Indigenous Activist Nemonte Nenquimo on Her New Book ‘We Will Be Jaguars’ and Defending The Amazon

Encountering other Indigenous communities during this time also led to the idea of joining together to rally against the multiple threats they faced. In 2015, Nenquimo co-founded the Ceibo Alliance, comprising members of the Waorani, Kofan, Siona, and Secoya peoples, alongside Amazon Frontlines. “It’s an organization that works with Indigenous communities to secure their land rights, defend their territories in real-time against invasion, deforestation [and other] threats,” the activist says. “[We wanted to] also begin creating global allies that could support the Indigenous movement to protect their lands.” In 2019, Nenquimo, alongside other members of the Waorani tribe, won a court case against the Ecuadorian government that prevented their land from being auctioned off to oil companies, later winning the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2020 in recognition of her work.

Following the painful losses experienced by her community, the campaigner decided to write her book in order to tell her story, as well as the stories of her ancestors. “In my culture, our stories are spoken; they haven’t been written down,” she explains. “After many years of struggle, working to protect our lands and our way of life, I realized that it was necessary to tell my story to the entire world, so that they could know our struggle, the culture of my people, the importance of the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous peoples’ defense of our ancestral lands.”

For Nenquimo, though, it’s important to emphasize that Indigenous communities are not asking to be saved, as highlighted by the title of her memoir. “In my experience, people from the outside arrived into the forest—missionaries, oil companies, and others—with this idea that the Waorani people needed to be saved. Ultimately, what they did was cause a lot of harm and trauma,” she says. It’s a crucial message in the context of the climate crisis we’re facing. “This mentality of needing to save Mother Earth is missing a deeper truth, which is that Mother Earth is not asking to be saved,” the activist concludes. “She’s just demanding to be respected.”

We Will Be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson is out now.