“Unripe Ones – From Fear To Faith” Part 4

“When the missionaries first came to our place, we were terribly afraid of them and we ran away when they came near us.

“We had been told by our parents that white people were demons in disguise who would befriend us and then later on, cook us all in a great big pot and eat us. Our spiritual leader told us that it was all right for these particular white people to live with us because the dee-wah-tah spirits had told him so, but we remained very suspicious for some time.

“At first we did not understand the missionaries because they could not speak our language and when they tried to speak they seemed to babble like children. Eventually, they learned to speak properly and many of us began to like them being around because they helped us with our sicknesses and other problems.

“Others of us hated them because we blamed some of our sicknesses and deaths on the fact that the spirits were angry about us letting the missionaries live with us. “We did wonder, though, how their medicine could sometimes overcome the spirits, but we just thought that it must be because the spirits didn’t have power over white people. Somehow the spirits did not seem to be able to control the missionaries.

“We thought that the missionaries might give us lots of goods so that we could live long and gain favor with the gods. We were a bit angry sometimes when the missionaries would not give us all we wanted and we made up schemes that we could use to get as much out of them as possible. We would give them false information and try to make them feel obligated to give us things and do things for us out of pity. After all, they had so much more than we did.”

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