We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People

by Nemonte Nenquimo

“I will lead my people in the fight against the oil companies.” It sounded so simple. Maybe destiny is a simple thing, after all.

I had been laughing for an entire moon. The laughter was jaguar medicine. It was what my ancestors had been trying to teach me all these years: to laugh at my own suffering, to laugh like wind in the forest, to laugh all the way into battle. It was part of my people’s power. It was our medicine. It was the mask we wore for protection, the laughter of survival.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the tiny hand of a Waorani girl reaching to touch Michi’s wavy hair, jutting out from under his backwards baseball cap. I nodded at the little girl, encouragingly, mischievously.

Part of what the jaguar had taught me that night was to unbury my stories, to find the courage to laugh at them with others.

What did I want to achieve by telling him these stories? Just to be at peace with them.

“White people always try to save us,” my aunt said cynically, “and they end up causing harm.”

“Father Oil got inside of us,” she said, a wry smile flashing across her weathered face. “Deeper even than Jesus.”

“This doesn’t feel good,” Emergildo said, fastening a plastic tube to the gutter of my aunt’s house. He had been quiet and nervous since arriving here. “That we are alone, that your people aren’t helping build the water systems.”

“I don’t feel safe here,” Emergildo said solemnly, stepping down from the ladder. It was an unusual thing to hear from a grown man.

“The jaguar only works for money.”

“No, it’s all oil wells and generators and outboard motors. And the thumping of nightclubs in the settler-towns along the roads,” I said. “You would hate it, Dad. If it happened here.”

Love was part of the warrior’s path.

“But if we ask them about their dreams, about their visions for their communities, then they will tell us about what is sacred. They will tell us about what they love.”

Would they make sure that our fight was ours and didn’t become some distant battle that white people waged for us?

“When I was a young girl, my grandfather told me that Civilization was like a boa’s tongue, that it had the power to confuse us, to stun us. But our elders are more powerful than the boa’s tongue. They will show us the way.”

“The forest gives our people everything we need to live well. The ankë try to trick us. They tell us that we are poor, that our youth must work for them, cut down our forest, keep money in our pockets, go to town to eat their food, always think about tomorrow, tomorrow.”

“How do you say ‘I love you’ in Wao Tededo?” he asked, his voice unsteady. I opened my eyes. “Ponemopa,” I said quietly.

“The white people’s world seeks to destroy community.” She spoke in Spanish, using the word blanco-mestizo. “Once they destroy the community, then it is easy to destroy the individual.”

Sometimes I felt that Michi asked too many questions, that he wanted spoken answers. In the forest, in my people’s culture, many answers are not spoken.

“The macaws will confuse this for a salt lick,” Pava muttered. “Their bellies will burn and their feathers will fall off,” Ongime replied. “The tapirs will wallow here,” Tementa added. “The oil will stick to their intestines.” “There are no more tapirs here,”

“The white people destroy the forest because they don’t know the forest,” Delfín continued. “It is easy to destroy something that you know nothing about.”

We had invited my elders to see what was here – the oil pits, the pipelines. But they had seen beyond that. They had seen what was not here. They had seen what was missing from these wounded lands.

pushing at the throbbing center of the universe inside me.

My body had become a brutal sacred passage. I felt my daughter’s head pressing against the walls of my entire being.

Mom had finally found the courage to love me after all these years of cold.

Just as I had wanted him to suffer the pain of birth, now I wanted him to suffer the pain of racism.

Soon we were surrounded by the love of our people, by the tenderness of warriors, by mothers and fathers who knew what it meant to protect a child against the cruelty of the cities.

human rights defenders, tropical forest experts, humanitarians, engineers, filmmakers. I was so close to them. But even so, sometimes, when I woke in the night, I asked myself if even they would do that cowori thing and try to save us, just when we were saving ourselves.

lawyers and community leaders discussed how to turn our rights into spears to defend and reclaim our lands.

“I’ll help you,” said Itota quietly, sitting down next to me and pointing to the first line on the screen. I had always liked him, and now I liked him even more. He said: “Tell me what you want to do and I’ll help you make it happen on the screen.”

I was proud of him for finally pursuing his dream to become a lawyer.

Was her first word in my language? Or in Spanish? Or English?

“It was unbelievable,” Michi continued. “She looked up at me and said . . .” “What?” “When is Mommy going to finish that fucking budget? I want to go home to be with Grandma.” I burst out laughing. “Our little girl is so wise,” Michi grinned. “Like a jaguar shaman! She must get it from her father!”

“This is going to be very different from what the old hunters are drawing.”

“Draw everything that you see in the forest, everything you know. Tape the sheets of paper together, and when you’re done, we’ll walk to all the places that you have drawn.”

“Let’s take a GPS point here. Medicine for snake bites,” Opi said excitedly, scribbling in his notebook.

We had spent three hours in a tiny patch of woods and had already collected over a hundred GPS points.

We walked every day for nearly a moon. We discovered old memories during those walks. They welled up in our elders, like stony creeks after a big rain. We recorded songs, filmed rituals, photographed plants, listened to stories.

“After we buried your brother, I lay awake all night, listening to the wails of a jaguar just beyond the turned soil of his grave.” Dad nodded his head towards the interior of the forest. “Then, at dawn, I heard the cries of a jaguar cub.”

My little brother Víctor had returned to the forest as a jaguar cub.

“Turn it off,” Dad said suddenly to Opi. “Mengatowe is a jaguar now, a mother jaguar. She visits us sometimes. She comes back here. Better that the machines don’t know anything about her.”

We had finished the maps of all our villages only a moon before. It had taken us two years.

My voice was quivering. I was struck by the knowledge that my ancestors were watching me through the bright open eyes of my elders, struck by the singular beauty of our faces, of our dangling earlobes, our long black hair, our tree-climbing toes.

“I lived for many years in the cowori world. I tried to imitate them, become like them, please them. I was wrong! I was confused! The cowori are not better than us. They are afraid of us. We remind them of what they have forgotten. They don’t hear the voices of their ancestors anymore. They don’t plant their own food. They give birth in hospitals. They don’t live in communities. They try to conquer us, not because they are better but because, deep down, they are afraid.”

You elected me, but I will not decide how and when we go to battle. You will decide. The assembly will decide. And, as your leader, I will listen. And, as a mother, I will be as fierce as a jaguar defending her cub.”

Because as Indigenous peoples we have rights to our territory. International law says that we have the collective right to ‘free, prior, and informed consent.’”

“They are marrying us,” I replied.

Rachel had made us ashamed of our nakedness, of our happiness.

He had danced barefoot until dawn. He didn’t fear what he didn’t understand. He wasn’t afraid to grunt like a peccary. He didn’t want to change my people. He danced to be accepted by them.

“We will carry our spears into the courthouse. We will bring the forest with us. We will show the maps of our lands. We will have the laws on our side. But that won’t be enough!”