About
The mission in Bisaasi-teri has a style and orientation quite different from the Salesian mission shown in Ocamo is My Town. The New Tribes Mission has been in this region since the early 1950s. Their main goal, the missionary-teacher in the film explains, is spiritual: to bring the message of Jesus and salvation to the Indians, and to teach them to reject their false gods, demons, and drugs.
"Only God makes men happy; life is nothing," the teacher leads the schoolboys in a Spanish song. She also speaks Yanomamö, not, she states, because she is particularly interested in the local language or the culture, but because it facilitates conversion of the Indians. Glimpses of a village near the mission reflect the material processes of change: shotguns and cane arrows hang side-by-side, and Yanomamö in varying degrees of Western dress socialize with others lying naked in their hammocks.
This film is part of the Yanomamö series, a collaborative project undertaken by filmmaker Timothy Asch and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon between 1968 and 1971 to film the Yanomamö Indians of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil.