Rachel Saint

Rachel Saint (January 2, 1914 – November 11, 1994) was an American evangelical Christian missionary who worked in Ecuador, with her language helper Dayuma translating the Gospel of Mark and the book of Acts into the Wao tededo (language) of the Waorani people.

Rachel Saint was born in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. She attended the Philadelphia School of the Bible (now Cairn University) and then worked at the Keswick Colony of Mercy in New Jersey, a rehabilitation facility for people with alcohol addiction.

Career Saint was sent out by the Wycliffe Bible Translators, trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL Global). Her first missionary assignment was to the Piro and Shapira tribes in Peru. Her work there began to become well-known after the publication of the life of Tariri, a Shapra chief who left head-hunting after being introduced to Christianity. However, even at that time, Saint had an interest in the Waorani people of Ecuador. In February 1955, she and Catherine Peeke went to a missionary station near Waorani territory, where Saint's brother was working. Rachel Saint started learning the Waorani language with the help of Dayuma, a Waorani woman who had left her people after her father lost his life in a revenge killing.

In January 1956, five missionaries in the area were killed by Waorani people, including her brother Nate Saint, who had come to Ecuador in 1948. As a result, Saint considered herself spiritually bonded to the tribe. In 1957, she embarked on a tour of the United States together with Dayuma, appearing with Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden and on Ralph Edwards' television show This Is Your Life.

In the summer of 1958, Saint returned to the Waorani in Ecuador and, together with Elisabeth Elliot, the wife of James (Jim) Elliot, who had been killed by the Waorani, continued to evangelize. In February 1959, they were able to move into a Waorani settlement. Where the five American men had failed to gain entrance into the Waorani society, these two unarmed women (as well as Elliot's little daughter) were not perceived as a threat. Saint continued in her labor to create a dictionary of the Waorani language that she had begun before the death of the five missionaries.

Saint appears in Joe Kane's book, Savages, in which she is criticized for the negative effects her proselytizing allegedly had on the lifestyle of those Waorani who chose to live in her village.

Saint also appears in Nemonte Nenquimo’s book, We Will Be Jaguars, published in September 2024. The book includes a photo of Saint welcoming an oil company executive to Nenquimo’s village, and Nenquimo accuses Saint of helping foreign oil companies to take over indigenous land.

Saint died in Quito from cancer on November 11, 1994 at the age of 80. She was buried in Toñampare, Ecuador, where she had lived with the Waorani.

Film Trinkets and beads. Documentary, Ecuador/USA 1996, 52 minutes; Director: Chris Walker; Producer: Tony Avirgan. “Chris Walker and Tony Avirgan’s films tells the tragi-comic story of the unlikely links between Maxus – a Texas-based oil company – the 79-year-old Wycliffe Bible Translators missionary Rachel Saint, and the Huaorani people of the Ecuadorian Orient, the most fiercely isolated tribe in the Amazon. First introduced to the Indians by the missionaries, Maxus is guilty of poisoning Huaorani land with its drills and flares and leaking pipelines.”