Nemonte Nenquimo and her family lived within nature, with food from the river, the rainforest and their gardens. A monkey was her childhood pet. According to family lore, she knew she would become a spirit jaguar when she died. But things were changing fast: A huge metal tube had descended from the sky not too many years before she was born. The missionaries who emerged from it didn’t speak her language, but they persuaded her community’s leaders to put a mark on a paper in return for clothing and other gifts.
Within a couple of decades later, her river was black with pollution, much of her forest was cut down, her community’s men had been coerced into laboring for oil companies in exchange for pieces of paper their way of life had no use for. White people said Nenquimo and her community must worship their god. She and other children were herded into schools that forced them to put aside their traditions.
A Waorani woman from Ecuador’s Amazon region, Nenquimo co-founded the Indigenous-led Ceibo Alliance that scored a major legal victory in 2019, protecting half a million acres of rainforest from oil drilling. Nenquimo has been lauded internationally for her activism; now, with husband Mitch Anderson, an American environmentalist, she is telling her story in the inspired and rare We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People.
In this lyrically written memoir, Nenquimo takes us inside her world, with its tensions between her family’s shamanistic traditions and the initial allure of the Christian missionaries, who taught her to read and write in Spanish, allowing her to communicate more widely. But this education came at a cost that traumatized Nenquimo for years. She describes her emotional journey through a deeply spiritual perspective, including one remarkable scene in which drinking ayahuasca brings her a revelatory vision.
Nenquimo sharply conveys the sheer confusion and terror of colonialism for the Waorani and other Indigenous peoples. Missionaries, oil executives and government officials used underhanded methods to wrest control of the region from families like Nenquimo’s. Ironically, the missionary education gave Nenquimo and others the tools they needed to fight back. Her story is one of fierce determination to claim a heritage that was nearly stolen from her.