Inner Shifts

Growing up I was taught that the word conversion referred to a one-time event in a person's life, a moment of personal commitment that resulted in total spiritual transformation. (Others who, like me, grew up in conservative Christian homes will certainly know what I am talking about.) However my own experience has been of not one but many transforming moments in life and this has led me to understand conversion in a different way. I have come to think of it as something that happens - and should happen - many times in our lives. In fact it must happen many times if we are to be truly alive and growing human beings.

I define conversion as a fundamental shift that takes place deep within us, at the very core of who we are, during moments of particularly deep insight in our lives. These are shifts that mean that from that moment forward something fundamental has changed in our understanding, commitments and/or priorities; in a significant (although perhaps subtle) sense we have become a new person. This may take place in a conversation, watching a movie, reading a book, in a time of personal crisis, in a moment of religious inspiration, during a walk in nature, in a near-death experience, in a moment of silent reflection or meditation, or in any number of other situations or settings. Some conversions result in dramatic change, leading one, for example, to take an entirely new direction in life. Others are hardly perceptible, except that over time one's life takes on a particular, recognizable direction and tone, the cumulative effect of those numerous moments of slight but nonetheless fundamental inner shifts that shape us.

I am interested in knowing if this narrative fits with your experience. Have you had experiences that created or led to a fundamental change in direction, value, priority for you? Can you see the cumulative impact of subtle shifts that have come to shape significantly who you are today? Your comments or personal sharings are welcomed.

In my next post I will write about an experience that was one of the more dramatic conversion moments in my life. It resulted in a fundamental change in my understanding of the world and led to the formation of values and priorities that continue to inform who I am at the deepest levels to this very day.

Xavante Playmates

Growing up, most of my playmates were the children of our Xavante (pronounced shah-vahn-tee) neighbors. In addition to very quickly learning their language (language learning comes easy when you're a kid), I also learned how to make a simple bow and soon was shooting my own homemade arrows. They taught me what fruit, nuts and bugs – yes bugs! - were edible, and I showed them how to ride a bike. We spent hours swimming together in the river and learning each other's games, and they taught me how to dance Xavante style and to sing the accompanying chants.

Xavante man dressed in festive regalia.

“Xavante” is actually a name given by outsiders. The Xavante's own name for themselves is a’uwẽ , “the people,” or a’uwẽ uptabi, “the real or authentic people.” The a’uwẽ were traditionally hunter-gatherers. A tall and handsome people, they lived in the savanna-type cerrado landscape of central Brazil raising seasonal gardens, and spending part of the year trekking, gathering fruits, nuts and berries, and hunting.¹

According to tribal oral history, the Xavante originally occupied a region near the eastern seaboard of Brazil. After the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century though, they were pushed westward, first to an area between the Araguaia and Tocantins Rivers in what is today the state of Tocantins and then later to an area west of the Araguaia. Legendary for their fierceness, "[f]rom the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century the Xavante defended an enormous stretch of territory in north-eastern Mato Grosso against Indian and non-Indian alike. Male warriors bludgeoned interlopers to death, strewing their naked corpses as testaments to Xavante supremacy, xenophobia and masculine prowess.”²

It was not until the late 1940s and early 1950s that Xavante groups began making peaceful contact and settling in more permanent villages at several religious and government outposts established for that very purpose. The community where our family lived was at an installation of the government's SPI (Indian Protection Service – later renamed FUNAI or National Indian Foundation), located along the Batovi River and called Posto Marechal Rondon. This particular group of Xavantes had established peaceful contact only three years prior to our family's arrival.

1  The classic ethnological study of the Xavante was David Maybury-Lewis' Akwẽ-Shavante Society 1967. Oxford: Clarendon Press

2   Garfield, Seth. Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988. 2001. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

An Unanswered Question

I would not trade where I grew up for anything. Two short months after I was born, my parents moved from their childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois to South America – Brazil, to be more precise – to work as missionaries. And so the first 15 years of my life would be lived in simple native villages.

Most of those years were spent in a Xavante¹ (pronounced shah-váhn-tee) community located in the cerrado ecosystem² that occupies large portions of the Brazilian Central Plateau. A savanna-type landscape with scrub trees and dense gallery forests along rivers and streams, it was in near pristine state when our family lived there. I learned from the native peoples about the edible fruits, leaves, roots, and barks (yes, that is correct - as in tree bark), and the water was pure enough to drink directly from the stream beds.

One treasured gift in this upbringing is that I became a part of and learned to navigate the boundaries between three different cultures simultaneously – Xavante, national Brazilian, and my own family's mid-west USA. And I felt equally at home and a part of all three. In my teen years though a fundamental question would be raised that would not find an answer until much later.

Two things led to this question for me – a question I don't ever remember voicing aloud, but simply pondered. First was a changing attitude I began to sense when meeting other guys my age, especially in urban settings. Pretty easily identified as an americano with my blond hair and blue eyes, I experienced that, because of that identity, I was no longer welcome. Verbally and on a few occasions through actual physical threats it was made clear that I was a persona non grata.

This was the mid-sixties and the heyday of the Peace Corps that had been established only a few years earlier by President John Kennedy. I thought – and what I heard from my parents and their colleagues at least – was that this was a wonderful initiative intended to help peoples and nations around the world. But that was not the message I heard from Brazilian teens and college students. They made it clear that they did not like the Peace Corps and that their wish was that the Peace Corps workers would all go back home to the U.S.

And so the question gradually emerged for me. It was clear that it was about the United States. Our nation, and by association we, were not welcome. Our help was not wanted. It would be only some fifteen years later that the answer to this puzzle would come.

1  There will be more on the Xavante People in later posts.

2  There will be more about the cerrado ecosystem in later posts as well.