So says President Donald Trump's good friend, Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, who wants to move into uncharted regions of his own country to harvest the natural resources he and others claim are locked away. A rigid national policy bars development of any kind among indigenous people, thereby allowing those tribes to maintain a way of life he obviously believes to be unevolved, primitive.
Bolsonaro is confident Brazil would be better off if its isolated peoples would take a few steps into the 21st century, realize the significant economic possibilities their regions hold, and cash in on the dividends. To that end, not long ago Bolsonaro appointed an ex-missionary, Richard Lopez Dias, to run a government commission called The Coordination of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indians. Brazilians who oppose contact of any kind with its isolated, tribal peoples feel President Bolsonaro's appointment of Dias to that position indicates a clear shift in national policy--away from protection and toward development.
Thus, when the mission organization formerly known as New Tribes announced a new helicopter ministry in regions of the country unreachable in any other way, some--those who oppose interference in another culture--were horrified. On the other hand, those who comprise the nation's new and growing evangelical minority feel the sea change clearly to be God's will.
Vine De Loria, Jr., who wrote Custer Died for Your Sins, the first attempt at telling American history from a Native point of view, was brought up in a family of Christian believers. Both his father and his grandfather were leaders in the Episcopal Church. His father once said he believed that Native people knew the difference between right and wrong before the white man came; but when they did come, they brought with them the best good his people had ever seen (the Word) and the worst wrong (a force which destroyed their culture and them).
That's a line that has always struck me as instructive.
I know people who have given their whole lives to New Tribes mission work. Those people, high school classmates, were, long ago, good people; I have no reason to believe that they've ever been anything but. They are remarkably strong believers. Children in the community of my birth have been taught to look up to those New Tribes missionaries and support them as God's own servants bringing the gospel to the ends of the earth.
Their commission is eternal. They believe, I'm sure, what the Bible says: that someday the Lord will return when His word has been brought to every far corner of this world. New Tribes missionaries, I'm sure, have a passion for finding the lost and bringing them into the fold of Christ's own. They're empowered by a strong belief that God almighty has given his people no greater task than sharing the love of Christ.
I know stories of 19th century missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, that are perfectly wonderful. Great things have been done in the name of the Lord where whole nations had never heard. It's easy for a believer to see that kind of selfless, devoted mission endeavor as true Kingdom work (upper case K).
But Vina de Loria, Sr., wasn't wrong about the other side of the equation either. Ever since white people landed on this continent, immense horrors resulted, million of deaths by viruses for which the indigenous had no immunity. Whole nations were wiped out by cholera, smallpox. White men brought liquor. Ever increasing numbers of white people moved into woodlands and prairies where Native people neither wanted or needed them.
Some of them were carrying a Bible.
This country has a history. I live in Sioux County, Iowa--two of those three words we've adopted from people who are now long gone, pushed out.
Should Brazil allow New Tribes missionaries to bring the Good News to people who aren't asking for their attention or their help or their religious faith, not even looking for good neighbors? Is a ministry that strikes at the identity of an established community of people really what we think of as "the Great Commission?"
Those are question whose answers I. Don't. Know.
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