We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People

by Nemonte Nenquimo

What will you do with my story now that it has been written? I hope you will let it live.

rumbling down from the sky where the white people lived.

What is Saved? Saved from what?

She was always reprimanding us, even our elders, for nakedness.

Let all of the women and all the men know that you love the food! Let the hunters know you love the food! Let all the fish and animals know that you are grateful for them!”

She was asking permission. She was thanking the tree.

As we turned away, Rachel said, with a laugh: “And remember, don’t tell any of the other aucas that I gave you sugar. They’ll be climbing all over my house for it if you do.” “Auca” is actually the word the Kichwa use for the Waorani. But somehow it spread and the cowori use it too. Rachel used it a lot. It means savages.

“When we die, we become jaguars,” he said. “We will live in the forest, tracking peccary and woolly monkeys. But we are not like any old jaguar. We are spirit jaguars. The souls of our ancestors roam in these woods. They remember everything. They carry sadness, anger, revenge, songs, healing powers. Only some of us can speak with them. The meneras and the meñemempos. The mother jaguars and the father jaguars.”

“No, he’s of no use in the forest.”

“I don’t know if she is bad. She is not one of us.”

But their God didn’t listen. ‘Our Wengongi is angry,’ they said, ‘and this is your punishment for not believing in him.’”

I was startled. The devil had bushy eyebrows, a squat nose, and thick lips. He was dark-skinned and hairy. In fact, he looked exactly like my mom’s father, Donasco.

“What color is God?” Rachel shouted above the thunderous rain. “White!” all the kids cried. “God is white!”

“But don’t worry. Rachel knows them well. She says they are God-believers like us.”

Deep down, I understood that there were two worlds. One where there was our smoky, firelit oko, where my mouth turned manioc into honey, the parrots echoed “Mengatowe,” and my family called me Nemonte – my true name, meaning “many stars.” And another world, where the white people watched us from the sky, the devil’s heart was black, there was something named an “oil company,” and the evangelicals called me Inés.

I knew they couldn’t understand because they didn’t speak the cowori language. Dayuma had taught Rachel our language but Rachel had taught Dayuma only about God.

“How many of our men will go with the company?” Dayuma asked Rachel in Wao Tededo. “Very many will go,”

Then they waved to all of us and said something that no one understood.

“When we got close to the Toroboro River, I saw the hills where we used to live when I was a boy. I saw peach palms that my grandpa had planted. We flew over a big road that went right through our old lands. There were many cowori living there now. They had cut down the forest, and there were cattle everywhere. Then we landed in the town of Coca.

“why were the cowori cutting down the forest?”

Dayuma and I have met a very good man; he is a Christian like us. He is the head of an oil company. A very powerful man and a believer. He wants to help the Waorani. Now, there are communists out there who will say that he is a bad man, that the oil companies are bad. There are young people in the village who are confused. Because they are being tricked by the communists!

“The oil companies will contaminate the river and kill the fish,” Moi said. “And then the last fish will be lonely, like shooting stars.”

“We are the richest people in the world, Äwäme,” Nënë said. “We have everything in our rivers and forest.”

And all so that we could have shoes? I liked being barefoot.

I knew that it was cowori who had shriveled Nënëcawa’s legs and it was cowori who were cutting down the forest and scaring away the animals. And now they had taken my dad away too.

I wondered why she had sent me this letter.

Soon we had filled Mimaa’s school notebook with blood-red hand-prints. We took the remaining clumps of lipstick and drew zigzag lines up and down our arms. Then we painted bright-red bands across our eyes. I took a small, wet clump from the gourd and rubbed it lightly on my lips. I looked at myself in the pocket mirror and imagined that I was Emily, from the Land of Rachel.

I had always known that as a Kichwa she was different. She interpreted dreams differently, she knew different plants and medicines, and she looked different from the other women too:

“All along the oil roads by the Toroboro River, the cowori colonists are invading further and further into our lands. They do not respect our territory. They are cutting down our ancestors’ fruit orchards to grow grass for their cattle.”

“He told me there are jaguars everywhere downriver, and the oil workers are afraid.”

“The cowori chainsaws ripped right through this little parrot’s home. She can’t fly yet. Go up and get her some ripe plantains, she’s hungry.”

I wondered what my dad had seen downriver with the company. I imagined the cowori men smashing bright-blue eggs on the forest floor, the chirping of little abandoned birds everywhere.

No one cared about it. In our language, money is called tokore, which means something like “worthless paper.”

“We don’t know who you are, or why you have come, but we are here anyways!” they sang. “We don’t know who you are or why you have come!”

“Ba, ba, ba, ba! If you don’t listen, I will kill you dead, just like this! Ba, ba, ba, ba!” The cowori could not understand the words of their songs.

I felt bodiless. With the women of my tribe, I became a song circling around the room.

But suddenly the voice of Rachel Saint cut through our singing like a machete through a peccary bone. And, abruptly, there was silence. “Waorani enani!” she shouted. “You are stoking the devil’s fire! God is watching you. Dancing naked? What is this? Where are your skirts? Grabbing each other’s most private places! Oh, how the devil is smiling at this. Stop it immediately, I tell you!”

The idea that there was a God who had worked all week to create the forest and the rivers and the sky and the stars and then simply took a nap on Sunday was hilarious for Dad.

The day was gloomy and overcast, perfect for hard work.

Mom always said that the good dreams are for keeping to yourself. The bad dreams and visions are the ones to share. They lost their power over you when you shared them, she said.

She has many things in her house . . . but they are only for those who mourn her.”

“Now you won’t boss me around anymore,” I said to her, without moving my lips. “Now you won’t tell us what to do.”

“The oil companies gave it to Rachel so that she would let them into our lands,” said a quiet voice. It was Moipa, who had thrown the money into Amo’s coffin. His words were met with silence.

Dad said that the forest had penetrated Víctor’s soul. The word he used was omere, which means “everything.” The whole of our world. Because the forest was our everything.

Of course I did. I had never slept under a black tarp like this. What was it even made of? Where would all the smoke from the fire go?

“You can use this to make sure that all of the boards and the beams for my house will be a good length.”

For all of my life we had woken in the morning and told each other what we had dreamed in the night and discussed what our dreams meant. Now that had stopped and we just listened to the radio.

How did the white people make planes and radios and chainsaws if they didn’t even know how to wash clothes or catch shrimp with their own hands?

Am I pretty? I wondered.

Why had they come to live with us if they were going to leave us so soon?