented that she wrote her novel, No Graven Image, as a way to deal with her experiences on the mission field through fiction, especially the three years she spent among the Waorani, then known as “Aucas.” Margaret Sparhawk, the heroine of Elliot’s book, is a sincere young woman who struggles with the challenging and unexpected complexities she encounters in her efforts to live out the gospel among an indigenous people. Through Margaret’s experiences, Elliot explores the idea that there is much more to missionary work than meets the eye, in fact, a great deal more than the folks back home ever imagine.
Elliot’s novel offers a helpful cautionary note to viewers of The End of the Spear, a feature-length film about the story with which Elisabeth Elliot is most often associated and which she did much to memorialize: the 1956 killings of her husband and four other missionaries by Waorani warriors in the rainforests of Ecuador. Elliot’s 1957 book Through Gates of Splendor, along with a Life magazine photo essay and wide coverage in both the secular and the Christian press, made the deaths of Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian the defining missionary martyr story for American evangelicals during the second half of the twentieth century.
The End of the Spear tells this story from new points of view, those of Nate Saint’s son Steve and one of the Waorani, named Mincayani. Mincayani (played by Louie Leonardo) is a composite character drawn from the life histories of several Waorani warriors but closely associated with the real-life Mincaye, one of the men who speared the missionaries. The film follows Steve (played as a boy by Chase Ellison and as an adult by Chad Allen) and Mincayani from Mincayani’s childhood experiences of tribal violence in the 1940s and Steve’s loss of his father in 1956 to a dramatic moment of confrontation and reconciliation as adults in the 1990s. Along the way, it portrays the love between a father and his son and recreates the efforts by Nate Saint and his friends to contact the Waorani that led to their deaths. It also brings the story up to date by sketching the subsequent peaceful contact by three women and a child who lived among these same people. The four were Steve’s Aunt Rachel Saint (Nate’s older sister, played by Sara Kathryn Bakker); a young Waorani woman named Dayumae (Christina Souza), who was Rachel’s language informant; Elisabeth Elliot (Beth Bailey); and Elliot’s small daughter Valerie (Laura Mortensen).
In the screenplay, Dayumae tells the Waorani, who turn out to be members of her extended family, about God’s Son, “who was speared and did not spear back.” The American women live the message by not seeking to avenge their slain family members and by nursing the Waorani through a polio epidemic. Young Steve Saint, his mother, and his sister ride out the epidemic with the tribe and make other visits. The Waorani choose to embrace Christianity and end their revenge killings. Rachel Saint lives the rest of her life among the Waorani. In 1994, when she dies, the tribe invites Steve to take her place, an invitation he and his family accept. Then comes the film’s climax.
The End of the Spear does a number of things well. Moviegoers, including evangelicals familiar with the story, learn that the name of this people-group is “Waorani” (or “Waodani”) and not “Aucas,” a Quichua word meaning “savages” and used as a slur.1 The movie is fast-paced, intense (including intense violence), and offers some beautiful aerial scenes of rivers and forests in Panama, where it was made. The focus on Mincayani enables the screenwriters to provide some context for the Waorani who killed the five missionaries, including the high homicide rates and patterns of revenge killings that characterized their culture. The choice of the Embera, an indigenous group in Panama, to play the Waorani (except for lead characters), reflects a desire to offer some authenticity to the portrayal of indigenous people. Although the explicit Christian message is muted, the film tells a new generation about five young men who cared enough about the Waorani to risk their lives.
The film has gotten mediocre reviews in the secular press, some because of the film’s message-based content, some (correctly, I think) for the lack of character development and other weaknesses in the script. For example, the word “missionary” is not mentioned until well into the movie, leaving the uninitiated to wonder why in the world the hotshot young pilot and his friends want to find and meet the elusive and hostile indigenous people. Even so, the film grossed about $4.3 million on its opening weekend, ranking eighth in U.S. box office receipts. Evangelicals, by and large, have responded positively. The main controversy among conservative Christians has centered not on the film itself but on the choice of gay activist Chad Allen for the dual roles of Nate Saint and the adult Steve Saint.
My own unease with the film has a different source. It goes back to the complexity of missionary reality. There is both much more—and sometimes less—to the history of missionaries and the Waorani than meets the eye in the film. In its effort to inspire and entertain, the film presents a story with all the complexities removed. In doing so, it also employs a great deal of fictionalization. The movie is honest about this, although most people will miss the disclaimer: at the very end of the closing credits, a brief statement acknowledges composite characters and fictionalized incidents. Of course, audiences recognize that history on the big screen is almost always fictionalized. At the same time, however, the film opens with the words, “From a true story,” and that phrase is prominent in advertising. The movie is based on the dramatized documentary, Beyond the Gates of Splendor, released in 2005. Unfortunately, in an attempt to appeal to a commercial audience, The End of the Spear loses much of the documentary’s charm and other strengths while sharing its weakness of glossing over large portions of the past fifty years.2
Much of the fictionalization in The End of the Spear is done to make the plot, which focuses on Steve and on Mincayani, correspond to the larger narrative of the missionaries’ deaths and the Waorani embrace of peace/Christianity. In essence, the screenplay adds the legend of these two characters to the familiar, and in some circles almost mythic, story of the five missionaries. Historical connections do exist, but not as the film presents them. As a boy the real Steve Saint spent many school vacations with his Aunt Rachel and the Waorani, but he became an influential participant in Waorani history only at about the point where the film concludes. He and his family did not relocate permanently to Ecuador as the movie implies, but lived there for about a year between 1995 and 1996. They have maintained their involvement through extended visits. Saint’s autobiography, published in connection with the movie and bearing the same title, reflects this. The real Mincaye, who is Dayumae’s half-brother, participated in many of the historical events narrated in the film and was one of the “Palm Beach” killers. However, other Waorani warriors played more prominent roles, which led to the creation of a composite character.3
Given the plot, it is logical that the Steve Saint character is introduced as an eight-year-old, frightened by the risks his dad is taking. The real Steve turned five the same month Nate Saint was killed. In the film, Steve secretly radios Aunt Rachel to find out from Dayumae how to say “I am your friend, your sincere friend” in the Waorani language. A phrase is given which the boy carefully repeats and writes down. He teaches his father, and these will become his father’s last words, as well as the words Steve later uses to reach out to Mincayani.
The historical record shows that the men did try to get phrases from Dayumae, including ones that they thought meant, “I like you; I want to be your friend.” Yet one real-life complication is that the Waorani are a kinship-based society and had no words in their language for friend or friendship. Contrary to the movie, Dayumae spoke no English. As a young teenager, she fled the violence of her people to become a peon or virtual slave on a hacienda at the edge of the rainforest. There she spoke lowland Quichua, the language of the Indians around her. When Jim Elliot visited her to learn phrases in Wao tededo, the Waorani language, he did not realize that she spoke a version of her native tongue corrupted by Quichua influences. Elliot was fluent in Quichua, but neither he nor the others would know that Wao tededo bore no relationship to that language. The End of the Spear certainly portrays the complete inability of the missionaries to communicate with the Waorani during their first peaceful encounter. Even so, “I am your sincere friend” is an invented theme that obscures the vast cultural divide between the Waorani and the missionaries who wanted to meet them.
More curious is the way the film depicts two events that have been the subject of controversy and criticism over the years: the shooting of a Waorani man during the attack on the beach and the circumstances surrounding the polio epidemic that struck the Waorani in 1969.4
Both the movie and historical accounts agree that the men took guns when they established their base camp in Waorani territory. They thought the Indians would flee if shots were fired, but they also believed that firing, even into the air, should be a last resort. The search party that arrived after the attack found a bullet hole through the plane window and some signs of struggle. Later, when the Waorani who participated began to talk about what happened, it became clear that a bullet from one of the pistols fired in the melee either hit Dayumae’s brother Nampa in the head or grazed his head. Nampa, who was one of the attackers, died sometime later—from a few weeks to more than a year—the time frame is unclear. Accounts generally connect his death to the attack, reporting that Nampa died of the bullet lodged in his head or from an infection related to the wound, though this, too, is disputed.5
Since 1974, critics have charged Rachel Saint and her sending agency, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), with trying to conceal the gunshot and Nampa’s death in order to make the missionaries look more heroic. In fact, neither Saint nor the sil denied the shot. The End of the Spear plays into the critics’ hands by offering only the slightest visual nod to the shooting of Nampa. One scene during the spearings shows an arm pointing a pistol to the sky, while another reaches around to knock it down so the pistol fires horizontally rather than vertically. There is no indication that the shot hit anyone.
Most accounts appear to suggest that the shot was accidental, in the context of a struggle, but we may never know for sure. Expressing a note of ambiguity might have added to the power of a film emphasizing forgiveness, reconciliation, and ending violence. The Waorani have known about Nampa’s wounding and death all along; perhaps American moviegoers should have been given the same opportunity. In the end, some Waorani still found the overall decision by the missionaries not to use their weapons in self-defense a significant witness to the potential of Christianity as a mechanism for ending violence.
The choice of the 1969 polio epidemic as a turning point in The End of the Spear seems particularly odd. Steve Saint was eighteen at the time, and, contrary to the movie, not present. No foreigner (non-Waorani) was there except for Rachel Saint, and her role was a mixed one of sacrifice, bravery, and a hard-headedness that cost dearly the very indigenous people she loved. In the movie version, the Aenomenane, downriver tribal enemies of the peaceful Waorani, arrive with their sick seeking help. The illness is diagnosed as polio and a six-week quarantine is imposed on the village. The quarantine includes young Steve, still not more than nine or ten, his mother, sister, Rachel Saint, and Elisabeth Elliot. The missionary women, along with Dayumae, Kimo, and other Waorani, demonstrate love for enemies by caring for the polio victims. They improvise wooden teeter-totters to rock the victims and help them breathe. Meanwhile, Steve’s nemesis, Mincayani, continues to resist the way of peace. He hunts game and throws it away rather than feed traditional foes. As the epidemic passes, old animosities dissolve and a peaceful kingdom dawns. “The teeter-totters had stopped and with them the cycle of revenge.” From this point, the film skips twenty-five years to Rachel Saint’s death in 1994, when Steve is challenged to pick up the mantle from his fallen aunt.
All this may make for good cinema, but it is deceptive history. The polio outbreak occurred at a time when Rachel Saint, a few of her colleagues, and a handful of Waorani believers were engaged in a controversial effort to find and relocate formerly hostile groups of Waorani scattered across their vast traditional territories. Saint and her colleagues pushed the relocation because they feared the Waorani would not survive hostile encounters with oil crews who were exploring their territory. They also believed that consolidating the groups would facilitate Christianization. The Waorani who responded to these efforts did so because they wanted spouses, trade goods, and peace (which also pretty much summed up their understanding of Christianity).
In September 1969, when polio first appeared, there were approximately 250 Waorani crowded in or near Tiwaeno, the clearing where Dayumae’s family first met Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint in 1958. (Elliot left the Waorani in 1961.) About 60 percent of them were from two waves of newcomers who had arrived within a little more than a year. Some had already faced contact illnesses such as severe respiratory infections in the new location and were weak due to food shortages. Sixteen people died of polio, all from among the newcomers. About the same number were left handicapped, some of them taken to outside hospitals or clinics for treatment. Two people were speared in revenge killings, and one of the perpetrators died mysteriously shortly after a spearing.
Rachel Saint has been criticized because she had dragged her feet on immunizing the recent arrivals. More important, after polio was diagnosed she ignored doctors’ advice to immediately immunize because she was afraid that adverse reactions would lead to violence. For three weeks, as the disease spread, Saint refused to allow a missionary doctor and a nurse to fly into the clearing because of the danger of spearing. They finally came anyway and were the ones who designed makeshift treatments like the teeter-totters. Saint worked to exhaustion caring for the sick. She also risked her life, even breaking spears, to enforce the Christian ethic of peace by confronting warriors bent on revenge killings after polio victims died. A few Waorani converts did care for their former enemies, reinforcing the association of Christianity and peace. Nonetheless, it was a difficult time. BaÏ, an influential warrior, left with members of one group. He called Tiwaeno “a place of death.”6
The crisis highlighted Rachel Saint’s unwillingness to let any other outsider live and work with “her” tribe, even while population influx overwhelmed her attempts to serve as sole resource—medic, missionary, linguist—among the people. In partial response to perceived shortcomings, during the next five years the sil would add four more staff members to the Waorani “team.” Two of them, Catherine Peeke and Rosi Jung, worked with informants to translate the New Testament into Wao tededo. Another, Pat Kelley, served as a literacy instructor and developed reading materials, while Jim Yost did an anthropological field study of the Waorani, the beginning of a series of important research projects. Yost and his wife, Kathie, who arrived with toddler Rachelle and had two more children during the eight years of their assignment, were the first nuclear family of outsiders to live among the Waorani.
Although these individuals almost never appear in any of the well-publicized stories, they invested significant portions of their adult lives helping the Waorani face the pressures of increasing contact with the outside world. They gave them tools—Scripture and literacy—for an indigenous Christianity. They helped negotiate Ecuadorian citizenship and land disputes and worked with missionary nurses to train native health care promoters. Meanwhile, tensions increased between sil in Ecuador and Rachel Saint, along with outside criticism of the organization. As reporter Amy Rogers noted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the film “glosses over great accomplishments and simmering controversies” when it fast-forwards through this period.7
In the climax of The End of the Spear, Mincayani takes the adult Steve to the beach where his father was killed. The Waorani warrior digs up a tin cup and a battered photo of Steve that Nate Saint carried in his plane (the photo having survived forty years in the rain forest).
“They didn’t shoot us,” Mincayani says, part of an intense exchange.
“Your father was a special man. I saw him jump the Great Boa [a Waorani spirit guarding the afterlife] while he was still alive.”
A flashback shows what has been alluded to earlier: angelic figures above the riverbank and light flooding the area as the men died. Radiance comes down and touches the dying Nate Saint. “I speared your father,” Mincayani confesses to Steve. Mincayani points a spear at his own chest and urges Steve to use it. In a moment of long pent-up rage, Steve wants to do just that. Yet Saint draws on the deeper power of forgiveness and faith. “No one took my father’s life. He gave it.” Mincayani and Steve are reconciled and find peace.
In 1989, 33 years after the killings, several Waorani converts who participated in the spearings began reporting that they had seen figures, or lights, and heard singing above the riverbank after the men were killed. Apart from this reference, which the film accepts without question, the rest of the final scene is fictionalized. The actual Steve Saint and Mincaye were never estranged. This is the stuff of Hollywood, and a perfect way to end a missionary drama for the folks back home. The deaths of the five missionaries in 1956 became an archetypal narrative of missionary sacrifice and heroism for evangelicals in the United States and around the world. As believers, we respond to an apparent sequel that is just as dramatic and unambiguous.
The reality is more complicated. The challenge of reconciliation for the Waorani was never with the missionaries or their family members; it involved finding a way to end the bloody vendettas among themselves and to coexist with former enemies. The End of the Spear vividly conveys the Waorani as agents of violence. The movie is less successful in portraying efforts by the Waorani themselves to make peace once the gospel was introduced.8 Nor is the theme of reconciliation extended to missionary relationships. Such deeply committed and determined women as Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint found it easier to forgive their loved ones’ killers and live among them than to get along with each other. The film also avoids the painful issue of children forgiving fathers who abandoned them in order to risk and ultimately lose their lives, even for the best of motives.
In the final voiceover, Steve Saint speaks movingly of the gain out of loss that has come to his family. Mincayani has lived to be a grandfather, and a grandfather not only to his own children’s children but also to Steve’s. The movie is silent on the complicated gains and losses—along with peace—experienced by the Waorani since some first embraced a form of Christianity almost fifty years ago. This includes the struggle to retain their cultural identity in the face of enormous pressures, while at the same time not remaining frozen in the past. It does not recognize the quiet efforts of others in addition to Rachel Saint—Peeke and Jung, for example—to help the Waorani survive in the modern world and to embrace a Christianity that means more than simply, “Thou shalt not kill.”9 They, too, have experienced gains and losses, seldom neatly balanced. For all their imperfections, they have tried to model Christianity in the midst of the beauty and the mud and the bugs and the dailiness of jungle living.
No one movie can do it all. And good cinema is often inaccurate history, though perhaps the bar should be higher when narratives explicitly concern God’s work in the world. The producers of The End of the Spear sought the authenticity associated with a true story without the difficulties that real history also brings. They gave the audience a stirring account, but not as much as we needed to know.
Kathryn Long is associate professor of history at Wheaton College. She is writing a book on the history of Waorani/missionary contact.
1. “Waorani” is a plural or collective noun; “Wao” refers to one person and is the adjectival form. To avoid awkwardness in English prose, I have chosen to use Waorani throughout as both noun and adjective.
2. Beyond the Gates of Splendor (Bearing Fruit Communications, 2002; Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005); available on dvd.
3. Steve Saint, The End of the Spear (Tyndale, 2005). Two fairly romanticized sources that include some of the Waorani history depicted in the film are Ethel Emily Wallis, The Dayuma Story (Harper & Brothers, 1960); and Wallis, Aucas Downriver: Dayuma’s Story Today (Harper & Row, 1973).
4. Although it was written in the late 1970s, the most credible summary of criticism published in English, including these two issues, remains chapter 9, “The Huaorani Go To Market,” in David Stoll, Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (Zed Press, 1982). Stoll was no friend of Wycliffe or the sil, but he did extensive research and refrained from the kind of spurious charges that have since been made. A Spanish source for extensive information on Waorani history, as well as criticisms against American Christians who have worked among the people, is Miguel Angel Cabodevilla, Los Huaorani en la Historia de los Pueblos del Oriente (cicame, 1999). The quality of some of the interviews and materials Cabodevilla has compiled is uneven, but his editorial voice generally is perceptive and balanced.
5. All English accounts are translations from versions of the story told by various Waorani eyewitnesses. Some early variations may have resulted from the fact that Rachel Saint was still learning the difficult Waorani language and misunderstood some elements of the accounts. Saint’s account appeared in an epilogue to the 1965 edition of Wallis, The Dayuma Story; see also an abridged version by Saint, “What Really Happened, Told for the First Time” in Decision, January 1966, p. 11. Anthropologist James Yost and writer John Man conducted extensive interviews in April 1987 with Geketa, the leader of the spearing party, including a visit to the site of the attack. According to a translated transcript, Geketa indicated that the bullet entered just above Nampa’s eye and lodged there. An edited version of Geketa’s story appeared in the sil film, produced in 1988, “Tell Them We Are Not Auca We Are Waorani,” where Geketa stated, “The man [missionary] shot Nampa.” Steve Saint reports a version where a Waorani woman grabbed the arm of a missionary with a gun. “Nampa was grazed by a gunshot and fell down hard.” He died a year later “while hunting.” See Saint, “Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Peter Fleming, Ecuador, 1956: A Cloud of Witnesses,” in Susan Bergman, ed., Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 151. The account in Saint’s book, The End of the Spear, is similar.
6. Wallis, Aucas Downriver, p. 100.
7. Amy Rogers, “Ecuadoran tribe transformed after killing of 5 missionaries,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 8, 2006. Among others, I was interviewed for this article. After a painful dispute, the sil asked Rachel Saint to leave the Waorani work in 1976. She did and later retired from the organization to return to Ecuador as a private citizen and live among the Waorani.
8. For Waorani agency and the missionary contribution, see James S. Boster, James Yost, and Catherine Peeke, “Rage, Revenge, and Religion: Honest Signaling of Aggression and Nonaggression in Waorani Coalitional Violence,” Ethos, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 471-494. Some isolated violence has continued.
9. These have included U.S. missionaries and Latin American nationals representing Mission Aviation Fellowship, the Plymouth Brethren, hcjb World Radio, and the Christian & Missionary Alliance.
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