BY EMILY CHAN
Growing up in Toñampare in the Amazon rainforest during the early ’90s, Nemonte Nenquimo was always among the first to run and greet the planes that began landing in her village. “I was a curious girl, always curious about everything,” she explains via Zoom in Spanish, with her husband Mitch Anderson translating. “I wanted to be the first person to hear the plane and the white people arriving.”
Nenquimo, now 39, describes how she was “torn between two worlds” as a member of the Waorani tribe. “My people lived in close connection with the forest, attempting to maintain our identities, our laughter, our songs, our ceremonies. I grew up learning how to garden in the Amazon, about the spiritual world,” she recalls. “At the same time, it was a missionary village, where an American lived and obligated the families to go to church every Sunday and attempted to instil fear in the Waorani people, to change their way of life, telling them nakedness is part of the devil.”
At the age of 14, Nenquimo decided to leave her home to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. During this time, she was sexually abused – a painful experience she recounts in her new memoir, entitled We Will Not Be Saved, co-written with her husband. “I buried these stories my entire life until I began writing my story,” she says. “I decided to include some of these in the book as a way of healing myself.”
After more than a year away from home, she was shocked by what she found when she returned to the rainforest: oil companies had moved in, destroying local habitats and polluting the waterways that Indigenous communities relied on. “I came back to my land, to my culture, to fight to protect our way of life – to defend our rivers and our forests against the bewildering threats we face from oil companies, from loggers, miners, the government,” she explains. “My people always lived free in the forest and they want to continue living free in the forest. We need to protect it.”
As Nenquimo looked for ways to help Indigenous communities in the rainforest, she met Anderson, who was building rainwater catchment systems in the Amazon at the time. “I was intrigued by the work Mitch was doing and wanted to go out and meet other Indigenous communities in Ecuador’s northern Amazon that I didn’t know but had heard about,” she recalls. “It was through this experience, building access to clean water, that we fell in love.”
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 organisation 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 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 realised 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’ defence of our ancestral lands.”
For Nenquimo, though, it’s important to emphasise 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 Not Be Saved by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson is out now. – Vogue
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