“A Story Dies When No One Tells It”

Indigenous Rights Activists Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson on their new book and their journey towards activism in the Amazon.

Nemonte Nenquimo gained international attention when she led an Indigenous campaign and legal battle that successfully protected half a million acres of Amazonian rainforest and Waorani territory in Ecuador from oil extraction, setting a legal precedent to protect millions more. She recently released a new book, We Will Be Jaguars, which she co-wrote with her partner, Mitch Anderson. In the book, Nenquimo shares the story of her childhood — growing up in Waorani territory amid the unfolding harms caused by oil companies and Christian missionaries — as well as her journey toward activism. It outlines the ongoing fight to save the forest and protect the rights of Indigenous peoples across the Amazon, one of our planet’s most crucial carbon sinks and a storehouse of biodiversity.

After attending a hectic Climate Week in New York this past September, Nenquimo and Anderson connected with Earth Island Journal over a Zoom call from central Mexico. They discussed their fight to preserve sacred and ecologically important lands, protect Indigenous culture and rights, and transform the global, systemic forces that have led the planet toward a climate crisis.

In her book, Nenquimo repeatedly returns to the refrain: “Do not ask people what they need. Ask them what they dream.” During our conversation, as in the book, she and Anderson spoke about the dream that has inspired their activism to end harmful extraction and save the Amazon — a dream that hinges on honoring the rights, knowledge, and leadership of Indigenous peoples, and healing our connection to Earth, upon which all of life is dependent.

The rainforest is full of life and knowledge. Tell me about your home, and the Waorani people’s connection to the rainforest.

Nemonte Nenquimo (NN): For Indigenous peoples, the forest is our home. It’s our life source. It’s our market, our pharmacy, our hardware store, the place of our spiritual wellbeing. It is everything. When our territory is healthy, we are healthy. When our territory is under threat from contamination, deforestation, and oil spills, we are under threat. When our territory is sick, we are sick.

Our ancestors protected and cared for our home for thousands of years, so that their children and grandchildren and future generations would be able to live well. The forest is sacred, and we depend upon it. It is a place of life, where our stories and our memories reside. We Indigenous peoples are deeply connected to the land, to our territory, to our home. We know that the forest is not waiting for us to save it. Mother Earth is not asking us to save her. All she is asking is that we respect her.

The Waorani practice an oral tradition. The decision to write this story — your story — down in a book was an intentional one. What led you to that decision?

NN: My people are an oral storytelling culture. For thousands of years, our ancestors have passed down their knowledge, their values, and their sense of self-identity throughout the generations this way. As my father told me: A story dies when no one tells it. That’s why day in and day out, the Waorani people fill up the longhouse, fill up the forest, with our stories: to keep those stories alive.

Over the years, we’ve been working to organize amongst Indigenous communities across the Amazon to protect our lands and our rivers from external threats. We have won big, historic victories — but still, the threats continue. And as we’ve worked, our people have called out to the world, saying: Menos conoce la selva, más destruye. The less one understands the forest, the more destruction they cause.

people in a rainforest

Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo alongside Waorani Pekinani (traditional authority) Memo Ahua in the ancestral homeland of the Waorani Nation in the Yasuni National Park, Ecuadorian Amazon. Photo by Nico Kingman / Amazon Frontlines.

So many outsiders have come in saying they were going to help us — from the missionaries who came to “save” our people’s souls and who caused immense harm and suffering, to the oil companies promising development that have caused so much destruction to our territory, our rivers, our forests, and our culture. Governments and big NGOs have come with the intention of conservation, but ultimately disempower us and displace us. The outsiders destroy what they don’t understand.

One day, my father said: “It’s time for you to tell the world, because they don’t understand our culture, our connection with the land, or our way of life.” It was necessary, my father said, to write our story down and share it with the world, so that the world can understand who we are and our connection with nature. And so we wrote this book as an act of resistance. As an offering to the world. This is not a story written by anthropologists or missionaries or governments, which is how it’s always been: outsiders who come to write a single, definitive story about the Waorani people. My partner Mitch lived with us for many years, listening to me and my family tell stories, learning about our life in the forest and our culture and who we are as Waorani. We set out to write this book together, and it was intimate and honest and true. Our culture is diverse. Every day is a million stories, and this book is one story. It is a story of an Indigenous Waorani woman. It is my own voice.

Mitch, tell me about the experience of coauthoring this book. What was it like for you to support Nemonte in sharing her story in her own words?

Mitch Anderson (MA): It felt sacred. I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility. As Nemonte has shared, she and her people — like Indigenous peoples around the world — have endured physical and spiritual violence and betrayal at the hands of outsiders for centuries. There aren’t many reasons for Indigenous communities in the Amazon to trust outsiders. But Nemonte told me at the beginning: “I want to write this book with you. I live my story, and I can tell it in many different ways — but I don’t know how to write it.” Entrusting me with this was an amazing, beautiful act of faith.

I did my best to listen deeply to Nemonte, her family, and the elders, trying to touch the written word with the spirit of their oral storytelling tradition. I didn’t start writing until I felt like I had listened and, in a sense, lived all of these stories by the fire with her. I spent several years writing, and every evening, I would read Nemonte what I wrote, and she would enrich the words and give me guidance and orientation.

There is an intimate connection between environmental violence and bodily violence — especially for women, and particularly for Indigenous women. In your experience, how is the defense of territory connected to defending the rights of Waorani people and women?

NN: The companies that enter our lands and destroy our forests often give jobs to the men, which changes the gender balance and dynamic for the Waorani people. We come from a matriarchal lineage, where women were always the deciders in matters of war and peace. We were the leaders of the domestic economy, the household economy. But when the companies arrive, they bring money, alcohol, contamination, and ego. They create a path of sickness that upsets the harmony and dynamic in our communities and creates problems in our families: domestic violence and abuse.

As an Indigenous woman, I see that the entire global economic system is based on extracting from our mother, causing pain to Mother Earth, raping Mother Earth. How can we rape our mother and expect that she will continue to nourish us, to be our caretaker? It’s the same with women, because as women, we are the life-givers in our families ... If you cause violence to us, if you rape the women, how do you expect the women to continue being the caregivers, the life-givers?

Mitch, you grew up in California, a world far from the Amazon. Why dedicate yourself to this work?

MA: I grew up in Marin County, where I would turn on a tap without questioning where the water came from. I didn’t plant or harvest my own food. When I learned to drive a car in high school and stopped at the gas station, I didn’t think about where the oil came from or about the harm it was causing.

When I went to the Amazon for the first time in 2007, the first thing I learned about was the devastation that oil had caused to rivers, forests, and Indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with those lands for thousands of years. And I learned that American oil companies — and California companies, at that — were responsible. That filled me with an awful lot of rage and pain and sadness. At the same time, I met people like Emergildo Criollo — a Cofan man who had lost his children to oil contamination. Instead of rage or hatred, Emergildo showed a profound well of kindness and a deep desire to make things better. That spirit in Emergildo and in others inspired me to move to the Amazon and ask communities impacted by 70 years of oil production and contamination: “What can we do together to make things better?”

We started a water project called Clear Water, aiming to ensure that every Indigenous family affected by oil contamination in northern Ecuador had access to clean water through rainwater harvesting systems. Through that, we created a movement — youth, activists, and community leaders all came together. That’s how I met Nemonte and how we were able to co-found Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance.

Colonialism, capitalism, and the extractive industry are huge, global systems that drive the climate crisis and impact communities around the world. How do you describe the struggle against these systemic forces?

NN: For my people, and Indigenous peoples across the Amazon, many of us still live in vast rainforest territories that are full of life. We have a direct and immediate connection to the forest, day in and day out, because it’s our life-giver. We plant seeds and harvest food, we gather wild fruits, and we maintain our spiritual connection to Mother Earth because we depend upon her. That reciprocity is the central reason why our resistance to capitalism and the extractive industry is so strong: because we’re protecting our home, and our home is what gives us life. Indigenous peoples are going to continue to battle against the threats that affect our lands, but these threats will continue if the system doesn’t change. The values that underpin the system are the root of the problem.

The outside world thinks that this system of development is more important than caring for the land. It hasn’t always been this way. Many ancestors from the outside world had this connection, like how we Indigenous peoples do now, with the Earth. But they have become disconnected due to materialism, power, ego, money, greed. It is a sickness of the mind.

That’s why we’ve written We Will Be Jaguars, as an attempt to create a bridge between Indigenous cultures and the rest of the world. To create a pathway to healing. To wake up people’s consciousness and spirits, to heal that connection with the Earth.

This story is ongoing. What are Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance working on now?

MA: The Amazon rainforest is nearing a tipping point. In the eastern basin, the forest is losing its ability to produce its own rainfall, contributing to a vicious cycle of drought and industry-driven fires. If the rainforest reaches 25 percent deforestation, the Amazon could start converting into savannah within 15 to 20 years. For Indigenous peoples who call this forest their home and who depend on the Amazon for their very survival, this means genocide. For the world, it means turning a vital carbon sink into a carbon bomb, which will accelerate climate collapse and cause incalculable suffering.

Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance are focusing on the upper Amazon, one the most intact, biodiverse, and culturally rich parts of the forest. We’ve learned from 15 years of organizing on the frontlines and are building an Indigenous-led movement to stop extractive industries from expanding and to secure millions of hectares of land back for Indigenous guardianship and stewardship. We’re doubling down on community organizing and global campaigning, leveraging powerful legal strategies and advancing policy frameworks across the region to advance Indigenous rights and protect the forest.

Another big focus is on cultural preservation and solutions. We’re supporting Indigenous youth and women to decolonize educational systems and build regenerative, non-extractive economies that honor traditional knowledge. And we’re working to uplift Indigenous leadership, to create a global movement and change the system from within by transitioning to a new economic model that respects Indigenous cultures and Mother Earth.

Inspired by your words in the book, I want to know: What do you dream?

NN: My dream is for my story to reach people’s hearts and awaken people’s spirits. For people to understand, those who come saying they will “save” us, or promising development, come to cause more harm. For people to share this story with others, so that more people might understand the importance of the forest, how we Indigenous peoples live, and our connection to the land. And for people to be stirred awake and stirred to action.

In this book, I have shared a vulnerable story of my life — a truth that I have lived in my own body. Through sharing my story, by breaking that silence, I healed. And I dream of connecting with women around the world, so many of whom live with similar traumas, to unite and create change together. We’re connected. We’re connected deeply to our families, to our children, to the Earth and to future generations. We can’t wait for our governments or politicians or companies to make decisions for the future. We are the leaders of the world today — women and civil society — who can make change. That is my hope, those are my dreams.

This interview has been translated and edited for length and clarity.

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