A Song From the Forest

“We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People“
By Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson
Abrams Press

The literature of Amazonia has always been a literature of outsiders. It begins with the travel diary of Gaspar de Carvahal, a Dominican friar who survived an arrow through the eye to pen a firsthand account of Francisco de Orellana’s miraculous 1542 voyage down the length of the Amazon River system, from its Andean headwaters to its yawning Atlantic mouth. It was Carvahal’s description of an army of female archers resembling the Amazons of the Iliad that gave the continental rainforest its name. This founding reference to Homerian legend was apt; along with gold, the conquistadors sought renown as adventurers on a mythic scale. It was also enduring. Charles Marie de la Condamine and Alexander Humboldt benefited from the region’s synonymy with the wondrous, the treacherous, the alien. This cross-reference with adventure may have achieved its highest expression in “One River,” Wade Davis’ monumental 1996 biography of his mentor, Richard Evans Schultes, the Harvard ethnobotanist whose Amazonian expeditions during World War II loosely inspired the character of Indiana Jones. 

The absence of Indigenous writers in the Amazonian library is lamentable, but not mysterious. Like the rainforests of Africa and Asia, it produced oral cultures, not written ones. This explains our ignorance about pre-Columbian Amazonian societies and their post-contact decimation by disease, slavery and displacement. The region’s answer to Bartolomé de Las Casas does not appear until the end of the 19th century, when Walter Ernest Hardenburg and Roger Casement sent gruesome accounts of the Putamayo rubber boom back to Western governments and newspapers. 

Only recently has the forest begun to speak for itself. At global climate and conservation conferences, Indigenous leaders are a regular presence, delivering testimonies, warnings and pleas. In much smaller numbers, Native voices have also begun to appear on area-studies bookshelves long dominated by anthropology. In 2013, the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa published “The Falling Sky,” a visionary twilight statement in the tradition of “Black Elk Speaks.” This month, the Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo publishes “We Will Be Jaguars,” a memoir of lyricism and power about coming of age amid the arrival of oil development in the northwestern Amazon, the largest extraction wave to hit the region since rubber. 

A decade ago, I spent several weeks reporting on these impacts in an area that included the ancestral territory of Nenquimo’s people, the Waorani. She has since emerged as an Indigenous voice of international stature. Just last week, a group she cofounded with her husband and co-author, Mitch Anderson, was awarded the Hilton Humanitarian Award, sometimes called the nongovernmental organization world’s Nobel Prize. When I met her in the summer of 2014, she was 27 and still in the process of cutting her teeth as an organizer. I remember being struck by her intelligence and direct, poetic manner of speaking. 

“What the oil companies have done to my people fills me with rage,” Nenquimo told me at the time. “Waorani are not supposed to be controlled by an oil company. We should live freely. We are strong. We sing. We laugh. We are in contact with the spirits of the forest. How can we live well on an oil road? Money and alcohol infect my people. We lose ourselves.”

Until reading “We Will Be Jaguars,” I knew Nenquimo’s story only from this point in time forward. From afar, I had watched her rise to prominence as a voice for biological and cultural preservation, punctuated by her leading role in an historic movement and lawsuit that protected half a million acres of Waorani land. Her memoir tells the story of what came before. It begins with a young girl feeding a nocturnal monkey against the sounds of distant oil rigs and a plane approaching a grass runway that carries Bibles, sugar and blonde Barbies. What follows is a profound and singular account of an Indigenous community negotiating the toxic shockwaves of contact with the modern world. Nearly 500 years after Carvahal’s likely apocryphal account of a warrior-tribe of Amazons, a native female warrior speaks to the world in her own voice. 

Nenquimo was born in 1985 in the village of Toñampare on the Curaray River in the Ecuadorean Amazon. It was there that outsiders made their first brief appearance on Waorani territory in 1958. They did not make it past the riverbank: the five American missionaries who showed up unannounced were promptly speared to death. But more missionaries followed, this time better armed with gifts and backed by soldiers from the Ecuadorean army, a common pairing that advanced the Quito junta’s “civilizing project” to prepare the rainforest for the arrival of Texas oilmen and their machines. 

Nenquimo’s earliest memories are of watching her culture withstand and buckle under the force of this civilizing project. By the early 1990s, Waorani villages were already split between elders who practiced ancient lifeways and younger people born into the new world. Her parents’ generation was somewhere in between: resentful and skeptical of what the oil companies had done to the world of their youth, but also forced to contend with the pressures and realities of a rainforest oil economy that was making the old ways of living obsolete. 

Nenquimo describes heated village and family debates about how to respond to the oil roads that continually cut deeper into hunting grounds, pollute rivers and tempt Waorani men away from their families. Some of the young men in the village side with the elders and urge resistance. Two of them, Amo and Moi, teach Nenquimo a Spanish word that does not exist in Waorani, “contaminar.” This word explains the strange new illnesses that have begun plaguing the villages since the arrival of the machines and the “cowori” — the Waorani word for gringo. 

Competing for Nenquimo’s allegiance is Rachel Saint, the village’s imperious American missionary and a sister of one of the men killed in 1958. As if to avenge her brother’s death, Saint runs her dirt-floor church like a zealous Nurse Ratched, strategically doling out steel pots and salt to the women and toys to the children to get them into Sunday school and steer them away from traditional practices and beliefs. Against the wishes of her father, Nenquimo attends the Bible lessons to receive what Saint calls “God’s gifts for believers.” The young Nenquimo is mesmerized by candies sweeter than wild fruits, baby dolls with blue eyes and blonde hair, balls that bounced, toys that rolled. But what she wanted most was a dress. Some of the other girls had dresses that fell softly to their knees. No root, no flower, no bark could make colors as bright as those dresses. 

Nenquimo’s friendship with Stephanie, the daughter of another missionary, draws her further from the culture of her parents and grandparents. Like an Amazonian version of Toni Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove, Nenquimo is tormented by her friend’s impossible and foreign standard of beauty. 

“I stared at my own reflection in the mirror,” she writes. “My nose was wide and flat. My skin was dark. My lips were big. My teeth had many spaces between them. Stephanie’s were straight and white.” Upon hearing a rumor that the oil company was paying to give girls of a nearby village “perfect white teeth,” she lies about horrible nerve pain and has several teeth removed. 

In church, meanwhile, Saint works to extract the influence of village “communists” like Nenquimo’s brother, Opi, who loudly opposes God’s plan for the Amazon. “The world is very big and the Waorani are very small,” Saint says in one of many warnings to Nenquimo against her brother’s influence. 

The world needs oil, and there is a lot of oil beneath Waorani land. There is no way that we can stop the oil companies. They are very powerful. The president of the country supports them. We are fortunate that we have met a good man, a Christian man, who will take the oil from underneath the ground and who will also help the Waorani.

This “help” largely takes the form of dangerous jobs at toxic oil sites and new dietary staples like pasta, sugar, salt, canned meat and beer. Both the jobs and the consumer goods they afford become more appealing in direct proportion to oil contamination of the land and the water. As the old ways are choked out, the Waorani focus on survival amid a world changed by the arrival of a new concept: money. Prior to the oil companies, currency did not exist, and the word the Waorani chose and still use for it is “tocori,” which translates loosely as “worthless paper.” 

When the corpse of a young man killed at an oil rig is flown back to Toñampare with a bullet hole in his head, his grieving father kneels beside the grave. As Nenquimo describes the scene, “He held a wad of paper in his hands. He was silent for a long time and then he said: ‘This is why you’re dead, my son. Money. Take it with you.’” In another scene, Nenquimo’s brother burns a handful of tocori to show her the strange color it produces — “like burning the head of a pit viper.” 

Nenquimo’s grandfather likens the allure of money and the culture it represents to “the flicking of the boa’s tongue,” a mesmerizing force that causes the Waorani “to lose their sense.” Even Nenquimo’s father — after years of inveighing against the companies — eventually succumbs and takes a job at a Texaco drill site several days’ walk from the village. He tells the family that he wants to buy them modern things, like shoes. “I tried to picture my dad with the cowori in the forest, wearing one of those hard hats, cutting down all the trees, making holes in the ground,” reflects the young Nenquimo, who may have wanted white teeth, but still loved running barefoot.

Saint’s death throws this tension into sharp relief, for Nenquimo and the village at large. The disappearance of this hectoring, punishing presence results in immediate pressure change among villagers of all ages, and Nenquimo revels in the reappearance of traditions that had been suppressed. “There was no one left to punish us, no one left to tell us what to do,” she writes. 

“Deep down inside, I had not liked the way our elders’ songs changed and people’s smiles were different when Rachel and the cowori were around,” she writes. “We were warriors — why were we always trying to please them? Now there was no more Rachel and maybe no more cowori! While the Waorani pastors shoveled dirt over her, I ran down the landing strip, skipping and twirling, singing at the top of my voice to the clouds floating above. No one tried to stop me.” 

As Saint represents the new world, the “nocontactados” represent the old. Living deep in the nearby forests are the Taromenane and Tagaeri clans, bands of Waorani who retreated to avoid contact with the missionaries, the army and oil companies. By the time Nenquimo is born, the settled Waorani have become nearly as estranged from their “wild cousins” as they remain from the newly arrived cowori. 

“They were fierce as we were once fierce; they might spear us if we came across them by mistake,” writes Nenquimo of the nocontactados, who remain in the area even today in ever-shrinking forests. “We respected and feared them, and at the same time we wanted to protect them from the white people. Dad got a faraway look in his eye when he talked about the uncontacted. They were the people we used to be.” 

As Nenquimo enters adolescence, her internal conflict deepens. She learns that her grandmother, a respected medicine woman named Wemonca, had warned the community with her dying breath “not to follow the white people [who] would bring sickness. To our bodies, to our souls.” These words haunt Nenquimo, but “the flicking of the boa’s tongue” has cast its spell. She leaves Toñampare without telling her family to continue her Christian education in the frontier town of Shell, where the missionaries recommend her to a school in Quito. In the capital, she is sexually abused by an Ecuadorean man and forced to answer to the name Inés, a Christian name she comes to loathe. She returns to Toñampare at 17 fully disillusioned with a cowori culture and saddened to find its influence, along with the oil industry’s presence, has only grown in her absence. She moves into an apartment at the forest’s edge, confused and unsure how to live.  

“Was it possible to live between worlds, between languages, between the past and the future?” Nenquimo asks. 

I couldn’t go home anymore. It was too late for that. I had left the forest many years ago because I believed in the white people. I had trusted them, thought they were better than us. Their skin, their teeth, their clothes, their planes, their promises. But now I knew they had no limits, that they wanted everything. They wanted to save our souls and change our stories and steal our lands. Those distant oil wells rumbling in the depths of the village night, those wells were creeping closer and closer. I still didn’t know what to do about it.

She begins to figure it out with her brother, who had begun organizing with local Indigenous groups during her absence. Through these circles, she meets her first mentor, a fellow Waorani named Alicia Cawilla, who tells her, “Paint your face, so the world knows you’re Waorani,” and, “By talking to the camera, we talk to the world.” It is here in Nenquimo’s story that I recognized the young woman I met a decade ago, newly emerged from a state of confusion with an utter clarity of purpose. 

In 2013, she begins working with a new NGO in the area that is testing rivers for pollution and building rainwater catchment systems in contaminated villages. The group’s California-born founder, Mitch Anderson, is a strange kind of cowori — the first in her experience not interested in selling her on Jesus or oil. When the two develop feelings, she initially resists them, until her brother assures her that Anderson can be trusted, that he is, in fact, “a gringo jaguar.” 

With the appearance of Anderson, a book that had been a love letter to her people and their land becomes a traditional love story. Nenquimo and Anderson marry, have two children and continue to organize throughout the region. Their collaboration and union are both literal and symbolic: an example of the cultural transmission and dialogue that has been key to their success in Ecuador and globally. For years, the two woke at dawn in a village that they had protected from oil to record Nenquimo’s story. The finished manuscript — whose author credit they share — is a feat of storytelling that links oral and written cultures without losing the rhythm and vigor of Waorani speech. 

The turning point — for Nenquimo, the Waorani, for Indigenous rights across Ecuador — arrives in 2018, when the government announces a new round of oil auctions across more than 7 million acres of rainforest. The proposed blocks threatened the territories of several Indigenous groups, but were concentrated on Waorani land. “This is the last part of our territory that the oil companies haven’t gotten to. The last part that truly goes on forever,” one villager notes when shown the state auction map. As the communities begin to strategize a resistance, Nenquimo’s dreams are haunted by visions of apocalypse: “Black smoke fires burning our villages. Tapirs licking salt off rusty oil wells. Shabby-looking jaguars crossing dusty roads. Vultures picking at the bodies of my elders.” 

Toward the end of the book, she describes emerging from a ceremony involving yagé, the local name for the mind-altering potion ayahuasca, with a newfound and tenacious lucidity. “I knew how to do this,” she writes. “My ancestors were sneaky and courageous too. They hid in trees. They crossed rivers unseen. They imitated bird calls. That’s how they ambushed the cowori. I would do the same, but in the city.” In the flickering shadows of a post-ceremony fire, she tells Anderson, “I will be a leader in the fight against your world.”

This fight did not stop with the landmark 2019 legal victory that she went on to lead, and which occupies the book’s final pages. Four years later, Ecuador would elect a new president, the banana oligarch Daniel Naboa, who is now pushing to restart oil and mining auctions throughout Indigenous territories and protected reserves. Internal government documents acquired by Nenquimo’s organization, the Ceibo Alliance, reveal the administration’s plans to defend the validity of a consultation process that has twice been voided by Ecuadorian high courts. Nenquimo and Anderson will need deep resources of courage and commitment to defend what remains of Waorani land. Nenquimo is eloquent on this point, and describes the source of both as “love, the purest, rawest love. Love for my elders, for my family, for the spirit that we had brought into the courtroom; for the courage we carried into the heart of Civilization; for the wisdom that we guarded in our feet, in our hands, in our stories, in our songs.”

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