08/18/2026
Our Spring 2018 speaker Dan Everett has been featured in a BBC World Service webcast.
Dan Everett went to convert the Amazon's Piraha people to Christianity. When he learned their language, he began to question everything.
As a young Christian missionary in the 1970s, Dan was sent to speak with a small indigenous group called the Piraha, who live in the Brazilian Amazon.
He had a talent for linguistics, and was given the task of learning the Piraha’s famously difficult language. Two other teams before him had already failed.
"The idea that I was being asked to take on a situation that others had failed at... was very appealing," he says.
When he arrived at the Piraha's remote village in the middle of the Amazon jungle, everyone came running out to meet him.
"I had read so much about them from the previous missionaries that it was like meeting a group of celebrities," he says.
Soon, Dan had moved his wife and three children to live with the Piraha, in a large thatched house in the centre of their village.
Dan says the Piraha felt at home with his family, and often gathered in their house after a day of hunting and fishing.
Dan became increasingly integrated into Piraha society. He went out on hunts with them and helped them in the fields. He loved how gentle and relaxed they were, and how much they cared for animals. Their village was full of their pets, including a huge eagle which they used to feed with live snakes.
"This oneness, near oneness with nature was extremely appealing to me," Dan says.
Dan quickly realised that Piraha is a tonal language, like Mandarin Chinese, and as he became more fluent, he began to set about the task he'd come there for - to convert them to Christianity.
It didn't exactly go to plan.
Once, the Piraha asked Dan if Jesus was brown, or white like him. Dan told them he'd never personally seen Jesus, or met anyone who had – to which they replied: "If you don't even know anybody who saw him and you never saw him, why would you tell us about him?"
Dan came to realise the Piraha didn't believe anything unless they'd seen it with their own eyes, or knew someone who had. And the more time Dan spent with them, the more he questioned his own faith – until finally, he gave it up altogether.
It was a difficult thing to admit. His first wife left him, and for a while his family didn’t speak to him, though their relations are good now.
But when he told the Piraha he no longer believed, they only laughed and said they didn’t believe either.
"To them, it was just common sense, and they couldn't understand what took me so long," says Dan.
Dan gave up missionary work and entered academia, spending his career arguing for the uniqueness of the Piraha's language.
And he still counts some of the Piraha people he met back then as his oldest and dearest friends.
🎧 Outlook: https://bbc.in/4fWoKoQ
