Mission

Mission. Intaglio, Digital Print, Chine-Collé. 45cm x 45cm. 2022.

Mission is the eighth print in my artist's book. Much of the reading and the research I did revolved around missions and in particular the Anglican missionary Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb, who was the main collector of the Enxet artefacts at the British Museum. Missionaries appear on the frontiers of colonization. The Paraguayan government welcomed the presence of Barbrooke Grubb and gave him the title of 'Pacificator of the Indians' in 1892. Missionaries were generally seen as these benign figures that would befriend and 'pacificate' indigenous communities, to introduce European thought, religion and way of life to prepare the way for future settlers and the 'development' of the land, or rather to prepare the way for the dispossession of indigenous people. In order to teach (change), educate (manipulate) and bring about this new way of life (assimilate), it was considered necessary to settle communities on mission stations and teach them how to become labourers and earn a wage, in opposition to the nomadic, autonomous, independent life indigenous people had known before. After the arrival of the Mennonites, they also established a strong missionary presence among the Northern Enlhet, which controls most of Enlhet life to this day. Through the text excerpts below I want to share a glimpse of the different perceptions of missionary work and the motivations behind it. 

The background of the print is a map of Makthlawaya (Walter Regehr, 1979), the Anglican mission station founded by Barbrooke Grubb. To the left is an outline of the mission buildings; to the right, on the other side of a road, are two neat rows of cottages for the indigenous inhabitants surrounded by farmland. Superimposed on the map is the grid again, to signify an imposition of order. I picked up on the rows of houses and printed several models of cottages in two rows in my print. The indigenous figures are confined within one small square. The preaching missionary is lecturing in the bottom left corner. I printed the figures of a politician and a settler behind the missionary on the backside of the paper, since he is backed by their interests. There is a physical space between the missionary and the group that alludes to the distance between the missionary and the people. Again, the scale of the figures is suggestive of the power dynamics between them. The church is printed in red. (If you haven't picked up on it before, in every print there is an element of the colonization process printed in red). 

The text excerpts below, and in particular Maangvayaam'ay's analysis, brings to the point quite clearly that the main purpose of the settlement projects was the accessibility of a labour force. Hannes Kalisch further explains that "[w]ith their acceptance of the attempts at proselytism, the Enlhet imagined themselves to be part of the same social fabric as the colonists, sharing a project of coexistence... By being 'Christian like the Mennonites,' they assumed that the latter became their 'friends,' their allies, their relatives even. But Maangvayaam'ay' is aware that such apparent inclusion was based on a lie: the colonists argued that, once settled, it wouldn't be necessary for the Enlhet to work for them. In reality, however, they were settled in order to provide the Mennonites with a workforce. Their taming, therefore, had clear benefits for the Mennonites: the Enlhet ceased to be feared and, above all, they became manageable and controllable. They could be included as functional to the immigrants' system – not as equals, but subordinated to the latter's economic aspirations ... Mangvayaam'ay's analysis is clear: the Mennonites' taming of the Enlhet was motivated by their fear of them, by the discomfort, the disgust that they felt in their presence and by their need for their labor. Their procedure consisted in missionary teaching, in the feigned inclusion of the Enlhet, in the latter's sedentarization and in the attempt to destroy their practice of sharing." Kalisch continues, that "[t]he fact that they [the Enlhet] accepted the aggressions of the missionary without resistance, that is without defending themselves or withdrawing from the mission, because they were now Christians, a tame people, indicates that they had accepted that life there had its own rules, that it was a life in a world belonging to others. Equally, the acceptance of the missionary as the authority who directs the conversion process and shows the path of life evinces subjection to the society that sent him. The mission thus embodies a space of defeat." (Kalisch, Hannes. “They only knew the Public Roads – Enlhet territoriality during the colonization of their lands.” Reimagening the Gran Chaco: Identities, Politics, and the Environment in South America. Eds. Silvia Hirsch, Paola Canova, and Mercedes Biocca. University of Florida Press, 2021, 108-110.)