We Will Be Jaguars

January 1, 2024

A leader of the Waorani people and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People, Nenquimo writes about her childhood growing up in the Amazon rainforest and her work as one of the leading figures in climate change activism. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2024
In this impassioned autobiography, Nenquimo teams up with her husband, Anderson, to recount her journey from young Indigenous girl to renowned environmental activist. Nenquimo was born in 1985 and grew up in an Ecuadorian rainforest tribe called the Waorani, where she was subject to persistent conversion efforts by Christian missionaries. Though Nenquimo felt attached to Waorani traditions, she succumbed to the proselytizing as a teenager, agreeing to be baptized and moving to a nearby Christian village, where she was sexually abused by her host. After she returned home, Nenquimo was galvanized to protect Waorani ways of life and began organizing against oil companies’ rapidly increasing interest in her tribe’s rainforest land. As Nenquimo builds toward the landmark 2019 Ecuadorian court case she led, which successfully blocked a government plan to develop oil infrastructure on half a million acres of rainforest, she educates readers on Waorani customs—including vividly rendered afternoons spent with her community storyteller—and makes space for moments of profound joy (the birth of her daughter) and sadness (her mother’s relinquishing of Nenquimo’s baby sister to missionaries in hopes they will “teach her the white people’s ways”). This fascinates and inspires.

Starred review from September 1, 2024
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.

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Starred review from September 15, 2024
For decades, the Waorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon have fought to protect their lands from illegal logging and disastrous oil drilling. This eye-opening memoir by native Waorani activist Nenquimo and coauthor Anderson, her husband, shares family and tribal stories, dives into Waorani cosmology, and chronicles their hard-fought battles for clean water and autonomy over their lands. Throughout her telling, Nenquimo peppers the narration with endearing childhood memories (feeding grasshoppers to her family's pet monkey) and vivid sensory impressions, such as charred manioc, the iridescent chest feathers of black curassows, and the "oily purple gleam of the palm fruits." These details add engrossing texture to Nenquimo's stories of family, friends, and rainforest life, even as Christian missionaries and capitalist greed encroach on their culture. Readers will find themselves heartbroken, infuriated, and elated as the Waorani fight against (and alongside) soldiers, volunteers, and fellow tribespeople to achieve a momentous, if fragile, victory. "We had protected a half-million acres of our rainforest," Nenquimo reflects, paving a legal pathway for other native nations to extend their own collective reclamations of their ancestral lands. An indispensable testimony to Nenquimo's people, their history, and their homelands that continues the unceasing fight for Indigenous rights and environmental protection across the Americas.

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Starred review from September 20, 2024

Activist Nenquimo, a leader of the Waorani people, grew up in Tonampare, a village of 30 families in the Ecuadorian rainforest. In her memoir, written with Anderson (founder and executive director, Amazon Frontline), she describes the Waorani people's homes and food and the lessons they learned from their elders. She recalled watching white missionaries arrive by plane and how her siblings invented stories of the missionaries' lives in the sky. At one point, her family left Tonampare to start a new village that was a two-day walk from an active oil well. There, Nenquimo's world changed rapidly: new clothes, work, encounters with authorities, and more. She asserts that the church, government, and oil companies abused, polluted and destroyed the Waorani land, leaving people in her village displaced and estranged from the forest. She recalled what her father told her, that the spirits of their ancestors live as jaguars, carrying experiences and knowledge from generation to generation. So, Nenquimo decided to fight the oil companies like a jaguar as she advocated for the Waorani people and built alliances with other communities too. VERDICT This stunning memoir offers compelling details about Nenquimo's parallel journeys from student to activist and from child to mother, in a way that will appeal to readers of many generations.--Catherine Lantz

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