Rachel Saint

Infobox Person
name = Rachel Saint


image_size = 200px
caption =
birth_date = birth date|1914|1|2|mf=y
birth_place = Wyncote, Pennsylvania
death_date = death date and age|1994|11|11|1914|1|2|mf=y
death_place = Quito, Ecuador
education =
occupation = Missionary
title =
parents = Lawrence Saint
Katherine Saint
relatives = Nate Saint (brother)
spouse =
children =
nationality = American
website =

Rachel Saint (January 2, 1914 – November 11, 1994) was an evangelical Christian missionary from the United States who worked in Ecuador.__NOTOC__

Rachel Saint was born in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. She attended the Philadelphia School of the Bible and then worked at the Keswick Colony of Mercy in New Jersey.

Rachel Saint was sent out by the Wycliffe Bible Translators, trained by Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International). Her first missionary assignment was to the Piro and Shapra in Peru, but she had an interest in the Huaorani. In February 1955 she and Catherine Peeke went to a missionary station near Huaorani territory, where Rachel Saint's brother was working. Rachel Saint started learning the Huaorani language with the help of Dayuma, a Huaorani woman who had left her people after a dispute and was sheltered by missionaries.

In January 1956, five missionaries in the area were killed by Waorani people, including her brother Nate Saint, who had come to Ecuador in 1948. As a result, Rachel Saint considered herself spiritually bonded to the tribe. In 1957 she embarked on a tour of the United States together with Dayuma, appearing with Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden and on Ralph Edwards' television show "This Is Your Life".

In the summer of 1958 Rachel Saint returned to the Waorani in Ecuador and, together with Elisabeth Elliot, the wife of James (Jim) Elliot, who had been killed by the Waorani, continued to evangelise. In February 1959 they were able to move into a Huaorani settlement. Where the five American men had failed to gain entrance into the Huaorani society, these 2 unarmed women (as well as Elliot's little daughter) were not perceived as a threat. Rachel continued in her labor to create a dictionary of the Waorani language that she had begun before the death of the five missionaries.

The government of Ecuador gave the Summer Institute of Linguistics a contract to create a reservation for the Waorani on an area of less than a tenth of their traditional territory.

While conversion to Christianity ended a fierce war between quickly shrinking clans (a war which was threatening to wipe them out all together), a few critics charge that the contact with the American missionaries had a profound and destructive impact on traditional Waorani culture. The teaching of evangelical Christianity has been criticised as changing Huaorani religious and cultural distinctives, along with the enforcement of new ideals such as monogamy, use of clothing provided by the mission. The missionaries encouraged the Huaorani to give up communal living and had them build houses for each married couple. Concentration of the population and the inevitable contact with Europeans led to a series of epidemics — the most devastating was a polio epidemic in 1969 — which killed many Waorani and left many more crippled.When criticism of Rachel Saint's actions at the missionary reservation emerged, in 1973, the SIL sent the anthropologist and missionary James Yost to investigate. Yost had worked for more than ten years among the Waorani. His report was highly critical of Saint's work and in 1976, SIL ordered her to retire. Rachel Saint decided to leave the SIL but to continue her work with the Waorani. Rachel Saint went back to the USA, raised funds and returned to Ecuador to work with the Waorani.

Rachel Saint died in Quito from cancer on November 11, 1994. She was buried in Toñampare, Ecuador where she had lived with the Waorani.

Film

* Trinkets and beads. Documentary, Ecuador/USA 1996, 52 minutes; Director: Chris Walker; Producer: Tony Avirgan. “Chris Walker and Tony Avirgan’s films tells the tragi-comic story of the unlikely links between Maxus - a Texas-based ‘evangelical’ oil company - the 79-year old Wycliffe Bible Translators missionary Rachel Saint, and the Huaorani people of the Ecuadorian Orient, the most fiercely isolated tribe in the Amazon. First introduced to the Indians by the missionaries, Maxus is guilty of poisoning Huaorani land and rivers with its drills and flares and leaking pipelines.” [http://www.tve.org/mp7/details.cfm?l=e&fid=1991]

References

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External links

* [http://cybersites.net/~random/yanomami/photoexh.htm Amazon Crude photo exhibition] (Judith Kimerling)
* [http://www.peoplesoftheworld.org/text?people=Huaorani The Huaorani] (Indigenous Peoples of the World)
* [http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2006/02/08/news/opinion/3seeit0208.txt As I see it] Missionary ‘help’ hurt native tribe ("Corvallis Gazette-Times", February 7, 2006)