One of the Waodani, a man the missionaries called 'George,' would play a big role in their murders the next day.

The day before, after numerous flights over Waodani territory, pilot Nate Saint secretly flew the five men in a small plane to the remote sandbar, where they made what seemed to be friendly contact with the locals, whose language was mostly incomprehensible to them. Interestingly, Beyond the Gates clarifies for viewers who have only a hazy memory of the fatal encounter of January 8, 1956, why the Indians speared the missionaries to death. Their grisly deaths are conveyed mostly through suggestion and interview, but viewers will see some corpses from a distance in the old footage. Then the documentary, based on widow Elisabeth Elliot's classic account, Through Gates of Splendor, moves inexorably but tastefully to the slaughter of missionaries Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming. These uncomfortably familiar values to Americans, good when balanced by others such as mercy and by adequate social structures to adjudicate between competing claims, were a recipe for self-inflicted genocide among the Waodani, for whom blood feuds and sudden murder had been a way of life for at least five generations. In it, anthropologists Clayton and Carol Robarchek state that the Waodanis' main problem was not a scarcity of natural resources leading to vicious competition, but a dysfunctional culture that valued egalitarianism and autonomy to their logical conclusions. The documentary is noticeably short on evangelical clichés. An estimated six in every ten adult deaths were homicides. Beyond the Gates of Splendor, while not gory, relentlessly conveys through interviews with tribe members the pitiless culture of the Waodani, who would kill each other for what we might call the most insignificant slights. The film begins not with the missionaries, whose plight captured a shocked nation's attention through stunning coverage in Life magazine, but with the indigenous Waodani people, known derisively as the 'Auca,' which (loosely translated) means 'naked savages.' This small but feared group unwittingly did its best to live up (or down) to the stereotype.Īt the time, the tribespeople killed not only hapless outsiders who crossed their territory, but one another, with a ferocity worse than anything seen in the slums of Chicago or Los Angeles.

Steve Saint, son of one of the martyrs, narrates the documentary

Through gates of splendor book