The little girls, the children of the forest, were trapped in a shed at the end of the oil road when Nemonte first told me her name – Many Stars – in that courtyard garden of the Hotel Auca. The city buzzed and clanked and groaned around us, an indifferent machine, an inevitable force. But Nemonte’s eyes held something much deeper than all that. I didn’t know what it was. The scratches of the little girls on her skin. The cries of the forest. The laughter of her ancestors. That was the night she began to tell me her story. It was in her eyes.
You know much of what happened afterwards. But you don’t know everything. Many stories were left untold.
Some were very good. There were triumphs that merit whole books. The Kofan stopped the gold miners at the headwaters. The Siekopai reclaimed their stolen lands on the Peruvian border. The Siona blocked pipelines. The Ecuadorian people voted to kick the oil companies out of the sacred forests of Yasuni, the territory of the uncontacted, the ancestral home of those little girls.
There were painful stories too. Friends were killed for fighting to protect their lands and their communities. Elders died, and with them stories, knowledge, language, a way of life that few will ever understand. More oil wells were drilled, gold concessions granted, roads carved, communities divided.
When Nemonte asked me to write her story, she was pregnant with our second child, our son. Her mother had been right that night when Daime was born. She had seen the future in the umbilical cord, knew that a boy was next. We made a home together in the village of Nemonpare. Our son was born while Daime ran barefoot along the trails, climbed the fruit trees, trapped shrimp in the creeks.
Each morning at dawn, Nemonte told me her story, and her people’s stories, by the fire. Some I knew. Some I had lived. Others reached places that I couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t imagine. Stories about the times when the Waorani people could speak to the animals, become animals. The ancestors had names and stories. Some felt to me like myths, legends, others like epic chronicles on the eve of conquest. Hunts gone awry. Battles between clans, betrayals, spear-killings. Detailed accounts of sorcery, of dreams, of visions. River crossings. Raids of colonist settlements for machetes and metal axes. Planes flying overhead, voices speaking from above, strange new things – salt and sugar, pots and clothes – lowered in baskets from the sky.
As the months passed, I listened and wrote these stories down, tried to touch the written word with the smoky spirit, the crackling embers of oral stories at dawn. But in the end, these stories, which are the deepest collective memories of the Waorani people, were not explicitly included in this book. I hope though that the spirit of these memories, of the lives the ancestors lived, can be felt beneath the words, rising like smoke or dreams within the story we chose to tell.
This book was a brave journey. It was painful. Traumas were relived. Memories unearthed, reshaped, cast in new light. It was healing too. Moments of joy and hysterical laughter are hidden beyond the pages.
Nemonte told me her story in Spanish, a language that she learned when she was already a young woman. And I wrote this book in English, the language of the missionaries and the oil companies who tried to save her people, invade her forests, the language of a civilization that caused tremendous harm.
I read aloud to her every word that I wrote, every scene, every bit of dialogue, every description. These are her memories. She shaped the words, the narrative, breathed life into the people, into her feelings, her experiences, her forest.
In her introduction, Nemonte said that for her people, stories are living beings. I hope you will treat her story kindly. Just like the forest and her people, it deserves respect. It deserves to live.