WE WILL BE JAGUARS

A young woman’s life among her people in the Ecuadorian rainforest, battling the onslaught of bulldozers and oil wells.

It has long been an anthropological desideratum to describe the world from “the native’s point of view.” Nenquimo, a member of the Waorani people of Amazonian Ecuador, does far more: her memoir reveals her world directly through her eyes, albeit as rendered into English by her American husband while taking pains to assure readers that “these are her memories.” Some of those memories are terrible; much of what she has seen, brutal. Her earliest encounter with non-Waorani people is with the earthly representatives of “Wengongi, the white man’s big spirit in the sky,” Christians whom Waorani warriors would once have speared to death but who now accuse the village’s teenage boys of “being influenced by the communists” simply because they are skeptical about an oil company drilling on Waorani land. Against these values are posed a Waorani elder’s assurance that Nenquimo’s ailing brother would grow up to be a brave hunter, acting as an intermediary between the human world and the world of the deceased ancestors, who “roam in these woods” as spirit jaguars. A stint in a missionary school in Quito—”You’re here to become God’s servant. Not another pregnant jungle girl”—doesn’t rid her of carefully guarded beliefs in the old ways. On returning to discover that her village is being besieged by invaders—foresters, cattlemen, and especially all-destructive oil companies—she becomes a fierce defender of her people, taking their arguments against dispossession up a steep legal ladder to victory: “We had protected a half-million acres of our rainforest. And we had opened a legal pathway, a bright trail, that other Indigenous nations could follow to protect their territories as well.”

An essential memoir of Indigenous resistance to economic subjugation and cultural extinction.