Nurturing the Other: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia

Nurturing the Other

NURTURING THE OTHER

First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia

Vanessa Grotti

First published in 2022 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2022 Vanessa Grotti

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Grotti, Vanessa Elisa, author.

Title: Nurturing the other : first contacts and the making of Christian bodies in Amazonia / Vanessa Grotti.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021052769 (print) | LCCN 2021052770 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800734586 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800734593 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous peoples--Suriname--Social conditions. | Indigenous peoples--French Guiana--Social conditions. | Indigenous peoples--Suriname--Religion. | Indigenous peoples--French Guiana--Religion. | Nomads--Sedentarization--Amazon River Region. | Christianity--Social aspects--Amazon River Region. | Missions, American--Amazon River Region--History. | Amazon River Region--Social conditions. | Amazon River Region--Religion.

Classification: LCC GN564.S87 S76 2022 (print) | LCC GN564.S87 (ebook) | DDC 305.8009883--dc23/eng/20211202

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052769

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052770

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-458-6 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-459-3 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Orthography of Trio and Wayana

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Making of Christian Bodies: Kinship and Pacification in Daily Village Life

Chapter 2. Drinking with the Enemy: Social and Bodily Transformations at Communal Feasts

Chapter 3. Nurture as Predation: Contact Expeditions to the ‘Wild People’

Chapter 4. The Wealth of the Body: Materiality, Corporeality and Nurture in Central Guiana

Conclusion

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

0.1 View of people gathered around a light MAF aircraft on the airstrip of Ararapadu

0.2 UFM missionaries Claude and Barbara Leavitt vaccinating children in Ararapadu

0.3 Trio shamans’ rattles donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum by anthropologist Peter Rivière following his doctoral fieldwork

0.4 UFM missionary Claude Leavitt demonstrating baptism in the river, Ararapadu, 1963

1.1 View of the interior of a Trio house in Ararapadu

1.2 Drawing by Demas depicting social communal life as it used to be in Antecume Pata

1.3 View of the houses built around the central space, or anna, in Ararapadu, a few years after the creation of the mission-station

2.1 Drawing by Demas depicting a moment of the Kalau

2.2 A parade of young hunters and their wives

2.3 A parade of young hunters and their wives outside the communal house

2.4 Young Trio men distribute manioc beer whilst joking and playing around with masks

2.5 Cooking a collective meal in the anna

2.6 Senior women distributing ‘childlike foods’ at communal celebrations

2.7 A senior female head of household feeding sugar cane into the mouth of the seated attendants

2.8 Diagram representing the movement of the distribution of manioc beer inside the communal house

3.1 Some of the objects brought back by Cognat from his 1968 trip to the Akuriyo camp

3.2 Pëmëi, an exceptional Akuriyo hunter, paraded around the main pole of the meeting house

4.1 Mimi Siku being recorded playing a trumpet

Tables

4.1 Comparison of the attributes of two pananakiri pawanaton

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nurturing the Other is a monograph based on a two-decade-long involvement with lowland South America, indigenous communities, research networks and institutions across two continents. I could not have realized any of the research presented in this book without the generous financial and logistical support of funding bodies and institutions, mostly based in the United Kingdom, but also in France and the Americas. My graduate studies in Cambridge, including my fieldwork, were funded by three fantastic scholarships awarded respectively by Trinity College, the Gates Cambridge Trust and the UK Economic and Social Research Council. I am grateful to Trinity College, and especially my college tutor Grae Worster, for their enthusiastic and generous support, including providing additional funding for academic activities during my student years. Supplemental funding to support audiovisual and material ethnography were kindly provided by the Smuts Memorial Fund and the Ling Roth Fund in 2004, thus enabling me to take audiovisual equipment in the field and to acquire a small collection for the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. From 2007 to 2015, I was able to improve my manuscript thanks to three consecutive postdoctoral fellowships, generously funded by the Ville de Paris, the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust. I am grateful to the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (LAS-EHESS) and to Philippe Descola for sponsoring my time in Paris, as well as to Jean-Pierre and Bonnie Chaumeil of the Centre Enseignement et Recherche en Ethnologie Amérindienne (EREA-LESC, Paris X Nanterre) for adopting me with such warmth. In Oxford, I thank the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Elisabeth Ewart for welcoming me from 2008 to 2012, before moving next door to join the wonderful community of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, led by Mark Harrison (and supported by the amazing Belinda Clark). I am indebted to Wolfson College for taking me in as Research Fellow from 2008 to 2015 and providing me with a supportive working and family environment. Finally, I am grateful to the John Fell OUP Fund for awarding me a small research grant that funded an additional period of field research in 2010–11.

I first discovered lowland South America as a graduate student in Oxford, when I took Peter Rivière’s regional option course in his last year before retirement, and it is thanks to his inspiring teachings that it became a lasting involvement. A few years later, a succession of circumstances led me to Suriname and to the Trio, who still remember him well as Pitu. Ever since then, Peter has been extremely supportive and generous at every stage of my career, especially with his material, such as unpublished data and many valuable photographs, some of which appear in this monograph, but also with his time, agreeing to meet to discuss the Trio on numerous occasions over the years. I am also very grateful to Chris Morton and Mark Dickerson and Philip Grover at the Pitt Rivers Museum for facilitating access to Peter’s photographic collection and publication of some items. In Cambridge, I was privileged to have the warmest and most knowledgeable mentor I could have ever hoped for in Stephen Hugh-Jones; I am grateful for his years of guidance, friendship and support – most importantly, he taught me the importance of thinking comparatively and through other regions beyond the scope of Amazonia. Aparecida Vilaça and Françoise Barbira-Freedman were instrumental in providing inspiring suggestions for improvements on earlier drafts; their moral and academic encouragement has been fundamental to my training and to the completion of the book. In Cambridge, I have fond memories of my fellow students and dear friends who studied at the Department of Social Anthropology and lived alongside me in Trinity College between 2002 and 2007. Special mention for the Newton Road crowd: Frédérique Aït-Touati, Marta Zlatic, Milka Sarris, Marinos Kallikourdis, Michaela Fakiola and James Ogle – I am grateful for all your friendship and warmth!

The most wonderful privilege of being an Amazonian anthropologist is to have an excuse to spend so much time socializing with warm and friendly colleagues, often in beautiful places such as Rio de Janeiro or Paris. Various parts of this book were presented at seminars and conferences in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Brazil in particular, and I would like to thank Olivier Allard, Luana Almeida, Giovanna Bacchiddu, Paride Bollettin, Oiara Bonilla (my new favourite neighbour in Ravenna!), Sergio Botta, Artionka Capiberibe, Eithne Carlin, Erica Charter, Bonnie and Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, Gérard Collomb, Luiz Costa, Damien Davy, Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino, Philippe Descola, Damien Davy, Francis Dupuy, Philippe Erikson, Elizabeth Ewart, Carlos Fausto, Dominique Gallois, Johanna Gonçalvez-Martín, Pierre and Françoise Grenand, Charlotte Grinberg, Denise Grupioni, Mette High, Casey High, Elisabeth Hsu, David Jabin, Ann Kelly, Peter Wynn Kirby, Florent Kohler, Vanessa Lea, Jimmy Mans, Laura and George Mentore, Joana Miller, Minna Opas, Maja Petrović-Šteger, Laura Rival, Joel Robbins, Elise Smith, Jamie Shenton, Renato Sztutman, Katie Swancutt, Anne-Christine Taylor, Olga Ulturgasheva, Lúcia Hussak van Velthem, Aparecida Vilaça, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Piers Vitebsky and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for supporting my work and for contributing to the improvement of the ideas presented here. I am truly grateful for the kind hospitality and friendship extended to me and my family during my brief visits to the Museu Nacional (PPGAS-UFRJ) in Rio de Janeiro and the Department of Anthropology of the University of São Paulo (PPGAS-USP). I realize that present times for Brazilian anthropology are darker, and darker still for Brazil’s indigenous communities and organizations, which currently face unprecedented threats to their personal, social, environmental and territorial integrity. I can only express my admiration for their determination, resilience and strength in the many battles they face.

In Suriname, French Guiana and Guyana, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, I would like to thank various individuals who have endorsed my research and given me support during my numerous fieldwork visits: Philippe Aquila, Ronnie Antonius, José Artist, Françoise Barten, Géraldine Béba, Laurence Bosquillon, Gabriel Carles, Jean-Aubéric Charles, Hillary de Bruin, Valérie Folie, Arletty Georges, Gillian Hewitt, Suraiya Ismail, Irma Jaglall, Anne Jolivet (who is also member of the Ethical Advisory Board of my ERC-funded project ‘EU Border Care’), Cees and Ineke Koelewijn, Guillaume Kouyouri, Roy Lytle, Mathieu Nacher, Jean-Yves Parris, Rémy Pignoux, Mark Plotkin, Terence Roopnaraine, Marie-Anne Sanquer, Carline Schlüter, Isabelle Stroebel, Alexis Tiouka and his family, Diane Vernon, Brigitte Wyngaarde and Beverly Yoshida-de Vries. Special mentions for their unique kindness, generosity and friendship go to Gilbert Luitjes and to the wonderful Otto Dunker (best and kindest pilot in the Americas!). Otto, his wife Rosie and their son Otto Jr. hosted and fed me in Paramaribo and sent regular email updates to my parents when I was in the field, reassuring them that I was still alive and well, saving them from many worries as to my whereabouts in the jungle. Several governmental and nongovernmental institutions helped in various ways with my research, and I am particularly grateful to Amazon Conservation Team (and its cofounder and President Mark Plotkin for our meetings and conversations over the years), the Agence Régionale de Santé de Guyane, the Centre Hospitalier Andrée Rosemon (Cayenne), the Centre Hospitalier de l’Ouest Guyanais – Frank Joly (St Laurent du Maroni), Conservation International, the Medical Mission Suriname, the PMI in St Laurent du Maroni, the Préfecture de la Guyane, the Stichting Bovenlandse Indianen Suriname, the Suriname Department of Culture Studies and the Vereniging van Inheemse Dorpshoofden in Suriname.

Most importantly, I wish to thank all the Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo friends who have generously welcomed me into their homes and their daily lives in Tëpu, Antecume Pata, Paramaribo and Cayenne: weikho Demas, papak Kulitaikë, mankho Pakëli, Imanau, Pëlinalu and Jason, Kïsi, Tumali, Nauku, Kosani, Kamenio, Rosina, Marcel, Tiwimo, Manase, Rosi, Mati, Tupi, Tiki, Ercilio and Sintia. I feel privileged to have got to know them, to have been patiently nurtured and grown by them during the time I spent as their awkward, gluttonous and clumsy guest. My gratitude also goes to all my neighbours and friends: Pilou, Sara, Aina, Jan, Josipa, Kuritune and Wekïimai, Tupiro, Nupi, Tapiro, Supipi, Aili, Rïime, Ësoro, Pesoro, Sarake, Itapë, Deny, Thomas, Peti, Nowa and Api, Tompouce and his father-in-law, Mimi Siku and Tapinkili, and finally Aiku. I am grateful to Tëpu’s captains Pikumi and Mosesi and their families for their welcome and kind support, and Antecume Pata’s village leader Antecume for his support and for sharing his wonderful reminiscences of the contact expeditions to the Akuriyo in 1968. Spending time among my Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo hosts and relatives has transformed my life; needless to say, Nurturing the Other owes everything to their hospitality, knowledge, generosity, selflessness, patience and wisdom, but all errors, omissions and misinterpretations are my sole responsibility. Further thanks are due to my editor at Berghahn, Tom Bonnington, and the reviewers, including Carlos Fausto, for their invaluable help in improving the manuscript.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my adoptive Trio-Wayana family of Tëpu and Antecume Pata, my Amazonia mentors Stephen Hugh-Jones and Peter Rivière, and above all my own family: Marc Brightman and our sons Ettore and Dario.

A NOTE ON THE ORTHOGRAPHY OF TRIO AND WAYANA

Two Carib languages are referred to in this text. They are spelt following the orthography introduced by missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics from the 1950s onwards. These are the spelling conventions taught in primary schools both in Suriname and French Guiana. As Chapuis (2003) pointed out with regard to the case of Wayana, they are likely to change as the Wayana and the Trio begin to develop them according to their own preferences, as another Carib group, the Kali’na, are currently doing. The present system is nevertheless widely in use today. The spelling of the two languages differs slightly when dealing with very similar sounds – for example, the palatal glide phoneme /j/ is j in Trio and y in Wayana. Other differences relate to the pronunciation of the language itself: the flap /r/ is represented by the graphemes r in Trio and l in Wayana (Carlin 2004).

Ï is a high central vowel pronounced with the tongue high in the mouth and with spread lips. Ë is a mid-central vowel and is pronounced like a in about, but with spread rather than rounded lips (Carlin 2002). Certain proper names have developed their own conventional spellings, such as ‘Akuriyo’, which have become standardized independently of Trio or Wayana orthography.

Except for proper names, when a non-English word is used in the text in order to document or illustrate, it is italicized, and when otherwise unclear, it is preceded by the abbreviation indicating the language.

ABBREVIATIONS

Several abbreviations are used for the sake of concision throughout the text, most specifically in the descriptive passages. As to the use of the native languages, unless otherwise clear, each word will be preceded by the letter of the language from which the word is taken.

DTL: Door to Life Gospel Mission

MAF: Missionary Aviation Fellowship

SD: Surinamese Dutch

SR: Sranan Tongo, Creole language in use in Suriname and on the Maroni River

T: Trio

UFM: Unevangelized Fields Mission

W: Wayana

WIM: West Indies Mission

INTRODUCTION

And only that which is temporary is perfect.

—Gianrico Carofiglio, Le perfezioni provvisorie

Between 2008 and 2011, on the southern side of the headwater region that separates Suriname from the Brazilian State of Pará, a group of Trio men established a series of contacts with members of a Zo’é settlement who appeared to have lived in relative isolation until then. Witnesses describe how the remote villagers’ bodies were naked, apart from ornaments such as the lip plugs and feathered headdresses characteristic of this Tupi-speaking population; their communal houses had thatched roofs made of woven palm, the ground was scattered with clay pots and the men held on to their bows and arrows. Although the Trio quickly realized that those whom they had just contacted had gardens and were thus seminomadic forest people, the Zo’é appeared to inhabit a space free from manufactured items: no metal pots or shotguns, no t-shirts or flip-flops. The strangers they had sought out and found were truly ‘wild’.¹ As an Amerindian people, the Zo’é acquired a certain level of fame when in the early 1990s they were then revealed to the world’s media as one of Brazil’s last ‘isolated tribes’; today they number about 280 people (Fajardo Grupioni 2015: 11).² Their main territory, officially registered as an indigenous territory in 2009 (Terra Indígena Zo’é Cuminapanema/Urucuriana), is located between the Cuminapanema and Erepecuru Rivers in the municipality of Oriximiná, approximately 200 km south of Marapi, the nearest Trio settlement in northern Brazil. A first delegation of missionaries from the New Tribes Mission had established initial contact and a base camp in the Cuminapanema region in the 1980s, before being evicted by the Brazilian authorities in 1991 (Funai 2011; Gallois 1997).

The settlements first visited by the Trio expedition members in 2008 could well have been situated further north along the Erepecuru River, in a part of northern Pará that remains particularly remote. The initial exchanges between the Trio travellers and the Zo’é villagers appear to have been relatively peaceful if somewhat guarded; crucially, they involved exchanges of goods. The Zo’é’s curiosity for the goods such as shotguns and Western clothing that the Trio had with them was so intense that on a subsequent visit in 2010, a young man decided to follow them back to their village all the way across the watershed into Suriname.³ Reportedly against the wishes of his relatives who feared that the Trio would kill him and eat him once they had returned to their village on the other side of the border, the young man accompanied the Trio to Kwamalasamutu, the largest Trio village in Suriname, and remained there for well over the three months his kin had agreed to see him go for. The only records of the young Zo’é’s extraordinary odyssey are Trio and Zo’é first-hand accounts and video clips Kwamalasamutu residents took of him with their mobile phones. Further stories circulated at the time on the airwaves of the radio communication network that connects the Trio and Wayana villages across the region, telling of other recent successful contacts established by separate expedition parties ever deeper in the remote headwater regions of northern Pará and Amapá states in Brazil.

This early wave of contact expeditions, which caused little stir in the Brazilian and Surinamese media, but gradually spurred a collaborative state-funded initiative to restrict access to recently contacted people living in indigenous protected areas in Brazil,⁴ was characterized by a common method of peaceful exchange of goods. The Trio expedition members carried objects such as metal tools and fishing line that they used on their journeys along rivers and through mainland forests and as barter items; they also transported highly socialized processed foods produced by their female relatives such as manioc bread (wïi in Trio). Occasionally, they also carried a Trio Bible (kan panpira, lit. God’s book/paper), printed in South Korea and distributed in Suriname by a network of retired North American field pastors who occasionally travel to the South American nation and its hinterland.

Nurturing Wildness: Trio and Other People in Central Guiana

As we got close to the village, the two children [who had guided us there] started to hit a tree, and moments later all the villagers came out of the forest into the clearing. I could see straight away that they were all tense … ‘We won’t do anything to you, we have come here to help you’ [I said] … We saw that they cooked from old fashioned clay pots. They ate on the ground … there was a sick man for whom we prayed … This was a small village where we stayed for two days. Then they brought us to a larger settlement of approximately 300 people … this was further into the forest. The leader is still young but is a fierce man … This group is wild but I think that they have already been in contact with white people … When the level of the river is good again, we will return, we are going to seek more help for them. (Trio expedition leader as quoted by Chang (2009))

A short article published in Suriname’s main newspaper De Ware Tijd at the onset of a wave of Trio contact expeditions in the second decade of the twenty-first century recounts the first encounter between the Trio and the Zo’é. The text mostly consists of an extensive quotation from the Trio expedition leader describing his impressions of the meeting with ‘wild Indians’, which was collected in Dutch by the travel journalist in Kwamalasamutu in 2009. Printed alongside the feature are two colour photographs taken by the Trio in which one sees the contact expedition members gazing awkwardly at the photographer, while surrounded by a crowd of confident-looking Zo’é. The description of the Zo’é, referred to as Chuernas by the narrator, bears some striking similarities to generic descriptions of ‘wild people’ (wajarikure) that I often heard during the time I spent among the Trio in southern Suriname. Wajarikure are wild and fierce people; fierceness is a bodily attribute that implies the absence of social bonds forged through alliance and trade, a powerful transformative capacity that is predatory and warlike, a way of being and living associated with a nomadic and sheltered life in the forest and the spirit-world. Wild people are potentially dangerous and would traditionally have been avoided by the Trio; yet, as the passage quoted above reveals, they now deliberately search for them with the purpose of bringing them ‘help’ and prayers. In short, the Trio spontaneously go out of their way into unfamiliar territory to seek out remote potential enemies who could well retaliate with less peaceful means, and the Trio contact them because they want to care for them and to nurture them.

The wave of contact expeditions initiated in 2008 is not the first of its kind; rather, it represents a new surge in a long series of expeditions that previously led to the sedentarization⁵ of several groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers into Trio villages in the late 1960s. Both waves have in common that they mostly involve Amerindian participants (usually young men in the prime of their lives), that they are partly designed and initiated by Amerindians, but also that they are coordinated and whenever possible logistically supported by a network of North American evangelical Protestant missions active in Suriname since the 1950s. Yet, especially in the past decade, the Trio involved are not mere pawns controlled by external agents; they are active and enthusiastic participants in these endeavours. The reasons for these contacts lie in processes of conversion to Christianity and processual relations with non-Amerindian actors, as much as in Amerindian relational ontology, which impinges on notions of personhood, historicity, kinship and social transformation. First contacts enable the Trio to seek out and incorporate through nurturing processes forms of alterity that are necessary for their social reproduction. This historic transformative process in which central Guianan populations are currently entangled forms the subject of this book.

Nurturing the Other is a study of ‘strange encounters’ in northern Amazonia (Vilaça 2010); it deals with first contacts and sedentarization processes of hitherto seminomadic Amerindians partly or wholly initiated by nonindigenous peoples. My argument is based on a comparative field study in Amerindian villages in Suriname and French Guiana connected by kinship networks across the border between these countries as well as those of Brazil and Guyana. The process of sedentarization, which began in the 1950s through various uncoordinated governmental and nongovernmental initiatives in the different countries involved, resulted in the formation of a small number of large villages that have broadly replaced the previous configuration of numerous small and dispersed settlements. Taking these historical events as the backdrop to an ethnography of population concentration, social transformation and Christianity in native Amazonia, I aim to analyse the Trio’s relation to other people and to themselves by focusing on native ideas about human and social corporeality. By ‘other people’, I mean a wide array of nonrelated persons who do not fall under the category of kin (-imoitï) and with whom the Trio seek relationships. These can be other Trio and, by extension, other Amerindians, who despite their social and physical distance are referred to as human persons (wïtoto).⁶ These nonrelated Amerindians are the first referential classificatory affines, those with whom one may develop processual bonds of kin-making through marriage and coresidence. Although in the past classificatory affines may have been the preferential affines, with the formation of mission stations in the early 1960s and the subsequent aggregation of previously dispersed extended cognatic groups in their vicinity, there are many more unrelated affines with whom the Trio now interact on a daily basis. The term ‘other people’ also refers to the Maroons (mekoro), descendants of self-liberated African slaves, who live downstream from the Trio in the interior of Suriname and French Guiana, and with whom they have been engaging in trading partnerships since the eighteenth century. The Maroons the Trio have historically developed trading bonds with are the Ndjuka; their territory lies along the Tapanahoni and Maroni Rivers. Finally, the Trio also distinguish urban, coastal Creole dwellers or distant foreigners (pananakiri), and Brazilian nonindigenous nationals (karaiwa). The use of the term karaiwa appears to be restricted to a rather small population of ‘colonizers’ who have put pressure on the Trio and their neighbours as far as triggering mass migration to flee persecution from skin hunters in precontact times or gold miners who have aggregated in the headwater region of the Maroni River at the border between Suriname and French Guiana since the start of the gold rush in the 1990s.⁷ Pananakiri (originally meaning ‘man from the sea’),⁸ which was originally used to refer to white-skinned colonizers (plantation owners, missionaries, etc.), is increasingly expanding to include a wide range of nationalities or national ethnic groups such as American, Dutch or East-Indian and so forth (Amerekan, Oransi, Industani). Occasionally white-skinned people will be referred to as tïkorojan, but they will mostly fall under the generic category of pananakiri.⁹

More fundamentally, the Trio ascribe two key states or qualities in relation to affinity that can be scaled accordingly to characterize a group or a person: fierceness (ëire) and peacefulness (sasame). These states are not used to define relations between kin and within a residential unit; they belong to the world of alterity. They are used to refer to Amerindian people, but can be found in other people too, such as mekoro or pananakiri. ‘Fierce, wild people’ are usually warlike, powerful but isolated. Almost by definition they are classified as enemies (ëirato).¹⁰ ‘Happy, peaceful people’ are their logical counterpart: they are not warlike and are less physically strong, but enjoy extended networks of sociality with Amerindians and non-Amerindians alike. This fundamental dualism is in constant flux within Trio personhood and in the Trio sense of historical transformation; it is typical of an Amerindian ontological identity in perpetual fluctuation between two incompatible halves (Lévi-Strauss 1991: 311). This oscillation between fierceness and peacefulness is a key element in the analysis of Trio involvement with Protestant missionaries, the missionaries’ engagement with Central Carib cosmologies and the dialogue