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Lesson in forgiveness: Man taught to live in jungle by Indian who murdered his missionary father

 

Steve Saint is shown with Mincaye, a member of a tribe of Indians known as the Waodani. Mincaye was with a group who killed Saint's father, a missionary who was serving in the jungles of Ecuador. Mincaye later taught Saint how to live in the jungle. Contributed photo.

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Steve Saint’s early education included some unlikely lessons, like how to make poison to put on the tips of his blowgun darts and how to use those darts to hunt tree-dwelling animals in the rugged jungles of Ecuador.

The man who taught him these skills and more was an unlikely father figure. Mincaye was a member of a savage tribe of Indians known as the Waodani, and one of six warriors who brutally killed Steve Saint’s father, Nate Saint, along with four of his missionary friends.

The story of the Saint family and their contact with Mincaye and the Waodani Indians was released in 2005 as a feature film titled “End of the Spear.”

Steve Saint will speak on Oct. 18 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 2343 Knob Creek Road, from 10 a.m. to noon. His visit is sponsored by Mission Safety International, a nonprofit Christian mission organization dedicated to promoting safety in missionary aviation.

Nate Saint and his friends were the first people to make peaceful contact with the Waodani Indians in the 1950s. At that time, the Waodani were regarded as the most violent people on the planet, with a homicide rate estimated at 60 percent. The missionaries’ initial interactions with the Waodani were positive; the groups exchanged gifts, and the missionaries even offered the Indians rides in their bush plane.

But on the afternoon of Jan. 8, 1956, the new relationship turned deadly when a group of Indians emerged from the jungle and attacked the missionaries with spears and machetes, killing all five and destroying their airplane.

Steve Saint was 5 years old when his father was killed.

“My mother told me,” he recalls. “I had been waiting for him to return for days. People were collecting at the house — more people than were usually there — and my mother took me in and told me that my dad, who was my hero, was never coming back. It was devastating.”

It was then that Saint learned some of his first lessons about forgiveness.

“I took my cues from my mother and my aunt and the other widows,” he said. “It was a terribly sad time, but I don’t recall any animosity ever expressed or implied on their part. Every night, we had family devotions and my mother prayed for these people. My aunt was confident that God was going to open up a way for her to go and do what they had failed to do.”

A few years later, Saint’s aunt and another of the missionary widows went to live with the Waodani in the jungle, and Saint later joined them, although he was still a child. It was then that his unusual relationship began with Mincaye, his father’s killer.

“One day, Mincaye came to my aunt’s little hut and objected strenuously to my total ignorance of how to live in the jungle,” he said. “I couldn’t hunt with a blowgun, I couldn’t make blowgun darts, I didn’t know how to make poison to put on the darts, I didn’t know how to track animals, I didn’t know where the fish were, I didn’t know how to make a garden.

“So he specifically asked my aunt, ‘Who is going to teach your boy to live?’ And my aunt’s response was, ‘You, having spear-killed his father, who do you say should teach him to live?’”

After thinking about this for a while, Mincaye returned to Saint’s aunt and said, “ ‘It’s true, having spear-killed his father, I myself will teach him to live.’ ”

When Saint tells the story of his friendship with Mincaye, people are often amazed he was able to forgive Mincaye for the horrible thing he had done. But Saint believes it was actually Mincaye who had to overlook more in their relationship.

“In the Waodani culture, for Mincaye to tolerate me was really taking a big risk for them,” he explained. “It would have been my right and my responsibility to avenge my dad’s killing. That was the right thing to do. But they didn’t attempt to kill me (to prevent that) — quite the opposite. They, and especially Mincaye, taught me the very skills that I would need in order to be able to avenge my dad’s death by killing them.”

Today, Saint is the teacher, giving back to the people who shaped much of his early life. He runs the Indigenous People’s Technology and Education Center — an organization that seeks to free people like the Waodani from dependence on outsiders for things like transportation, medical care and electricity.

“They gave me an assignment to help them figure out how to do these things that foreigners would do for them but the foreigners didn’t teach them to do,” Saint said. “Just because indigenous people are low tech doesn’t mean that they’re low IQ. They can learn how to do these things; they just need the right training and the right tools to do it.”

Thanks to Saint’s help, the Waodani and other indigenous peoples are now able to perform simple medical procedures, including basic dentistry.

They even have the ability to fly from village to village in a tiny fan-powered parachute car that Saint’s team designed for jungle use.

“We’re going around the world trying to teach frontier people to do things for their own people so that they don’t have to be dependent on others, including taking care of their physical and spiritual needs,” Saint said.

Saturday’s presentation at Westminster Presbyterian is free and open to the public. For more information about the event, call 283-4643. For more information about Steve Saint and I-Tec, visit www.itecusa.org.

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