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There is one scene of the little Indian boy singing a Christian song in a beautiful voice in front of the council of religious leaders. Before the camera comes into the scene, he sounds like an European alter boy, singing the holy hymn, only when he is finishing, is it clear that he is of a darker skin, and he is still wearing his native clothes. The reactions to this singing by the religious leaders present are not the pleasing and loving as to be expected from the loving Jesuit priests that had befriended the boy's village. The boy is compared to a parrot that can be taught to sing, mimicked, but ultimately animal. The scene reminded me of a poem I read in 8th grade, dealing with the role of the missionaries in the colonization of the non-western peoples and countries. Reading this poem, I could draw parallels to the colonization of the New World and the south pacific, and the role of missionaries and the church to befriend and westernize the "primitive" peoples such as the native Indians of the Americas as well as the native Hawaiians.
The innocence of the child is misinterpreted; the poem plays on the nervousness of the upright missionary, sweating in his constrictive European clothes and wig, clearly inappropriately dressed for the tropical climate. He tries to find a way to make this "savage" a Christian. He clothes him, teaches him to read the bible, to play the violin, to come out of the forest, to forget his identity. The role of the Church in colonization was ultimately a means of coercing obedience from the native people, either by forced assimilation and cultural genocide, or murder and slavery. The child has been misled, as the rest of his people were. We are all supposedly God's "children" as it by Christian belief, yet the entire village of God's newly found "children" is destroyed, God's church burned to the ground, his God's children massacred or enslaved by God's other, more righteous, more loved children. |