Amazonian activist Nemonte Nenquimo on a life under threat and people’s ignorance to the rainforest

As a child, I often heard the elders in my community say that the less you know about something, the easier it is to destroy it. I wondered what it was that I didn’t understand, and what was in danger because of what I didn’t know. It would take me years to realise that they were talking about us, our forest, our way of life, that we are the ones constantly on the verge of being destroyed by those who don’t understand us. 

I am a Waorani Indigenous woman from the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. My life, my language, my culture and people and the territory that gives us life are all under threat. 

Illegal miners want to poison our rivers and blow up our hillsides to leach gold dust from rocks. Illegal loggers want to build roads into our forests and cut down the trees. The Ecuadorian government and multinational oil companies want to drill deep into our lands and pump out every last drop of oil, the blood of our ancestors, killing the land and the rivers and everything that depends on them, including us, in the process. 

And the urban, industrialised world wants to continue buying and selling their comforts and conveniences, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, heating up the planet, and pushing the entire Amazon – as well as other vulnerable regions – to a point of no return. 

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I see these dangers everywhere and recall the words of my elders. The miners, loggers, oil barons and beneficiaries of hyper consumerism must be completely ignorant of what life is like in the Amazon rainforest – the most biodiverse place on Earth and the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink – and of what people like me and the hundreds of other Indigenous cultures in the Amazon are like. That must be why it is so easy for them to destroy what gives us life. 

Over the past decade I and many others like me have tried to bridge this gap in understanding. We have participated in interviews with anthropologists, journalists and documentary filmmakers. We have travelled and spoken in all kinds of international panels and conferences. 

We created an Indigenous mapping project to show the government and the oil companies that our territory is not some vast empty green space on their map. In our cartography, the forest is full of life: it is where we find our grocery stores and hardware stores, our pharmacies and temples, our burial grounds and old villages, our beauty salons, cultural centres and art supply shops, our living history. Our stories and memories all reside there.   

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We had to take the Ecuadorian government to court to make them listen to us, look at our maps and ensure that our rights to decide what happens in our territories are respected. We won in the courts against the interests of the big oil companies, and protected hundreds of thousands of hectares of Indigenous territory and pristine rainforest. And yet the dangers and threats persist. 

The book I wrote with my husband Mitch took us a few years because our stories take time. I come from an oral storytelling culture: we talk in the mornings, we talk late into the night, we talk as we walk through the forest, while we work and as we share meals. I told Mitch my stories over many years and then, after a time, Mitch began taking notes, recording some conversations. 

He didn’t listen like an anthropologist does. He listened differently; he listened with love and respect and so I decided to trust him with my story. 

After more than a year of taking notes and making recordings, Mitch began to write. Sometimes he would excitedly read me his latest pages at night. Often, he would tell them back to me. An editor recently described Mitch as my translator.

In a sense, he does do some cultural translation between the Waorani world and the English-speaking world. But he did not translate my book: we wrote my book together. In that sense, our book is itself an embodied offering from the desire to understand and communicate, the desire to respect and not do harm. 

Which leads me to the book’s title: We Will Not Be Saved. For centuries, the people who have done the most harm to my people and the forests where we live, are the very people who have claimed to save us. They said they brought us salvation and the word of God. But they brought disease, slavery, murder, dispossession and racism. 

Later they came back, with bulldozers and drills instead of horses and Bibles, saying they would save us from “poverty”, a condition we never knew before their arrival. 

People must not understand what they destroy so easily. We don’t want to be saved – which has always been code for conquered or eliminated – we want to be respected. And we hope that our book can play some role, even a small one, in strengthening understanding and respect, and protecting Indigenous lives and the rainforest we call home. 

We Will Not Be Saved: A Memoir of Hope and Resistance in the Amazon Rainforest by Nemonte Nenquimo with Mitch Anderson, is out now (Headline, £20). You canbuy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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