What is SIL International?
Founded 70 years ago, SIL International is a faith-based organization that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world's lesser-known languages. SIL's staff shares a Christian commitment to service, academic excellence, and professional engagement through literacy, linguistics, translation, and other academic disciplines. SIL makes its services available to all without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race, or ethnic background.
SIL has grown from a small summer linguistics training program with two students in 1934 to a staff of over 5,000 coming from over 60 countries. SIL's linguistic investigation exceeds 1,800 languages spoken by over 1.2 billion people in more than 70 countries.
From "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins, Berret-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2004:
" For instance, he [Jaime Roldos, assassinated former president of Ecuador] accused the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an evangelical missionary group from the United States, of sinister collusion with the oil companies. I was familiar with SIL missionaries from my Peace Corps days. The organization had entered Ecuador, as it had in so many other countries, under the pretext of studying, recording, and translating indigenous languages.
SIL had been working extensively with the Huaorani tribe in the Amazon basin area, during the years of early oil exploration, when a distubring pattern emerged. Whenever seismologists reported to corporate headquarters that a certain region had characteristics indicating a high probability of oil beneath the surface, SIL went in and encouraged the indigenous people to move from that land, onto missionary reservations; there they would receive free food, shelter, clothes, medical treatment and missionary-style education. The condition was that they had to deed their lands to the oil companies.
Rumors abounded that SIL missionaries used an assortment of underhanded techniques to persuade the tribes to abandon their homes and move to the missions. A frequently repeated story was that they had donated food heavily laced with laxatives--then offered medicines to cure the diarrhead epidemic. Throughout Huaorani territory, SIL airdropped false-bottomed food baskets containing tiny radio transmitters; receivers at highly sophisticated communications stations, manned by U.S. military personnel at the army base in Shell, tuned in to these transmitters. Whenever a member of the tribe was bitten by a poisonous snake or became seriously ill, an SIL representative arrived with the antivenom or the proper medicines--often in oil company helicopters.
During the early days of oil exploration five SIL missionaries were found dead with Huaorani spears protruding from their bodies. Later, the Huaoranis claimed they did this to send SIL a message to keep out. The message went unheeded. In fact, it ultimately had the opposite effect. Rachel Saint, the sister of one of the murdered men, toured the United States, appearing on national television in order to raise money and support for SIL and the oil companies, who she claimed were helping the 'savages' become civilized and educated.
SIL received funding from the Rockefeller charities. Jaime Roldos claimed that these Rockefeller connections proved that SIL was really a front for stealing indigenous lands and promoting oil exploration..." (pp. 142-43)
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