In 1956, five Christian missionaries and their families travelled to Ecuador intending to convert a rain-forest people who had not had contact with the outside world.
The Waorani were known to defend their privacy but the missionaries persisted with their plan called Operation Auca and they were eventually killed by the Waorani.
But that’s not where the story ends. The missionaries left behind their wives and their children and a legacy that continues to resonate today in the evangelical community.
The novelist Joan Thomas comes from an evangelical family and as a child she knew the story of these missionaries. She has turned that story and the aftermath of Operation Auca into the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award winning novel called Five Wives (Harper Avenue).
She is in town this week to be feted by Gov-Gen. Julie Payette at a Rideau Hall event on Dec. 12. And she’ll give a reading from her book on Dec. 11 at the offices of the Canada Council on Elgin Street.
She told ARTSFILE that winning a GG “is pretty wonderful actually. I was nominated for The Opening Sky but winning is better. There is more attention drawn to the work.
“This prize has such caché in my mind. It has for decades from when people I knew from Winnipeg won, people like Miriam Toews and Sandra Birdsell.”
Thomas would have perhaps reviewed the books of winners in an earlier phase of her career when she did a lot of literary criticism.
“I pursued it. I wasn’t writing fiction at the time but once I started I lost my taste for writing criticism. I just don’t do it at all now. I did a degree in English and I loved literature and it was something fun to do. Still it got me into writing.”
And it certainly helped her fiction. When you review a book you do a lot of close reading. From that, she said she learned how to write with precision, for example.
“People think it is two different mind sets and wonder how you can turn the critic off. But really when you are writing fiction, it’s 90 per cent rewriting. You are drawing on your critical skills all the time when you are refining your own work.”
The novel Five Wives was sparked by Thomas’s concern about issues confronting the environment.
“I hadn’t really thought about this story in decades and then I read an article on the politics of oil in Ecuador. That drew the story of Operation Auca into my current sphere of interest in environmental issues. Then I wanted to connect the dots.
“When missionaries write about this incident they see it as a great victory because the Waorani people were eventually converted.
“I wanted to look at the secular impact” of this evangelism. She started thinking about it in 2012 and started reading.
“I took the story for granted as a young person but it was a really dramatic story with interesting personalities. I came to it for the politics, but I ended up staying for the characters and the personalities.”
Thomas comes from a religious household. And even though the story is about American missionaries, there was a lot of interest on the Canadian prairies. One of the key figures in the event was named Elisabeth Elliot, who attended what was known then as the Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta. Today it is known as the Prairie College.
“There is a chapel named in her honour there. A lot of our ministers tended to come from that school. We were more attuned to the story than a lot of Canadians might have been.
“It was a huge event in the world of evangelism and missionaries. Elisabeth Elliot was also a fine writer. I read two of her books as a young person.”
Thomas’s family belonged to the Evangelical Free Church. It has roots in Scandinavia. It’s a mainstream evangelical church, she says.
The novel reveals the ideas of evangelism to a relatively secular society.
“As I was writing I didn’t really appreciate how unusual this experience was. I think now from the response that it is unusual for someone to go as intimately into that mindset. Very often writers stand outside it and satirize it.
“I am hearing from people that it is a revelation. I am happy and gratified that people are interested.”
In the world of the evangelical movement everyone is a missionary. The idea is to spread the word of God.
“They feel that imperative to try to witness to the people around them.
“As a young person, she said, “I was always kind of in dread of being called to the foreign mission field as people called it then.” She was concerned that God would point the finger at her and “say “‘You are going to Africa’.” It was a possibility if you were growing up in that world.
“There is that sense that you don’t determine your own fate. God makes those kinds of decisions. If you didn’t grow up in that kind of world, it is hard to imagine how every single small decision is scrutinized in that way.
“In the book I wanted to say what underlies the statement ‘God made me do this’. Because I saw all kinds of other motives when I started reading about (Operation Auca).
“With the men especially, I saw this desire for adventure. One of them was actively involved in the war but there was also so much militarism around this story. They professed to be wanting to be near the Waorani people and to love them and yet talking in terms of the weapons they were preparing and the body armour. It was very weird.
“I was so aware of how we construct reality and shape a narrative from it. The missionaries came up with a whole different narrative than we would have drawn from that story. We are all very aware of that in the tribalism we are experiencing now. There certainly is a fear other people whose symbols and narratives are different from ours for sure.”
While her own position of concern about the environment and of a move away from the religious, she said, her stance in the novel is implicit.
“I didn’t see my role as the novelist was to be expressing judgment. I wanted to penetrate that bubble and try to put down as authentically as I could with the understanding of my own background what the thinking is and allow people to draw their own conclusions.”
She said however that she was always seeking to find counterpoints within the story. The missionaries weren’t self-critical so she said she tried to bring forward different points of view.
The wives may seem to be collateral damage in this story but, in fact, Thomas said, “I was interested in the extent to which people like the wives were complicit. They are not passive bystanders for sure.
“And, I didn’t realize this had drawn me to the story but it became a real driver as I was writing, I was interested in the kids and this thread of the indoctrination of children.”
In Canada, we know all about that kind of thing, just consider the residential school system.
“I thought a lot about whether I would describe the missionaries as well-meaning. which is often a phrase that is used as in they were mistaken but well-meaning. I’m not sure I would use that expression.
“I like something Wade Davis said that I used in the author’s note in book which is ‘Other cultures of the earth are not failed attempts of being you.’ There is an assumption in all missionary work that their way is better.
“I think they were kind people who in their own minds were well intentioned but I question the whole exercise. They were trying to convert people who had successfully lived in the rain forest for thousands of years and had a way of life that was far more congruent with their surroundings.”
The missionaries were also the tip of the colonization spear.
Today a lot of missionaries go to Ecuador to pay homage to the five men they consider martyrs. A museum/shrine has been made of the Nate Saint House. Thomas, too, went to the area twice in the course of her research.
She saw the ruins of Elisabeth and Jim Elliot’s house where she talked to a man who had worked for them as a gardener.
“He spoke of them with so much love. I asked him what he thought of these efforts to go and contact Waorani and he said they needed to know about Jesus.”
These days the Waorani have been converted and settled. The place has been opened up. Thomas said that the missionaries were acting in concert with oil exploration companies.
“This was an industrial change that was going to happen, not just because of the missionaries. There are roads there now and there is tons of sludge through the rain forest.
“In my research I found that the oil companies very specifically provided the missionaries with helicopters and small planes. And once the missionaries had converts they became the conduit to get the Waorani out of the forest and away from the drilling. This was to prevent attacks on the oil camps.”
She has turned to history a few times for her novels.
“I like the big ideas. I don’t read historical novels, but I do like to write about real things. It’s lovely to do the research. It speeds the imagination.”
She also said it’s harder to pull a novel out of thin air.
She stopped going to church long ago. “I don’t get it. It feels like it’s adding an unnecessary screen of complication to our seeing the world clearly.”
But she has been interested in how religious people have received the story.
“I was invited to a book club made up of 18 retired people who were affiliated with the church and they had all grown up with this story. They revered the missionaries and viewed them as martyrs and yet they were open to me.
“Maybe they are more progressive thinkers than some but they welcomed an interrogation of this story from a modern point of view. Much to my surprise. it was a very moving experience.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into until I arrived. But it was good for me to see that not all churches are what they were in 1960s when I was growing up.”
In town: Joan Thomas will join other winners of the GGBooks English prizes on Dec. 11 at noon for readings at the Canada Council for the Arts, Massey-Lévesque Board Room, 2nd floor, 150 Elgin Street. On Dec. 12, the French winners will read in the same room at the same time. These readings are free. In the evening, the winners will gather at Rideau Hall.
