52 pages • 1 hour read
Elisabeth ElliotThrough Gates of Splendor
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Aucas”
Chapter 8 provides a background historical summary of outsiders’ contacts with the Huaorani people. Although they still had no access to the message of the gospel, the Huaorani had had numerous dealings with outsiders ever since the Spanish invasions of the 16th century. The Huaorani were known by local Indigenous groups like the Jivaro and Quichua people, but the latter groups tended to steer clear of Huaorani territory because of the Huaorani reputation for hostility and violence. Spanish and Ecuadorian settlers had also come into contact with the Huaorani, and as late as the early 20th century there were still a few haciendas that bordered or overlapped with Huaorani territory. The late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, had brought the depredations of rubber traders into their area, and the abuse and violence the Huaorani experienced at the hands of these outsiders made them even more unwilling to tolerate encroachments from strangers, and more ready to use preemptive deadly violence. In the decades leading up to the missionaries’ attempt to contact the Huaorani, every outside presence—from the last hacienda to oil company outposts—had been forced to withdraw from the region.
Only one Huaorani was known to live outside the group’s territory—a woman named Dayuma, who had escaped inter-clan violence and taken up a new life with the Quichua workers who served on the hacienda of Don Carlos, one of the last remaining settler estates in the region. Dayuma’s linguistic and cultural knowledge would play a valuable role in educating the mission team about Huaorani customs. Despite the obvious dangers involved in seeking to make contact with the Huaorani, the five missionaries were resolute in their goal to bring the message of the gospel to all those who did not yet know it: “It is a grave and solemn problem,” Pete Fleming wrote, “an unreachable people who murder and kill with extreme hatred. It comes to me strongly that God is leading me to do something about it” (104). They did not see the violent reputation of the Huaorani as a factor weighing against going to them, but rather as an indication of their need for the gospel message.
Chapter 9 Summary: “September, 1955”
By September of 1955, the young men’s thoughts about reaching the Huaorani were beginning to coalesce into a plan, which they called “Operation Auca.” Back in 1953, Jim and Elisabeth Elliot had decided to take up residence in the Quichua village of Puyupungu at the invitation of the chief, while the McCullys were still engaged in language study in Shandia. Pete Fleming had returned to the US to marry his fiancée Olive, and now both were back in Ecuador again.
The three families shuffled between mission stations, with the Elliots eventually returning to work at Shandia, the Flemings taking up the new post at Puyupungu, and the McCullys establishing a base at an old Shell Company project at Arajuno, very close to Huaorani territory. From Elisabeth Elliot’s perspective, God was moving all the pieces into place for the next great venture:
Truly they were being ‘thrust out’ to carry the Word of God to the Aucas. The McCullys […] provided the vanguard. Jim and I were in Shandia. The Flemings were in Puyupungu. Roger Youderian and his family […] were again helping the Drowns at Macuma. Nate Saint with his little yellow plane […] remained at Shell Mera (127).
These five families, though they served in different mission agencies, were soon to lay the foundations for a common missionary enterprise.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Operation Auca Begins”
Shortly after the McCullys’ move to Arajuno, Ed McCully asked Nate Saint to fly over Huaorani territory and look for settlements. The results of that attempt are told via extracts from Nate’s diary. After a great deal of searching, they managed to identify their first Huaorani settlement at a great distance away. Two weeks later, however, they spotted a likely settlement very close by: “That was it. There they were as plain as the nose on your face and only fifteen minutes from Ed’s place at Arajuno by plane” (132). The young missionaries took this fortuitous finding as yet another indication that God was preparing the way for them to reach the Huaorani with the gospel message: “To some of us the most significant thing was not the information gained but the fact that after so much fruitless searching we had located the first group of Aucas […]. It seemed to mean that now was the Lord’s time to do something about them” (132). With the likelihood of an encounter with the Huaorani rising swiftly due to their proximity, the team began to tackle one of the remaining obstacles, that of language—all of them had trained in other Ecuadorian languages, but did not know any Huaorani. So Jim Elliot hiked over to Don Carlos’s hacienda to confer with Dayuma, the Huaorani woman who had taken up life in Quichua society, and began to learn from her some basic phrases of welcome and greeting.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
This set of chapters represents the book’s pivot away from the missionaries’ backstories (narrated in Chapters 1-7), now taking up its primary focus with the events of “Operation Auca.” Chapters 8-10 describe the historical background of the Huaorani people and the beginnings of the missionaries’ planning phase. Three of the families (the Elliots, McCullys, and Flemings) start to consider how to accomplish an outreach to the Huaorani, which would necessarily be assisted by Nate Saint’s aviation ministry. While the focus of this section is on the incremental steps that lead the team closer to contact with the Huaorani, Chapter 8’s historical retrospective is useful as well, setting the Huaorani culture in an understandable context. Rather than simply depicting the Huaorani along the familiar lines of their rumored hostility, the reader is now able to understand the troubled history of Huaorani’s relationship with outsiders. This adds a necessary sense of empathy to the readers’ engagement with the Huaorani, so that they are not merely seen in the abstract, either as a violent people or as the target of a missionary endeavor, but as a group with its own unique story leading up to the missionaries’ contact.
The theme of the Cross-Cultural Dynamics of Missionary Work continues to be important in this section, as the text strives to portray Huaorani culture in a sympathetic light. At the time of Through Gates of Splendor’s initial publication, Elisabeth Elliot had yet to encounter Huaorani culture directly for herself, and all her experiences of it—from anecdotal reports of the Quichua people to the death of her husband—were profoundly negative. Nevertheless, these chapters seek to put the Huaorani’s actions into a theoretical context in which their reactions are understandable, which is often the first step in cross-cultural understanding. Elliot puts the ultimate blame for Huaorani violence not on the Huaorani themselves, but on their earlier interactions with the predations of outsiders: “It was the behavior of the white man that closed off this area” (97).
The themes of Faith and Sacrifice and of Discerning the Will of God are also present here, often intertwined with one another. As circumstances develop to allow a contact with the Huaorani, the men begin the process of discernment as to whether God is actually leading them to make that contact: “[These events] seemed to mean that now was the Lord’s time to do something about them. Again we agreed to pray about the matter and compare notes further” (132). Part of that process is an acknowledgment of the risks involved—including a possible sacrifice of one’s own life—and a reckoning of the motivating factors that drive one to consider such a mission, which in each man’s case comes down to his faith in Christ. This interweaving of the themes of discernment and sacrifice will continue to become even more accentuated in the following sections.
