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November 18 - November 22, 2024
“Walk down the trail, then veer off into forest, leaving no tracks.” This was my father’s counsel when I told him that I would be telling my story to you. I knew what he meant. That my ancestors would be watching. That there are stories that must remain hidden, secrets that must be guarded. Across the centuries, my people learned not to trust you. That’s how we stayed alive, unconquered: by leaving no tracks. For us, stories are living beings. They breathe life into our homes, into our forests. They pulse in our blood, in our dreams. They stalk us like jaguars, clack like peccary, sail like
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“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.”
“Like when a boa mesmerizes a deer by flicking its tongue. The deer becomes weak, trapped. That’s what happened to our people. It was the things she gave us, and the stories she told. Then the sickness killed us.”
“This is the devil,” Rachel announced impatiently. “Kids, what color is the devil’s heart?” “Black!” exclaimed a chorus of children. “The devil’s heart is black!” “Good!” Rachel nodded. “The devil is a trickster, the one who puts dark thoughts into your hearts.” 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. I felt a chill on my skin. I had two grandfathers. Dad’s father, the mighty warrior Piyemo, was a jaguar that howled in the forest at night. And Mom’s father was the devil.
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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.
‘Tiri, I need you to go with these men! Your uncontacted relatives are behaving badly. Over the last moon, they’ve spear-killed several company men. God wants you to go with the company and tell your relatives that killing is the devil’s work.’”
“We are the richest people in the world, Äwäme,” Nënë said. “We have everything in our rivers and forest.”
In our language, money is called tokore, which means something like “worthless paper.”
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.
“Well, do you want to live under leaves?” Opi demanded. 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?
What were numbers for? In the forest there was no need to count. There were either no peach palm fruits to eat or there were many! The walk was either very short or very long. There were few children or there were many.
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.
“Have them sleep on the ground,” my brother Ñamé said. “That way they will learn about life in the forest.” “The white people are very soft,” Dad said. “Like papayas.”
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?
The animals are our teachers too. Remember that.”
“Why is our skin so dark?” I asked. Mom was kneeling in the muddy banks of the creek, filling the basket with short lengths of the vine that she had bundled with palm leaves. I could tell she didn’t like my question. “Because we live in the forest,” she said, “and we are close to the earth.”
“Are the cowori really people?” “What do you mean?” “I mean, are they actually people, or are they something else?” “They are people,” I said. “Do they know how to hunt animals?” “I don’t think so.” “Then they’re not people.” I didn’t respond. I was getting sleepy. “And,” he said, “they smell funny.”
“Is a road like a trail?” “Roads are the trails of the white people. They don’t know how to walk well. They drive in cars and trucks.”
In the forest, a morpho is a sign of good luck. But in town, everything is different. Civilization jumbles the messages, distorts the signs. I had learned not to pay much attention anymore.
I couldn’t go home anymore. It was too late for that. I had left the forest many years ago because I believed in the white people. I had trusted them, thought they were better than us. Their skin, their teeth, their clothes, their planes, their promises. But now I knew they had no limits, that they wanted everything. They wanted to save our souls and change our stories and steal our lands.
My people were about to go to war against our uncontacted relatives – and all because of the oil company. I had never met the Taromenane people, but I loved them. They were a part of me. The part that hadn’t been corrupted, hadn’t been abused, hadn’t been weakened by the white man’s world.
“Why do white people read so much?” “To learn about . . .” He paused, staring out the window. “To see little parts of ourselves in other people’s stories.”
“When Delfín steps into the forest,” Michi said, “he can hear the plants – I mean, literally. He listens to them.” I opened the car door. It was stuffy without the wind. “My only question is: when did your people stop listening to the plants?” I asked.
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.
What did I want to achieve by telling him these stories? Just to be at peace with them.
“Help!” she exclaimed. “You sound like a cowori! The young men have forgotten how to hunt. And the young women . . . they’d rather stare at their cell phones than make a garden. The men work for the company all moon and then they pour alcohol into their souls. What are you going to do about that, Inés?”
“Father Oil got inside of us,” she said, a wry smile flashing across her weathered face. “Deeper even than Jesus.”
“In my culture, when a woman raises her voice, that means something is wrong in the universe.”
“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.”
“For the Kofan people, the spirits give life to the forest; they order our universe. The kukama don’t know anything about them. The kukama’s eyes brighten only at the thought of gold and oil and money. If the Kofan youth follow the ways of the kukama, then we do not know what will happen to the spirits of the forest, but we do know that the Kofan people’s world will end.”
“The ankë . . .” Delfín said, and paused. I had learned that this was the word for white people in Pai’coca, the Siekopai language. “The anke only eat chickens and cows and drink beer and Coca-Cola. That’s why their bodies are soft and their minds are confused.”
He wants us to help our people recover the lands that were stolen from us, and he wants us to remind the youth that the forest has always been generous to us – it is our pharmacy, our market, our hardware store, our place of worship. If the youth do not realize that, then they will become soft and confused like the anke.”
In the forest, in my people’s culture, many answers are not spoken.
“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.”
“Budgets are just the white people’s word for what our people already know. When a hunter brings home meat to the longhouse, the woman looks at the meat and says: ‘We will make a stew with the forelegs, and we will smoke the hindquarters, and we will give the ribs and the head to our neighbors so that there will be harmony between our families.’”
“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.”
“Never speak when you are angry. Silence is better. Go to the waterfall together. Then speak.”
When she spoke, she spoke against us. Her voice was flat as pavement, denying our requests. I knew her words were separated from her heart, their meaning disconnected from her spirit.
And as the online fire grew in the social media feeds of thousands of strangers, I realized that our fight to protect our forests and our way of life was really a fight to protect the whole world. Lose our forest, I understood now; oceans away, there were floods. Continents away, there were fires and droughts. Many others around the world understood this too – that we were all connected, and that to protect the Amazon was to protect the one home that we all share: Mother Earth.
It was the optimism of privilege, of a white man who didn’t live the conquest in his bones, who didn’t feel centuries of betrayal and hurt in his blood. He still didn’t understand that, to the world, I was faceless without my feathered crown and my achiote. I had to wear the paint of my ancestors in order to be seen.
Maybe if we showed them that we were capable of seeing them, then they would see us, hear us, learn from us?
Maybe violence is born in the chasms between us, within us? Maybe the conquest, at its root, has always been about that chasm, a pain so lonely, so unbearable, so spiritually numbing that violence becomes the only path, the narrow trail to being human, to feeling something, anything.
