by Adele A. Wilby
With its pristine rainforest, complex ecosystems and rich wildlife, Ecuador has been home to one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth. For thousands of years indigenous peoples have also lived harmoniously in this rainforest on their ancestral land. All that has now changed. Since the 1960s, oil companies, gold miners, loggers and the enabling infrastructural workers have all played their part in the systematic deforestation and destruction of this complex eco-system. Human rights abuses, health issues, deleterious effects on the people’s cultures and the displacement of people have all become part of the indigenous people’s lives. But wherever and whenever oppression, exploitation and social injustice raises its ugly head, resistance will eventually emerge, and so it is with the indigenous Waorani people of the Ecuadorian rainforest, under the leadership of Nemonte Nenquimo.
Nenquimo’s recent autobiographical memoir, We Will Not Be Saved, is a detailed narration of her life as an indigenous Waorani woman living in the rainforest and the consequences of the extractive industrial practices on their way of life and the rainforest they live amongst. With the assistance of her husband Mitch Anderson listening, translating and rendering Nenquimo’s voice, she provides us with authentic, deep insight into the exceptional culture and world view of her people; it makes an important contribution to our knowledge of indigenous people’s lives and the devastating impact of the oil industry on those lives.
There are two parts to this book. Part One spans her childhood years in her village of Toñampare and ends with her flight from the missionary couple with whom she lived when in her teens. Nenquimo writes emotively and insightfully about those years of her life and her community’s intimate and harmonious connection to the natural environment; of her mother’s pregnancies and her twelve brothers and sisters living in a smoked filled oko; of how she makes the sweetest manioc mixture of chicha; of hunting with her father and learning to identify the footprints belonging to the diverse forms of animal life; of how she learns of the spirit that lives within the jaguar and of the power of the shamans.
The book is also significant for the way it highlights the stark contrasts between two ways of life and world views, that of the ‘cowori’, ‘outsiders’ as the white people are known in Wao Tededo, the language of the Waorani, and the life of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian rainforest. As a small child Nenquimo runs excitedly to the landing site when she hears the humming sound of an ebo, a plane, bringing the cowori, including missionaries, to her village. She could never have imagined then that one day she would find herself not running towards but running away from the Christian missionaries the plane delivered to her village.
As has been the experience of many indigenous peoples across the globe, the proselyting Christian missionaries have been involved in effecting drastic changes in their lives imposing on them not only the ‘word of God’ but bringing with them deadly diseases such as polio. From the outset, the missionary in Nenquimo’s village, Rachel Saint, defined the differences between the two cultures by choosing not to live in the oko, the traditional large home of the people, but to live in a house ‘made from wood boards and sheet metal’. Once settled, we learn how Saint set about proselytising, patronising and disparaging the Waorani people and their way of life. Her shocking racism and arrogance and her unwillingness to learn about the people amongst whom she lived, and the rainforest became apparent soon after arrival in her explicit naming of Nenquimo’s people as ‘auca’, ‘savages’. She constantly asserted her Christian beliefs, their relative nakedness being one example, telling them, ‘God gave us clothes to wear, the devil took them off’. Saint dismissed and ignored the spiritual beliefs of the Waorani and attempted to replace them with a new ‘God’, a ‘God’ who was ‘white’. But as the people came to understand, Saint was more than a missionary: she acted as a paid agent of the oil companies hosting them when they visited to discuss the appropriation of land and providing the labour for the industries.
Confused by the presence of the missionaries, Nenquimo asks ‘What were they here for?’ She had already heard of stories of how people had come to ‘save my people’ before she was born and how the warriors had resisted and killed the invaders. But Nenquimo’s curious mind further asks, ‘What is saved?’ Saved from what?’ (italics in original). As the title of the book suggests, they feel no need or aspiration to be ‘saved’ least of all by the imposition of the ‘cowori’ lifestyle and beliefs that had brought with it such devastation to the culture and environment. In a telling answer to Nenquimo’s question ‘what kind of power did Rachel’s God give her?’ her perceptive father says, ‘like when a boa mesmerises a deer 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’ (page 33) Narrating what has happened since the arrival of the ‘cowori’, he says, ‘I saw everything’, ‘everything’ referring to how ‘the ‘cowori’ cut big trails. Straight lines in the forest…They cut from dawn to until dusk … they brought orange cables…and bundles of what they called dynamite. They made holes in the ground and dropped the bundles deep into the earth’.
Nevertheless, Nenquimo is initially ‘mesmerised’ by the ‘tongue of the boa’, the material goods Saint brings, ‘god’s gifts’, of ‘candies sweeter than wild fruit, baby dolls with blue eyes and blonde hair, balls that bounced, toys that rolled’ and she longed for a ‘pretty dress’. But as she is to learn, these are not gifts at all, but bribes: the ‘gifts’ are only for those who attend the ‘House of God’ on Sundays. Such is Nenquimo’s enchantment at times with the ‘cowori’, ‘their skin, their teeth, their clothes, the planes, their promises’, she goes to the extent of feigning toothache and painfully extracting some of her teeth hoping that the white people will replace them with new ones as she had seen in others.
Over time, Nenquimo comes to understand that there are ‘two worlds’, ‘one where there were smoky, firelight oko, …the parrots echoed ‘Mengatowe’, and my family called me Nemonte… 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’. Yet the way of the ‘cowori’ from ‘Civilisation’ and her own curious mind eventually leads to Nenquimo leaving the rainforest and her family for the town of Damonoïntaro where she lives with a missionary couple. Nenquimo writes movingly of that period in her life and her confusion and fear during episodes of sexual abuse by one of the missionaries. She is taken to Quito, the capital of Ecuador by the missionary couple where she learns to read and write and studies the Bible – and the sexual abuse continues. Nevertheless, as is the case with many instances of experience with injustice and exploitation, a breaking point is reached, and so it was with Nenquimo, and it is a turning point in her life.
A configuration of events come together and effect a rupture between Nenquimo and the evangelicals, one of those being an awareness of the hypocrisy and insincerity of the wife of the missionary. Nenquimo is shocked when she notices that the letters she had written in response to the queries about her way of life from the ‘Compassionate Ones’, children from America, had all been totally rewritten and replaced with religious jargon such as ‘I prey to the Almighty…’ and ‘My saviour…I live for God’. At this point, for the first time in the book, we see real anger from Nenquimo. ‘My whole body was shaking’ she writes. Nenquimo finally flees into ‘the pitch-dark night… towards the hissing yellow lights of the road’. Deceived and abused she knows she ‘would not return to the big red house…nor to the mission and the missionaries. I was leaving it all, and I didn’t know where to go’.
We pick up Nenquimo’s story seven years later in Part Two and Nenquimo is a woman who ‘carried secrets now, traumas that rotted inside me, stories that I would never share’. Her return to her village and the rainforest brings with it both joy and dismay. Her family welcomes her but there are changes: her beloved brother Victor has died; the family has moved further inland; some of her siblings have moved to the towns and the river and the land are polluted with oil waste. There is also a growing awareness in her of the widespread indignities her people are exposed to when she sees women outside a camp that housed the oil industry employees queuing for fresh water from the hose of a ‘coweri’ and wonders how their situation has come to this. But Nenquimo is stirred into action when she hears women from different villages commenting that it was ‘up to the women’ to resist the sale of land that was continuing. Nenquimo attends a protest at the site of the Oil Round, the meeting place where the government makes decisions about which new area of the rainforest the oil companies are to start drilling. It is at this protest that the reader sees Nenquimo assert her identity when another protestor tells her to ‘paint your face so the world knows you are Waorani’.
Participation in this event is the beginning of Nenquimo’s future life as an environmental campaigner and for the empowerment of the Waorani and other indigenous people, for their right to determine their own destiny on their ancestral land. Years of social injustice and exploitation and pride in her own identity and love of the ancestral rainforest, Nenquimo’s political and social skills are revealed in her narration of how she mobilises the different communities under a united front of the indigenous people, the Ceibo Alliance. With allies from the Amazon Frontlines, she mobilises all resources to resist the further expropriation of their land and plans for opening new drilling sites and to assert their rights.
The plans for protests represent a new form of struggle for self-determination for the indigenous communities. Throughout the book there are events which indicate that the Waorani people have always shown some form of resistance in their history to both the missionary presence and the activities of the oil companies in the rainforest. We learn that Rachel Saint’s brother was killed by the Waorani when he arrived in the rainforest. The labelling of ‘young men being led by the devil’s hand’, as ‘communists’ for speaking out against the oil companies and the impact it will have on the rivers and environment and the practices of the ‘cowori’ suggests early resistance by the people. Likewise, some indigenous communities have moved deeper into the rainforest, the ‘uncontactables’ as they are now known, people who, Nenquimo’s father thought, ‘must stay hidden and safe and untouched’. They demonstrate their resistance to the presence of the ‘cowori’ by the symbols they leave in the rainforest to warn the oil companies they are angry and that ‘this is our territory’.
Taking on and winning court cases against the vast legal resources available to a state is a monumental challenge for any resistance campaign, yet Nenquimo and her people remained unfazed by the prospect. With the assistance of people such as her husband Mitch Anderson, a writer and activist, and the support from environmentalists and activists from around the world, Nenquimo mobilises a united resistance from within the community also under the slogan ‘Our Land is Not for Sale’, to challenge the Ecuadorian government and its plans for annexing land and drilling for oil in the future. In a fascinating section, we learn how the people reject the government’s maps and utilise their vast knowledge of the rainforest and redraw the boundaries of Waorani territory to demonstrate the extent of their ancestral land for presentation at the courts.
Their campaign brings some success. In an unprecedented court ruling in April 2019, the judge awarded the Waorani communities half a million hectares of their ancestral rainforest to be protected from being auctioned to oil companies. Following this campaign, in 2020 Nenquimo was named one of the Time magazine’s most influential people, and she was awarded the 2020 Goldman Environmental Prize .
Nenquimo’s book is a stark and powerful reminder of the costs to people and the environment of modern economies and materialism that drives the fossil fuel industries. She also reveals the power of collective resistance to injustice, exploitation and deception. But it is more than that also: the Waorani people’s struggle has global reach and implications for us all facing a climate change crisis, it is also a struggle to protect the diversity and richness of life on the planet and to secure a sustainable environment for all.