We Will Be Jaguars, written with her partner Mitch Anderson, is Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir of her life and struggle growing up as a Waorani woman in the Ecuadorian Amazon. After her early childhood in her community in the rainforest and her adolescence spent with evangelical missionaries, Nenquimo moved to Quito. While she was there, a violent conflict spurred by the oil company broke out between a Waorani family living near the oil fields in the rainforest and a Taromenane clan living in voluntary isolation deeper in the forest. One night, Nenquimo had a vivid dream of two little Taromenane girls who were being held captive after their family was murdered. The next morning she decided to head out alone to try and find and help them.
The below excerpt was reprinted courtesy of Abrams Press. **Content warning: This excerpt contains descriptions of sexual harassment. **
The river was creamy brown, soup-like, and slow-moving beneath the scorching blue sky. Sandy yellow clumps of foam floated on the water. Swirling oily rainbows glinted on the surface. Rusty barges churned white water and belched black smoke. An old man sat in a canoe at the river’s edge, bobbing in the wakes.
“She is insisting,” the soldier said loudly into his radio, leaning against the idling military vehicle. “She says that she is from the village of Yarentaro. Over.”
“Copy that. Tell her that no one is allowed in. Her people are f***ing crazy. They’re threatening to kill anyone who enters.”
“Copy that,” the soldier said, raising his eyebrows.
“That is my land,” I said fiercely, pointing across the river. “My grandmother is buried in that forest.”
“You heard the orders,” the soldier said. “Everything is paralyzed. Not even the oil companies are operating right now. Your people are threatening war against the companies, the government, everyone!”
I stared at the soldier coldly. He eyed me through his glasses, a leer forming on his face.
“We’ve got some time to kill now,” he whispered. “I like me a feisty auca girl.”
He made kissing sounds. I turned away in disgust.
The market was dusty at the river’s edge. A rusty, hulking barge clanked and scraped against the concrete slab of the port. I walked down the banks towards the old man in the canoe. He was busy gutting fish.
“How much to take me across the river?”
He looked up at me. His eyes were glassy-wet, like an old hunting dog’s.
“Two dollars.”
I stepped onto the bow of the canoe.
“Downriver,” I said. “Away from the soldiers.”
The old man glanced at me strangely.
“Who is your family?” he asked in Kichwa.
I shook my head. I understood Kichwa, but I couldn’t speak it. “You’re not Kichwa?”
“No. I’m Waorani.”
The old man yanked the cord to start the outboard motor.
“Ah,” he said, backing the canoe into the river’s current. “Fire in your blood.”
I sat on the bow, gazing downriver. The canoe cut through the water, bouncing softly.
“There aren’t many fish anymore,” the old man shouted over the drone of the outboard. “Those f***ing barges!”
I nodded distractedly. The river’s current swirled, bubbled, and lapped
against the wood. My ancestors knew this river as the Toroboro, the Mighty River. But now it was known as the Napo River. I pictured my warrior ancestors crossing it, bundles of chonta palm spears on their shoulders, their long black hair floating on the surface.
The canoe glided into the muddy banks. The forest was a thick wall above red clay. I handed the old man two dollars.
“How do I get to the road?” I asked.
The old man looked at me with surprise. “You’ve never been here before?”
I shook my head. It was strange, even to me. For the first time, I was about to enter the forest of my ancestors, where my grandmother was buried, where our stories were born long ago.
“I thought you were a Waorani from these parts.”
“No, I’m from another village, far away.”
“Ah,” the man sighed. “You look like you’re about to get into some trouble, young girl.”
I shook my head, avoiding his eyes, and started up the muddy banks into the forest.
“Seems to be some problems out in those villages at the end of the road,” he shouted after me. “Better stay away from there.”
“That’s where I’m going,” I shouted back, pushing through the stiff cane into the cool green woods.
There was no trail that I could see. I walked a short way, then stopped.
The forest was trilling and pulsing. I noticed the faint, days-old tracks of an ocelot. A line of leaf-cutter ants. A wasps’ nest. I felt lightheaded. Maybe it was the fumes from the port, or the rocking waters. Or was I feeling the spirits of my ancestors?
I crumpled a wild garlic leaf in my hands and inhaled deeply.
A truck rattled in the distance upriver. I walked towards the sound. A white blanket of light illuminated a patch of the forest. I stood in the shadows and a white truck rumbled around a bend in a cloud of dust. I scrambled up the edge of the road and waved my hand. The truck slowed.
“Beautiful butterfly, where are you going?” the driver said. He was an oil worker, an Ecuadorian from the coast; I could tell by his accent. He wore black shades, a white helmet, and a blue uniform.
“I’m not a butterfly,” I hissed. “I’m a Taromenane!”
The man laughed and rested his arm out the window.
“Then take off your clothes, butterfly.”
I glared at him in silence.
“Where do you want to go, beautiful one?” he asked.
“To the village of Yarentaro.”
“No, no, no! We can’t go there! That’s the end of the road.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, butterfly. You Waorani, your people are acting like savages right now. They’re f***ing crazy.”
“Then I’ll walk.”
I started down the hot, dusty road. The man idled the truck forward. “Hop in the flatbed,” he said.
I jumped in the back of the truck.
“I can’t have you sit inside with me,” he shouted, leaning out the
window. “It’s against company policy.”
The tires spit dust as the truck rolled forward.
“The boss likes all the pretty girls for himself,” he shouted again, over the sound of crunching rocks.
Soon the forest was a blur and my body was shaking against the metal.
A pipeline snaked in the trenches. A gas flare hissed. We crossed a metal bridge. The creek water was foamy and gleaming with oil.
A group of Waorani women stood on the edge of the road before a chain-link fence adorned with barbed wire. What were they doing there at the gates of the oil company? They had ripped clothes, bare feet, long earlobes, and empty water jugs.
Surely it wasn’t possible?
But it was. The women were collecting water from the oil company. And I could guess why. Contamination. Once I had not known that word, but now I did. The fresh water of the creeks the women would normally depend on had been poisoned.
An oil company security guard shoved a hose through the fence. The water poured out milky-white into the women’s empty jugs.
We picked up speed again and disappeared around the bend.
The company was taking the oil from our forests and contaminating our water sources. The oil was taken to the cities so that the white people could drive cars and fly planes while Waorani women were degraded in the dusty shadows of the barbed wire, left to beg for water.
I spit onto the road, spit on the long finger of the white man’s world curling and curving and cutting into our forests. Spit on the boa’s tongue of civilization that turned my people from hunters and harvesters and shamans into barefoot beggars in our own lands.
I knew how this all had come to be. It was, in large part, Rachel Saint’s doing.
I had been just a little girl in the village of Toñampare when the helicopter had landed that day. Distracted by the shiny earrings some important woman had worn! Shiny earrings! I had no idea that inside the longhouse Rachel Saint was orchestrating her final act: facilitating the delivery of these forests to the blue-eyed, Bible-carrying boss of the oil company, Maxus Energy.
That was 20 years ago.
And now my women were begging the oil company for water. And there was war between my people and the Taromenane, a war between what we were and what we had become.
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