The early missionaries played pivotal roles in changing the Solomon Islands and more specifically my village of Kekehe. They were aiming to bring Christianity into the South Pacific and were successful in accomplishing that. These all fall into the topic that I have done for my HYF01 assessment which is the positive impacts that missionaries had on my home village in the western province of the Solomon Islands, Kekehe. This essay will be focusing on module 3 and will mainly be discussing the constructive changes that the missionaries brought. I will also be answering some compelling questions. Who were the missionaries? Why did they come here? How did they change a village of warriors to good Christian people? Did they bring any negative impacts? …show more content…
They introduced new technology that helped to develop my village and the entire country as a whole (Storch Tanya 2006). When the missionaries came they brought with them the knowledge of the outside world that was used to better the lives of my ancestors in Kekehe. With their arrival came the preaching of the gospel to what they thought were cannibalistic savages . It allowed them to forget there violent pasts and go into a new age of Christianity. The Solomon Islands were then introduced to new forms of medicine that helped to heal thousands of people (Moore Clive 2013). These medicines were brought by the missionaries to cure the hundreds of sick people distributed throughout the nation. They even trained locals to become deacons and priest who allowed them to carry out the work that the white missionaries did but with more knowledge about the land and its people (ibid). Another one of the things that they did to bring positive changes to Kekehe was to take young boys (and a few girls) to go to mission schools; where they were taught evangelism, education and industrial skills so that they could go back to their home villages to build up their own mission schools and teach what they were taught
Evangelical missionaries came to change the ways of the indigenous people by showing them the western culture. Schools were built for children to learn about the outer civilizations, but not of their lifestyles. Joe Kane emphasize this with attitude of the people with the missionaries. Rachel Saint is one of the many missionaries that deterred the natives from their culture and have them commit ethnocide which means “killing the culture” (Kane, 7). Rachel Saint place the ministry of education, companies, and religious groups tried to make the Huaorani learn the western ways like the ABCs, mathematics, and geography. This is one of the hardships of the Huaorani because they are losing their culture and are struggling with the adaptation of the western ways. Rachel Saint believed that they are corrupted and need to be helped, “It seemed painfully obvious that [Rachel] by any measure- emotional, physical, material-her remaking of the culture in her own image had been a net loss for the Huaorani (Kane, 88). She is changing the culture of the Huaorani in her way because of her personal experience and it is difficult for the Huaorani to sustain their culture when outsiders are killing it. The hardest part of assimilating into the western world is have their culture dead. It is very sad to see because the years in preservation and living in harmony within the community and the Amazon. Destroying the culture is inhumane and it is shown in the 1990’s. Adapting into a different world is difficult and other worldly. Think of Moi as he walks in the streets of the city, not grasping the concept of society. The change is hard to adapt; the environment is hard to adapt. The city is different from the Amazon. There are so much the westerners can learn from them. They know the ways of the jungle and destroying their culture is like destroying the live history passed from their
Amin, Julius A.“Secular Missionaries: Americans and African Development in the 1960’s”. American Historical Review.Apr2012, Vol.17 issue 2, p559-560.2p.Book review.Web.30 April 2014.
( ) we see a couple of things. We see that the missionaries are winning people over with this religion of acceptance. This is winning over regular Ibo people but especially the outcast, the men who live on the outskirts of town were told they could could be part of their church. They were even told “cut your hair” witch was a big No go for the Ibo people but with this new acceptance movement form Christianity they were eventually accepted. Nwoye will eventually stray from the path of the clan and go forth into the light of god and be accepted
The Americans settled all over the United States and in the 1820s began showing interest in the West because of trade with Asia. Certain leaders were sent out on missions' to "help" better the lives of the Indians and Mexicans. When the white settlers first came to West they viewed the Indians and Mexicans as savages. They did not think of them as human because their lifestyle was unsuitable, or rather different then their own. The only way that they could tolerate them was to try and change their way of living. They attempted to convert them into the Christian religion, to change the way they ate, what they ate, how they ate it, the way they dressed, teach them English, etc. "The object of the missions is to convert as many of the wild Indians as possible, and to train them up within the walls of the establishment in the exercise of a good life, and of some trade, so that they may be able to provide for themselves and become useful members of civilized society."1
The European colonization of the Americas granted new opportunities to second born males who would have been soldiers or serving under the church or any who were less fortunate. It gave people a new start away from the monarchy and corruption that was prevalent through Europe. The French, English, Dutch and Spanish primarily colonized the "New World" for commercial and trading gains. None of these European nations conformed its entire enterprise to a religious endeavor or even came close to doing so. This brought astounding changes to both the "Old" and "New World" changing the course of history in ways we take for granted.
& nbsp; On arrival, the missionaries barely understood the tribe. They have very little knowledge of the cultural beliefs or rituals that the tribe reveres. It seems inappropriate that they are willing to declare that the villagers' beliefs are false. " He told them that they worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone. " They don't even acknowledge that this too is a successful community, which works well under its method of religious law.
Large-scale education and social consciousness may not be enough, though; even when the government becomes involved and offers a scholarship for Babamukuru and Maiguru to pursue higher education in South Africa, the missionaries feel a sense of entitlement to the natives’ bodies and minds and later coerce this same pair to continue their education in England. This lends itself to a description of “missionary goodwill as a form of benevolent tyranny” that works to alienate individual natives from others and prevent them from taking any sort of united stand (Paustian
Imagine a group of foreign people invading your home, disavowing all your beliefs, and attempting to convert you to a religion you have never heard of. This was the reality for thousands and thousands of African people when many Europeans commenced the Scramble for Africa during the period of New Imperialism. A great fiction novel written by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, highlights the responses to missionaries by African people. The African natives responded to the presence of white missionaries with submission to their desires, strategic responses to counteract them, and with the most disruptive response of violence.
The Revitalization Movement and Salvation Rituals of the South Pacific Melanesians had a particularly interesting effect on colonization. Elements of Christianity make this movement syncretic and highlight the universality of the ideas of salvation and new beginnings. The Melanesian Cargo Cults first became known to the modern world shortly after World War II. The Australian government at the time was already heavily involved in the colonization of New Guinea and its surrounding islands, one of which was Melanesia. With the arrival of Australian colonizers came missionaries and fortune hunters alike. As with many regions of colonization, the Melanesian people soon found themselves under economic and social
Many people don’t believe in medicine at all. The most commonly used treatment is prayer. Ordinary people relied on methods their parents and grandparents used, such as lucky charms, magic spells and herbal cures. Some of the herbal remedies are quite useful. The monks who looked after sick travellers in the monasteries were very skilled in using herbs.
Exploration and Colonization impacted the native peoples in positive and negative ways. These positive and negative impacts include religion, disease, and technology. These expeditions were occurring during the time that many European nations started searching for new trade routes and started spreading their influence to many new cultures. These people had their way of life, but the Europeans thought their way was better so they pushed their ways on the natives. Some Europeans had good relations with natives, but others did not.
They were brutally persecuted and were not allowed to practise their religion, because they said that the beliefs taught by the Anglican church were against the Bible. When they arrived in the New World, they were confronted with numerous threats from the outside. Their trying to take land away from the Indians caused many fights and attacks. Moreover, they had to deal with the total wilderness surrounding them. Under these frontier conditions, they needed harmony and peace inside the community in order to survive.
The missionary expansion and their work within different nations is a dilemma of well intentions versus prosperity and power. Many missionaries remained out of politics and out of local culture and only served the communities for the better. They increased educational opportunities and provided medical care; most importantly they served to ensure the communities could actively participate in the international community. While the government and businesses reaped the rewards of increased prosperity and power, these rewards were in many ways not the purpose of missionary expansion but merely an outcome.
Looking through these times, medicine slowly advanced over the past centuries. Native Americans where the main source of these new advancements and helped contribute to the Europeans and colonial medicine. Although remedies and herbs were their from of medicine during these early times this was there way of restoring health and helping medicine evolve to where they are today.
Soon after the missionaries began to teach the tribal people about the Christian faith, their tribal customs began to be questioned. This caused a sense of unrest in the village. The missionaries were trying to bring with them new ways of life, and mostly better ways of life. Mr.Achebe tries to show us that the missionaries showed people who were hurt by the beliefs of the tribe that this did not have to go on in their religion. This is one of the main reason people switched to their religion.