Opinions of a Wolf

Part history of the 20th century for the Sawi people of New Guinea, part personal memoir by the first missionary to live with them.

Summary:
In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among these headhunters and cannibals, who valued treachery through fattening victims with friendship before the slaughter. God gave Don and Carol the key to the Sawi hearts via a redemptive analogy from their own mythology. The “peace child” became the secret to unlocking a value system that had existed through generations. This analogy became a stepping-stone by which the gospel came into the Sawi culture and started both a spiritual and a social revolution from within. With an epilogue updating how the gospel has impacted the Sawi people, this missionary classic will inspire a new generation of readers who need to hear this remarkable story and the lessons it teaches us about communicating Christ in a meaningful way to those around us.

Review:
There’s a lot of controversy about modern mission work. Not to mention the known atrocities committed by missionaries in the US, Canada, and other places in historic times. I support Indigenous peoples and condemn the horrific means used by these supposed “missionaries.” (I personally do not consider these people to be true believers bringing the gospel but rather colonizers acting on behalf of a nation. For example, Jesus loved children and yet these people murdered them.) So I approached this book with quite a bit of trepidation. Yet slowly over the course of it, I came to see the picture of a very different type of mission work.

Unlike many missionary memoirs, the perspective of the first third of the book is actually that of a historical account of approximately one year in the life of the Sawi before the missionaries arrived. It immerses you into the world of New Guinea and also gives a neutral depiction of the cannibalism as it existed at that point in time. Because Sawi culture honored duplicitousness and treachery, the different villages were quite isolated and small. Betrayal with the end result being death and, yes, cannibalized, was a real consistent threat. There was a Sawi saying about honoring this treachery – “fatten with friendship for the slaughter.” Starting the book from the Sawi perspective sets the expectation that this book is really about the Sawi, not Don and his wife Carol.

Something Don makes clear early on is that other cultures were encroaching on the Sawi. They were not going to continue to be left untouched for long due to the political situation in New Guinea. Essentially, the people with the hands-off approach were departing. It was clear the ones incoming were going to go into the jungles themselves but also allow hunters, prospectors, etc… in. Don’s belief was that the first people the Sawi encountered shouldn’t be out to exploit them for anything but rather should be there to help them in as many ways as possible, not solely with the gospel but also to adjust to their world shifting more dramatically than it had in generations. Don and his wife brought medical care and information on how the outside world that was coming into contact with them would work. A story that particularly struck me was how Don and Carol taught Sawi how to be shopkeepers. You might, like me, think at first, oh no, he’s destroying their hunter/gather society with money. But when he explained his reasoning, I was humbled at how forward-thinking and selfless it was.

Educating Papuans without training some of them to be shopkeepers invites non-Papuans to come in and take control fo the supply and pricing of manufactured goods. As non-Papuans enrich themselves, they eventually gain ownership of land bequeathed to Papuans by their ancestors. Papuans thus tend to end up as exploitable cheap labor or, worse yet, as beggars foraging on garbage cast off by non-Papuans. Hoping to spare our Sawi friends such a fat, we trained some of them to be, yes, shopkeepers! Shopkeepers who charge prices lower than non-Papuans care to compete with! Shopkeepers who see no need to sell their land because their shops are doing quite well, thank you!

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Beyond helping the Sawi to prepare for meeting the world, Don’s perspective on mission work is essentially that the culture you are visiting already has inbuilt messaging from God about Jesus. You just have to find what it is to help them see it, since they haven’t heard the message before. In the case of the Sawi, that is the cultural tradition of the peace child. I won’t go into the details of how the peace child works in Sawi culture. I think that is most impactful by actually reading the book. What is interesting to me to note, however, is how his method of missions doesn’t supplant the culture or force another culture upon it. It rather takes an aspect of the culture that already exists and builds upon it. Now, all cultures have good and bad aspects. Essentially what Don does is he tries to help enhance what is good within the culture and tamp down what is only hurting the people. The Sawi inability to trust anyone because of treachery being so upheld as a positive trait is an easy to understand example of this. Once the Sawi understanding of a peace child was uplifted higher instead and became more achievable for anyone, then the Sawi were able to start trusting each other and uniting so that they might remain that way when facing the world. I frankly found myself wishing someone could come help my own culture in such a way to help us be better, more communal, versions of ourselves!

I was also surprised by how things turn out. Ultimately, the mission group withdraws from the Sawi villages, not in defeat, but because they feel the Sawi are ready to stand on their own within the extended world they now find themselves in. Updates on the Sawi indicate they are still doing well and have even sent their own missionaries to another Indigenous group, the Sumo, further inland. This article also talks about the fact that Don use the Indonesian characters to write down Sawi and translate the New Testament. This means that when the Sawi were newly required to go to government schools and learn Indonesian they could also automatically read Sawi, helping to preserve the language.

Overall, this is a very engaging and informative read about one Indigenous nation encountering the larger world in the 20th century. It also gave me a new appreciation for how mission work can be done ethically. While I understand that some may disagree and say there is no such thing as ethical mission work, I think how Don and his wife Carol helped the Sawi maintain control of their land and literacy in their own language is a strong counterpoint.

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4 out of 5 stars

Length: 256 pages – average but on the shorter side

Source: Library

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