We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People

“‘For no good reason,’ Dad said. ‘God doesn’t speak their language. He can’t understand anything they say. That’s why they talk so long to him with their eyes closed. They are waiting for him to respond, but he never does.’”

This piece of dialogue from Nenquimo’s father conveys a Waorani perspective that quietly dismisses the power of the Christian God within their world. Tiri portrays missionary religion as an alien and ineffective practice, asserting the integrity and sufficiency of the Waorani spiritual framework rooted in the forest itself.

“‘What I am telling you,’ Rachel continued, speaking very loudly now, ‘is that the world needs oil. And there is a lot of oil beneath Waorani land. Now, there is no way that we can stop the oil companies. They are very powerful. The president of the country supports them. We are fortunate that we have met a good man, a Christian man, who will take the oil from underneath the ground and who will also help the Waorani […] People from the oil company will come here soon. We will talk with them and make an agreement about how we can be good friends. Does everyone understand?’”

Rachel Saint’s speech leverages religious authority to frame corporate resource extraction as inevitable and benevolent. She presents oil companies as Christian allies, discouraging resistance by portraying their power as absolute and their intentions as helpful. Her coercive rhetoric highlights how colonization uses faith to justify economic exploitation and pacify Indigenous populations.

“Rachel said my son was a communist. That he was on the devil’s path. But that’s a lie. He was a warrior, just like our ancestors. My son went to fight against the company and against the cowori who Rachel invites to our lands. And they shot him in the head and left him to die on the oil road.”

The author foregrounds the testimony of Moipa, father of the slain activist, Amo, to present a direct counternarrative to the missionary’s rhetoric. This passage reframes Amo not as a devil-led “communist” but as an ancestral warrior defending his people, establishing a clear line of Waorani resistance against the alliance of church and corporation.

“‘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!’”

This scene renders a moment of direct cultural suppression as Rachel Saint interrupts a traditional Waorani celebration. By capturing her words verbatim, the author illustrates how Christian morality was imposed to shame and control the community, recasting joyous, life-affirming rituals as sinful and demonic acts, thereby attacking the culture at its core.

“‘This is a radio!’ he announced. ‘I gave them Amonka and they gave me a radio!’”

This moment encapsulates the unequal exchange at the heart of the Waorani’s encounters with the outside world. The author highlights Tiri’s trade of a living being—a beloved family pet—for a piece of technology that brings in foreign voices. The exchange encapsulates how the Indigenous people’s animate, personal connections to the forest are replaced by inanimate, passive consumer goods.

“‘The black stains of sin run very deep,’ said Steve. ‘But because Mincaye has opened his heart to Wengongi…’ He paused, looking tearful. ‘God has forgiven him and whitened his soul.’”

Steve Saint’s sermon employs a stark racist metaphor, equating sin with “black stains” and salvation with a “whitened” soul. His speech explicitly links Christian conversion to a form of racial and cultural purification, reinforcing a colonial hierarchy where Waorani identity is seen as inherently flawed and requiring assimilation into a superior, white worldview.

“From the very beginning, all our ancestors, whether they were bitten by snakes or mauled by jaguars or speared by enemies or sickened by sorcery, when they died, their blood pooled in the center of the earth.”

Tiri explains to Nenquimo the sacred connection between the Waorani, their land, and their ancestry. He asserts that oil is not an inanimate resource but the lifeblood of generations past, making its extraction a deep act of desecration. This worldview confronts the commodification of nature inherent in the extractivist mindset of the outside world.

“For us here in the forest, the white man’s world is the boa’s tongue. It makes us lose our senses, little one.”

Through an elder’s authoritative voice, the memoir introduces the boa’s tongue motif to convey the deceptive lure of civilization. Grandpa Donasco’s words articulate how the allure of Western “civilization” functions like a predator’s trap, mesmerizing and disorienting Indigenous people and making them vulnerable to exploitation.

“The jaguar appeared. It stood on the trail like a vision. It was sleep-walking. Its eyes were closed. It arched its neck, sniffing, like an animal dreaming. I stood stock-still. Was I being hunted in a jaguar’s dream? I did not move a muscle. I was mesmerized, by the jaguar and by fear.”

Nenquimo’s encounter with a jaguar on her way to the missionary village of Damointaro is a reminder of the deep spiritual connection to the forest she is leaving behind. The author presents the encounter as a tangible, mystical event that grounds Nenquimo’s identity in Waorani cosmology, foreshadowing her eventual rejection of the Christian path and her embrace of her own culture’s power.

“The plane skidded onto a black runway with yellow stripes and we climbed out. The ground was hard and flat; I had never walked on ground like that before. The sun was hotter here and there were almost no trees.

Through stark sensory details, this passage conveys Nenquimo’s visceral shock and alienation upon arriving in the “civilized” world. The author renders the town of Shell as unnatural and hostile—hard, hot, and treeless—conveying the violence of her transition from the forest. Nenquimo’s experience illustrates the deceptive lure of civilization as her first encounter with civilization fails to meet her expectations.

“‘We already have God,’ she said quietly. ‘Tell me, Nemonte, what God are you talking about?’”

The author uses this pointed question from Aunt Geca to challenge Nenquimo’s role in the missionary project. Aunt Geca asserts that the Waorani possess their own complete and valid spiritual cosmology, reframing the Christian God as a foreign concept being imposed on them rather than a universal truth. The observation connects to Storytelling as Cultural Survival, highlighting how Nenquimo has accepted the authority of Western religious narratives over those of her own people.

“I had been trying all this time to save her from the truth, but at that moment I understood that she already knew it.”

This sentence marks Nenquimo’s epiphany while under the care of the missionaries, Rosalina and Alfredo. Her realization that Rosalina knows that Alfredo sexually abuses her and other girls exposes the moral hypocrisy that enables abuse under the guise of salvation. The author presents this moment as the final shattering of illusion, ending the hold the deceptive lure of civilization has over her.

“The boa’s tongue had trapped me, convinced me that I had no place, that I belonged in the dizzying, precarious world between the forest and the city.”

This passage establishes the central internal conflict driving Nemonte’s journey. The author uses the motif of the “boa’s tongue” to highlight how the allure of civilization leads her to become suspended between identities. In the town of Shell on the oil road, she is “trapped” in a liminal space between the Western world and her home in the forest.

“‘This is what’s got Mom,’ Dad whispered. ‘This is what’s got our people. This is the cowori sorcery right here.’ He placed the man’s face gently onto the tongue of the golden flame.”

The author uses this scene to argue that the destructive power of the outside world is not just economic but spiritual. By having Nenquimo’s father frame a dollar bill as “cowori sorcery” and destroy it in a ritualistic manner, the narrative posits that money itself is a foreign magic that corrupts and divides the community.

“‘There are no jaguars in the Bible!’ Connie continued. ‘No hunting trails. No forest medicines. No harpy eagles. The missionaries discarded whole parts of your culture, your identity, your universe!’”

By including this dialogue from the American linguist Connie, the author makes a direct point about the mechanics of cultural erasure. The passage argues that by presenting religious narratives that perpetuate their own values, missionaries actively devalue and discard the ecological and spiritual vocabulary that forms the foundation of Waorani identity.

“I spit onto the road, spit on the long finger of the white man’s world curling and curving and cutting into our forests. Spit on the boa’s tongue of civilization that turned my people from hunters and harvesters and shamans into barefoot beggars in our own lands.”

This quote conveys a moment of political awakening, where Nenquimo’s personal anger transforms into active resistance. Her physical act of spitting rejects the entire exploitative, extractive system. The personal motif of the “boa’s tongue” transforms into a public condemnation of the dependency and degradation caused by civilization.

“‘They said that oil was a salve that we could put on our skin,’ Emergildo recalled, ‘and that if we covered the lodge poles of our huts with the tar, it would keep the insects away.’”

Emergildo’s memory exposes the insidious nature of the oil company’s deception. This quote highlights how industrial poison was deliberately reframed as a beneficial “salve,” a modern tool to improve traditional life. This manipulation reveals a deeper form of violence—not just polluting the environment, but also corrupting Indigenous knowledge systems to facilitate exploitation.

“Tobacco smoke bathed my body. Delfin began to sing. The medicine wind washed across the garden, and the candles flickered, and the night became very delicate and still. Do you know who you are? I nodded my head. Who? ‘I am your daughter,’ I whispered, staring into the jaguar’s eyes. ‘I am the jaguar’s daughter.’”

This passage from the yagé ceremony represents Nenquimo’s spiritual anointing and the claiming of her true identity. Her declaration that she is “the jaguar’s daughter” is both a moment of self-recognition and a verbal acceptance of an ancestral mandate. This moment presents her future leadership as a destiny bestowed by the forest’s consciousness, moving beyond personal struggle to embrace a sacred duty.

“Band together as warriors. Learn from each other. Fight for each other. And use the tools of the cowori to defend our territories and our way of life.”

Nenquimo articulates a powerful and pragmatic strategy for modern Indigenous resistance. Her manifesto calls for inter-tribal unity while advocating a hybrid approach: maintaining a warrior spirit while adopting the legal and technological tools of the outside world. This shows an important evolution from pure opposition to strategic engagement for survival.

“‘Look at us,’ I said, my voice beginning to waver. ‘We are asking that fish to tell a laboratory to tell us what we already know.’”

In this key moment, Nenquimo finds her political voice, rejecting the passive reliance on the colonizer’s tools to validate Indigenous knowledge. Her realization that outside sources cannot be trusted to identify oil contamination is the catalyst for the Ceibo Alliance, framing the resistance movement as one born from an insistence on the legitimacy of lived experience over external validation.

“I knew our territory was immense, knew that we didn’t live in disconnected islands of forest like the Kofan, Siekopai, and Siona, but I didn’t really understand the difference until I saw Opi draw the gigantic, two-headed oval below the Napo River.”

The author uses the visual act of mapping to render an important geopolitical argument about the stakes of the fight. The contrast between the fragmented territories of other nations—already carved up by industry—and the vast, intact Waorani land is made starkly visible, establishing what is at risk and why their struggle is unique.

“Delfín was right: The cowori don’t know anything about the forest, they only think about turning it into money. Maybe we can show them how much life is in our territory. If they can see what we see, maybe they won’t destroy it.”

Nenquimo’s father, Tiri, frames the Waorani’s mapping project as an opportunity to make the forest’s sacred and complex reality visible to an outside world blinded by extractivist logic. His words emphasize the theme of storytelling as cultural survival, suggesting they can create a counternarrative to the state’s official maps depicting only empty forest.

“‘It means that the white people can’t understand the jaguar,’ she said. ‘But they can understand us now.’ She paused, nodding at the judges. ‘Because we are jaguar lawyers. We speak the jaguar’s words so that the white people can hear them.’”

The author uses this statement by the elder, Wiña, to offer a culminating metaphor for the Waorani’s legal victory. Wiña underscores the importance of storytelling as cultural survival as she argues that their success lay in their ability to translate a non-Western understanding of the world, embodied in the jaguar, into a narrative the court could comprehend.