Reclaiming the Narrative: Nemonte Nenquimo's Fight for Her People and the Earth

“For us, stories are living beings,” writes Nemonte Nenquimo in the introduction to her memoirs. We will be jaguarswritten together with her husband and fellow activist Mitch Anderson: “A story dies when no one tells it.”

“This book is about my thoughts: how I see evangelicals, how I see white people,” Nenquimo tells me in a video call during a family vacation with her in-laws in Petaluma, California. Behind the white sofa where Nemonte sits with her husband and children hangs a drawing of a densely populated jungle. We will be jaguarswhich was published in the US on September 17, is a testimony to her upbringing. “I asked my father: 'How about we share our common struggle? Our memory. It is necessary to convey to the world what we must do,'” she recalls. “We began remembering with my father, mother, brothers and aunts. Evangelicals and anthropologists have often presented their perspectives. But no one has written down our memory, the true story.”

Nemonte Nenquimo is one of the world's best-known indigenous climate activists. On April 23, 2019, she was the lead plaintiff in a landmark case against the Ecuadorian government's planned auction of Waorani land to oil companies. After a three-day trial, the ruling found that the government had conducted a flawed consultation process with the community before auctioning off the Waorani territory. Under Nenquimo's leadership, the Waorani demanded their right to self-determination, culminating in the protection of 800,000 hectares of their rainforest. On April 26, hundreds of Waorani streamed into Puyo, Ecuador, with streaks of achiote red pigment in their eyes, declaring themselves Waorani. They had defeated a system that had long considered them voiceless.

Photographed by Thalía Gochez.

Nenquimo was born in 1985 deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon to the Waorani tribe. This tribe was among the last tribes to be contacted by American missionaries in the 1950s and was known for resisting previous attempts at contact. Experiences and life stories like Nenquimo's have been told by anthropologists and other outsiders for far too long. Nenquimo accomplishes a monumental feat by reversing colonial narratives and using the written word to center generations of the Waorani cosmovision. It joins the company of The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami ShamanDavi Kopenawa Yanomami's memoirs from 2010, in which he documents his life story as a shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami as well as the cosmoecological thinking of the Yanomami in the Brazilian Amazon region.

The book is both a people's memoir and a coming-of-age story, covering nearly three decades of their community, from the early 1990s to 2019, from the first time Nemonte sees a plane land near the Curaray River to the ever-increasing tensions between evangelical settlers and nearby oil companies over the past decade. Youth and elders can either accept missionary hymns and Western dress and work for the oil companies, or find forms of counterattack. Some flee their land while others take jobs, but in the end they must all come together to respond to the oil companies' poisoning of their water supply.

Photographed by Thalía Gochez.

For Nemonte, the process of remembering her youth meant confronting deeply painful memories that she had long repressed. At 14, Nenquimo left Nemompare for the first time to study with an evangelical mission group in Quito. She writes from a position of empowerment with an eye toward women as she tells stories of sexual abuse and walks her path to breaking away from biased views of the so-called “civilized” world. Naming the damage became a step toward healing and transformation. “It was a difficult process of remembering,” says Nemonte. “I kept so many things hidden for so long.”

By far the hardest memories I had to dig up were of her late brother Victor, or Mengatowe. “It was very emotional to talk about him and then hear the stories. I went to the waterfall crying and asked Victor to come with me and help me write this book so that everyone can see Mother Nature,” Nenquimo explains.

With Victor's blessing, Nenquimo delivers an urgent message: “How can I get the world to respect Waorani, to respect Mother Nature? Many elders say, 'Outsiders know more about destruction than the jungle.' We need to remind city dwellers that they are also connected to the earth, air and water.”

Photographed by Thalía Gochez.

We Will Be Jaguars grew out of years of early morning conversations with Anderson. A few days before the birth of their son, Sol, Nemonte began telling her husband stories. Guided by generations of oral tradition, Nemonte recited while Mitch transcribed them. Over the next two years, the two collected enough stories from Nemonte, friends, and loved ones to weave a picture of the Waorani people. She stresses that Mitch is not a translator: “My husband lives in our territory. He is one of the activists who works and fights with us. We learned from him, just as he learned from us.” Mitch is the founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines and has long worked with indigenous peoples across the Amazon to defend their rights to land, life, and cultural survival. During our interview, Mitch distracts her two children, Sol and Daime, while Nemonte tells me her recent dreams. It's a small glimpse into their partnership.

As the title suggests, We will be jaguars claims the future without erasing the past. It is a promise to reclaim and expand Waorani knowledge – a self-documented celebration of the tribe's rich history and culture. Importantly, so many of us watch, almost frozen in fear, as our world is inevitably engulfed by rising tides, burning forests and widening inequalities. We will be jaguars is a portrait of the modern revolutionary activism of Nemonte and her husband, their companions and ancestors. Our task is to listen humbly and then ask ourselves: What measures can We take now?