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Like the previous image of Harriet Fields, this historic photograph of Hattie
Kneeland was taken at Yarinacocha, Peru in 1966
by photographer Chuck Clark. Hattie Kneeland was an ordinary American girl
from Missouri who had no previous anthropological or linguistic training before
becoming a missionary with SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics). Kneeland
teamed up with Harriet Fields to work on the SIL project to make contact with
the then uncontacted tribe, the Matsés Indians of the Yaquerana and Yavari
Rivers on the border of Peru with Brazil. They needed to learn Matsés in
order to make contact, but since no one spoke Matsés (other than the uncontacted
Matsés themselves), they were in a seemingly impossible position. Finally,
they found out that a Peruvian woman (Sophia) escaped from the Matsés and was in
Iquitos, Peru. Kneeland and Fields worked with Sophia to learn the
language of the Matsés. They also had another language informant,
"Mayoruna Joe," a Matsés man who mysteriously left the Matsés and wound up near
Iquitos seeking medical aid. Kneeland and Fields thought that Mayoruna Joe
could lead them to the Matses. However Mayoruna Joe was not as cooperative as
Sophia, and eventually abandoned Kneeland and Fields, returning to the Matsés
tribe leaving the missionaries behind. Curiously, it seems that Mayoruna
Joe may not even have been Mayoruna (another name for the Matsés tribe) at all,
but rather from a neighboring tribe and had been kidnapped by the Matsés as
a child. Finally, after years of trying to learn the Matsés language and
make contact with the Matsés people, Kneeland and Fields succeeded. During
an aerial reconnaissance, they finally located a large Matsés "maloka" (long
house, where traditionally more than 100 people lived) on the banks of the
Chobayacu Creek. They landed their plane nearby and were soon accepted by the Matsés people and invited to live with them.
The Matsés were in awe of Hattie Kneeland because she was so big.
Typically, indigenous Amazonians are small people of slight build, rarely being
overweight. Kneeland and the Matsés got along famously and Kneeland,
similar to Fields, devoted a large portion of her life for the benefit of the
Matsés people.
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