One morning, I stood frozen in the front of the classroom with a stub of chalk in my hand. The teacher wanted me to trace the lines on the chalk-board, lines called letters, vowels, numbers . . . I hated the screech of chalk, so I was happy to hear the sudden drone of a plane in the faraway sky.
The teacher shouted at all of us to sit down but we ignored him, rushing gleefully from the schoolhouse to the runway to see who was coming. The plane juddered to a halt before us. But this was odd. A plane without white people? A plane that carried a wooden box?
The pilot unlatched the doors amidst whispers. The Waorani pastors unloaded the long wooden box amidst murmurs and cries. From the many voices, from the collective anguish, I knew there was death inside the box, that it was a coffin. And that inside was Amo. Amo, who I had seen asking his jaguar grandfather, the sorcerer, to help him kill the cowori cattle. Amo, who had lifted Nënëcawa’s wheelchair down to the river so he could go fishing. Amo, who had whispered kindly to me that my father would be home soon. How could Amo be dead?
The Waorani pastors were soon beside the coffin, singing a prayer, heads tilted up towards the sky. They lifted it, and everyone walked behind them towards the church. I had not seen death before. The death of many animals, yes. But not the death of one of us. The box was set down in the shade beside the church. I walked towards it on the machete-scraped red earth. My parrot was chirping inside my shirt. My heart was pounding.
Amo’s skin was the color of unripened petomo fruit, a purplish-green. He was wearing nice clothes, a button-down shirt. His hair had been combed. It was shiny black and lay partially across his chest. He had tissue paper sticking out of his nose, and a hole in the side of his head. I didn’t look at him for very long because I didn’t want to smell the death of my friend. I remembered how strong he was, carrying Nënë across the mud.
I looked up at the sky. I wondered if a condor would travel from the mountains to pay respects. My little brother was at my side.
“You see that?” Víctor said.
“What?”
“He’s watching us from over in the miwagos . . .”
“Who?”
“Amo is in the miwagos, watching.”
I looked into the lush shade of the trees but couldn’t see anything. It was a still and windless day. I turned back to Víctor. I said nothing.
Amo lay in the wooden box until the sun was high overhead. The entire village was waiting for his parents, Moipa and Etahuane, to arrive. They had gone away into the forest earlier that morning. I felt scared for them. What would the news of their son’s death do to them?
Moipa arrived and walked through the crowd, and he didn’t look into anyone’s eyes. He knelt beside the coffin, put his hand over his chest, and bowed his head, silently. Etahuane was behind him. She burst into tears and, wailing, threw herself onto her son’s body.
“We will bury my son by our home, not here. Not by the church,” Moipa said.
They carried Amo across the runway. The pastors followed on each side, singing to Jesus. Moipa’s house was right next to ours, just behind Nënëcawa’s. The men dug a grave, beneath the sun, behind the longhouse.
I wanted to know what had happened to my friend Amo. But all I learned was that he had been shot by the cowori. What kind of cowori would do this? Would the bearded Jesus man do such a thing? What about the men in hard hats, the company men?
Rachel stood at the edge of the yard, watching the men dig the grave. Suddenly, I felt angry at her. Why hadn’t her God protected Amo?
Amo’s mom, Etahuane, wailed a death song. She reached into the coffin and put her fingers inside the hole in his head.
“Where is the bullet?” she screamed. “I will kill all of them!”
Aunt Wiamenke pulled her away.
Before Amo was lowered into the ground, his father knelt beside the coffin. He held a wad of paper in his hands. He was silent for a long time and then he said: “This is why you’re dead, my son. Money. Take it with you.” And he threw the paper into the coffin.
After the burial, Moipa sat in a hammock in our oko, drinking chicha from a gourd.
“The animals always warn us before death,” he said. “My son was thinking about our people, but he did not see the signs.”
“Ao,” my father said with his throat, the sound of understanding.
“All my son talked about was the company. How Rachel Saint was going to give our lands to the company, how they were letting cattle farmers into our forest. How they were ending our world.”
I looked through an opening in the palm thatch. Mom was crouched down, burning a pile of dried leaves, forest medicine to keep the evil spirits away. The smoke was thick and dark like a storm cloud. She chanted softly, wafting the plumes across the yard. Her face looked severe in the orange light of dusk.
“He went to spear-kill the cowori cattle that are grazing our lands,” Moipa continued. “At dusk, he found a dead amonka in a patch of forest. It had been shot in the head that day. It was freshly killed. That monkey was an omen. The others did not eat it but my son was hungry, and he roasted it on the fire. That night, the wasps came to him in his dream. They too wanted to warn him. They stung him in the head. He told the others his dream in the morning. But he did not listen to his own dream.”
I looked at the chigra hanging in the corner, where Dad kept the money that the company gave him. Inside it, I knew that the money had become dry and crinkled and slightly black from smoke. No one looked at it. No one cared about it. In our language, money is called tokore, which means something like “worthless paper.” I wasn’t quite sure what this money could be used for or how some worthless paper had killed Amo.
“Rachel said my son was a communist. That he was on the devil’s path. But that’s a lie. He was a warrior, just like our ancestors. My son went to fight against the company and against the cowori who Rachel invites to our lands. And they shot him in the head and left him to die on the oil road.”
We were silent for a while, and then my dad said: “Now your son is a jaguar.” He made a big motion with his hands, circling the entire forest. “And he will defend our lands.”
Rachel wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, a ruffled white blouse, and a big red necklace. Her skin was pink and blotchy. She carried a colorful parasol and stood at the edge of the runway, a head taller than Dayuma and the Waorani pastors at her side.
“There will be soldiers with guns,” she said sternly. “Make sure that those aucas over there don’t spook them with their spears. They’ve got that crazy look in their eyes.”
The planes had been arriving all morning. There were cowori every-where. Some of them held things called “cameras” in front of their faces, black boxes with one big eye. We children rolled around in the grass and jumped all over each other, giggling. The men of the village were wearing sun-bleached white skirts, made from the bark of a tree, with forest-seed bandoliers across their chests. No one was naked; even the sorcerer, Äwä, was wearing a skirt. The men were kicking up dust on a patch of red, sunbaked earth, their chants echoing across the village.
My dad didn’t join in the chanting. He was sitting on a log, shirtless, under the open sun, with his arms folded across his chest.
He had explained to me that Rachel was making an agreement with the oil company and today the company was coming to celebrate. They were going to give us lots of tokore and then they would build roads and drill for oil in the old lands, where our relatives the Taromenane and the Tagëiri lived.
Dad was unhappy about this. The Taromenane and Tagëiri were clans who had never left the forest, who had stayed away from white people and had never followed the missionaries. We may not have met them, but they were still our relatives. They were fierce as we were once fierce; they might spear us if we came across them by mistake. We respected and feared them, and at the same time we wanted to protect them from the white people. Dad got a faraway look in his eye when he talked about the uncontacted. They were the people we used to be.
“They must stay hidden and safe and untouched,” Dad always said, in a way that made me wonder if he wished he had stayed like that, instead of being taken to the missionaries as a child.
I did not understand what was going to happen today, why our men were clothed and kicking and chanting. I stood near Rachel to try to find out.
“When the helicopter arrives,” Rachel said to Dayuma, “make sure that the women greet them. Tell those auca men over there to form a line to the longhouse. A very special lady will be arriving. She is the daughter of the president of Ecuador! It is important that we are polite to her. The chief of the oil company will be here too. They want to be friends with the Waorani. They are good Christians and they want to help.”
The chopping grew louder and then the helicopter appeared over the ridge. It was green and black and it was the biggest and scariest thing that I had ever seen. It hovered over us. The wind was violent.
Soldiers jumped out of the helicopter before the wind had even stopped blowing. They wore the colors of the jungle at night, dark glasses, and flat, soft, red hats. They carried black guns over their shoulders.
Finally, the blades were still, and for a moment I felt dizzy.
A very pale, thin lady appeared. She had short, dark, curly hair and shiny jewelry in her ears. Rachel, Dayuma, and the pastors greeted her like a very important person.
I joined the women of the village nearby. Their arms were woven together and they were dancing, barefoot, outside the palm-thatch meeting hall.
“We don’t know who you are, or why you have come, but we are here anyways!” they sang. “We don’t know who you are or why you have come!”
At the edge of the crowd, a few men were demonstrating another sort of dance, thrusting their spears down at the ground: “Ba, ba, ba, ba! If you don’t listen, I will kill you dead, just like this! Ba, ba, ba, ba!”
The cowori could not understand the words of their songs.
The chief of the oil company had followed the pale lady out of the helicopter. He was very tall, old, and white. He wore a clay-colored uniform and a white hard hat. One of the women, Ömpure, whose name means river otter, stepped forward. She smiled and dotted his cheeks and forehead with red achiote seeds. I wasn’t sure he was pleased about that but you could never tell with cowori.
We kids were not allowed in the meeting hall, so we stayed outside. Groups of Waorani boys posed for pictures in front of the helicopter, wearing skirts and crowns and carrying spears. I thought about Amo. What would he have thought of all this to welcome an oil company? And where was that other young man, Moi, who everyone said was the leader of the communists? He had not come to the celebration.
I looked around and the villagers were smiling and dancing and behaving exactly as Rachel had told them to. But the more I thought about it, the less I understood. Why didn’t Äwä send the jaguars to attack? If the company was going to destroy the homes of the birds and all the fish in the river, then why didn’t we just spear these people dead?
I ran around the longhouse and peered through a crack. All I could see was Rachel in her white shirt, beaming broadly amidst the sound of clapping.
When I returned to the others, a young woman was bursting from the shadows and the crowds inside. It was Mengare, daughter of River Otter. She ran into the sunlight, holding something in her palms.
“Look, look,” she shouted. “The earrings. I have her earrings! The lady gave them to my mother.”
We gathered around. In her hands lay the shiny earrings.
“You can see the clouds in them!”
“I’m going to wear them in my ears forever!” Mengare shouted gleefully.
“What is everyone doing in there?” I asked her. “Why is everyone clapping?”
She shrugged. “They are saying that we are all going to be friends and that everyone will be happy.”
I knew that my dad was not pleased that Rachel had allowed the company into our old lands, the faraway lands where he was born. He worried most of all about the uncontacted.
“How can our relatives live in the forest if the company builds roads and cuts down trees and digs holes into the earth?” my father asked.
Mom stirred the pots and fried the meat and did not reply.
“And us too,” he continued. “How can we live here if there are no animals left to hunt?”
“Rachel says the company will give us food,” Mom said.
Dad shook his head. “We don’t eat the company kind of food.”
Mom was silent. We all knew that some people did eat that kind of food. If they were offered chicken and rice, a few villagers were pleased to take it so that they did not have to go out hunting.
“We don’t eat cowori food,” Dad repeated as if Mom had argued with him.
But that was not the end of the conversation. At night, I woke up and heard them speaking softly by the fire. They were talking about leaving the village.
“I don’t want to walk so far from the village to hunt peccary,” Dad was saying. “There are many animals downriver.”
I soon understood that he wanted to leave Toñampare and she did not.
I expected her resistance to be still and silent, or perhaps angry, but instead she simply said: “I am not dreaming well.”
“Ao,” murmured Dad.
“My dreams are filled with snakes. That means the people are talking too much. There is gossip and envy in the village. Did you know they are stealing from our gardens?”
“We should go soon and make our own village downriver,” Dad said.
Mom was whispering and yet I could hear her as clearly as if she was whispering in my ear. “There will be no school.”
“Our kids will do better without school. They can learn from us about the forest.”
There was a long silence.
“We should go,” Dad said again.
At last Mom spoke: “It is not time yet.”
I knew then that we were certainly leaving Toñampare, although I did not know when. And there were rumors about another departure. People said Rachel was going away for a while. Some thought she was going off to live with the oil company. A few whispered that she was sick and that she was thinking of going away to get better, that Dayuma had offered her all the plant medicine the forest had to offer and Rachel had said no to this. But time passed and Rachel stayed, so maybe the rumors were just gossip.
And then something happened.
That day did not start well. When I woke up, I found that a rat had sneaked into the oko and eaten its way through the liana we used to make hanging bird cages. It had eaten the heads off all my baby birds. There were just feathers and intestines left.
“I’ll find you some more birds,” Dad said when I could not stop crying.
“I hate those rats,” I sobbed.
“There never were rats until the cowori came in their planes. They cleared runways and brought in grass seeds on the soles of their feet and the wheels of the planes. And once we had long grass, we had rats.” Dad blew on his chicha before taking a huge gulp of it. “They love cowori food. Rice, sugar, pasta, candy. It’s food for the rats.”
Dad was born before any of that food came to the forest. Before there were any churches or missionaries. Before clothes, before blankets. When everyone had been the uncontacted, not just the Taromenane and the Tagëiri
Mom was outside, preparing to go to one of our gardens in the forest. She had been so irritated by my persistent sobbing that she had threatened to beat me with a stinging nettle. But I could not stop crying as I stooped to pick up the black and bright-red feathers of my tepeña bird. It must have chirped loudly when it had been attacked but I had not come to save it.
“We will make a crown of feathers,” said Dad. “Those red ones are for going to war.”
I went to school clutching a handful of bloody bird feathers and continued to cry until I was startled by a sudden commotion at the door. Voices. Loud voices. Then a couple of elders appeared. They were naked, wearing feathered crowns and bandoliers across their chests. The teacher started to protest but one of them was addressing us.
“Children!” he boomed. “You are spending all your days in school, but what are you learning here? What can this man, this teacher who knows nothing about the forest, teach our young? Well, we are going to have a celebration tonight. Many elders are walking along the trails. They will be here soon. We have more peneme than we can possibly drink, but we will drink it all and we will dance and sing! Come with us now and we will show you how our ancestors celebrated a good harvest.”
The teacher looked on, expressionless. He couldn’t understand anything they were saying. He was powerless to stop us as we poured out of the schoolhouse. My brothers were shouting and jumping and rolling in the grass. I took off my itchy uniform and shoved it in my bag, then hid it in the bushes. I stuffed the wad of bloody feathers down the side of my underpants and ran with all the kids barefoot to the longhouse.
It was true! The elders were gathering! My father was there, sitting naked on a rough bench that wrapped around the inside of the smoke-filled space. His arm was resting fondly over Moipa’s shoulder. Everyone was hooting and hollering. Young women were serving huge gourds of peneme and forcing the men to drink every last drop. I saw my mother serving peneme to Äwä. She didn’t look directly at him. But she didn’t appear afraid either.
A group of women circled across the room, chanting a song. Their arms were woven together, and their feet pattered against the hard-packed earth in unison. They wore anklets made of hollow seeds that rattled with each step, like the rustling of wind in dry leaves.
“We live well. We have many gardens. The sun does not bother us. We are Waorani women. We have good hands for growing. Our children live well,” they sang.
Aunt Wiamenke was singing and dancing with the other women. She called to me and I joined them in the middle of the longhouse. We circled and circled and circled the room, singing. I held Wiamenke’s hand. I knew how to sing some of the songs, but not all of them. Our songs go on forever, like the forest. And so too are they always changing.
“Cayawe cayawe cayawe cayawawe, uummp, cayawe, uump cayawe.”
The longhouse was filled with the music of my people. Smoke twirled up into the leaf thatch. My spirits soared. I forgot the rats and the dead birds and my sadness.
Pastor Paa, my favorite of all the pastors, stood naked in the middle of the longhouse, shouting joyously: “Keuuu, keuuu, children, listen to me. In the old times, this is how we would celebrate a harvest! We would travel along our ancestors’ trails to invite our relatives to drink peneme with us, to sing and dance with us. We would say, ‘We want to live in peace and have many children,’ and we would—”
But he did not finish because one of the elder women was leaping to her feet and rushing towards him. She squeezed Paa’s penis and testicles with her hand and let out a whooping yelp.
“Keeuuuu, keeuuuu, that’s how we did it, children! That’s how we used to get good hands for growing!”
Everyone roared with laughter.
“That’s how a woman would grow big, healthy plantains in her garden!” she cried.
Paa chased after her around the longhouse, trying to grab her, whooping and yelping all the while. The longhouse was alive with shouts of laughter. The women, including my mother, who were serving gourds of peneme, threw clumps of the gruel at the men’s naked butts, laughing and screaming. Our singing became louder and louder, and as we circled around the room, more and more women joined us until I felt like we were a swarm of singing bees. My legs went numb. I was no longer holding Wiamenke’s hand. I felt bodiless. With the women of my tribe, I became a song circling around the room.
I couldn’t see beyond the bodies of all the singing, shouting women, and I don’t even know if my eyes were open or closed. But suddenly the voice of Rachel Saint cut through our singing like a machete through a peccary bone. And, abruptly, there was silence.
“Waorani enani!” she shouted. “You are stoking the devil’s fire! God is watching you. Dancing naked? What is this? Where are your skirts? Grabbing each other’s most private places! Oh, how the devil is smiling at this. Stop it immediately, I tell you!”
I crouched down to see Rachel through the legs and torsos and long black hair of the women. She was turning now. She pushed her way awkwardly out through the leaf-thatch door of the longhouse and the silence in the room remained. Everyone was dead-still, and so quiet that I could hear Rachel’s heavy, lumbering steps walking down the trail towards her house.
Dayuma must have been standing right next to her. Now she remained alone at the entrance, backlit by the strobes of sunlight that pierced through the palm-thatch walls. She was wearing a long dress, below her knees, and rubber boots up to her shins.
“God is not happy with us today,” she said loudly. Her voice sounded angry and fierce. Her eyes looked lonely.
Suddenly, I felt the feathers in the side of my underwear. They were poking at my leg. I remembered my dead birds again as I grabbed the feathers and rubbed them between my fingers before dropping them on the ground of the longhouse. I watched how, as the elders retreated meekly from the celebration, their feet pressed the feathers into the damp, hard-packed earth.
Very soon after that, Rachel went away. I didn’t see her again before she left so her face when she had ended the celebration – angry, white, shocked – stayed in my memory. And when she was gone, the village started to change a little.
Sundays were different in Rachel’s absence. Kids from all the different clans of our village would hoot and holler up in the magical caves of the long miwago branches right by the House of God. Dayuma wanted us to come down into the church but even her talk of toys and candy could not tempt us.
I remembered what Rachel would say if we played in the trees when she wanted us in church: “There are no gifts, no toys, for little aucas that don’t go to church.”
The more moons Rachel stayed away, the more people started going back to the old ways. They went hunting and gardening on a Sunday as if all the days were the same. Dad had never stopped hunting on Sundays and he had laughed at Rachel’s prohibition. The idea that there was a God who had worked all week to create the forest and the rivers and the sky and the stars and then simply took a nap on Sunday was hilarious for Dad.
One day, when Rachel had been gone so many moons that I was beginning to forget what she looked like, my parents took us all to a new garden site that Dad had found. It was a patch of forest in the hills not far from the village. There was not only good soil there but already a giant tree had fallen, making a small clearing. I wondered why we were making a new garden if we were going to leave Toñampare and start another village downriver.
The day was gloomy and overcast, perfect for hard work. The boys, who had learned to use a machete when they were still very young, were busy with Mom and Dad. My job was to take care of the little ones. Víctor still followed me and Loida needed me, and there was Emontay to carry around and to rock.
We were all tired at the end of the day and I went to sleep quickly. I was woken in the night by a bad dream. I opened my eyes in the dark and saw my dream very clearly.
A plane had landed in the village, and I knew that it had come for me. It was there to take me away from my family. I called for Mom and Dad but they didn’t appear. I felt Rachel’s hand on my neck. It was cold and soft. She pushed me into the plane. Her eyes sparkled. “Inés, it’s time for you to go. God wants to show you his love.”
Inside the plane, I saw that the pilot was Jesus, the bearded man with the beady blue eyes. I struggled against the seat belt. I looked out at the landing strip like it was a memory. My brother Víctor was there, waving at me. Opi and Ñamé were jumping in the grass, getting blown by the wind. And then we were gone, flying over the village like condors.
The dream made me feel cold and sad. I wished that I could hear Mom and Dad talking by the fire, the way they often did, but they were sleeping. I wondered if I should tell them my dream. Mom always said that the good dreams are for keeping to yourself. The bad dreams and visions are the ones to share. They lost their power over you when you shared them, she said.
I rolled over and went back to sleep. But the next day, when I heard the drone of a plane in the distance, I had that cold, sad feeling again. All the same, as usual I shouted: “Ebo, ebo, ebo!” and ran with my brothers to the landing strip.
The plane skidded and bounced to a stop. There was a cowori man with glasses sitting in the plane. He had yellow hair on the sides of his head but almost no hair on the top. I had seen him before.
“Steve is here!” Mincaye shouted. “Babë!”
Babë was the Waorani name for Steve Saint. He was the son of Rachel’s brother, one of the five missionaries that Mincaye, Yowe, and the others had killed on the beach long before I was born. When Steve was a boy he had lived in the forest with Rachel for some time; lots of elders remembered him and he still visited often enough for many to know him.
Dayuma approached the plane and looked in the window. Almost immediately, she began to wail and howl. My heart stopped.
“My sister, my sister!” she screamed. And that’s when I knew that Rachel was in the plane. That Rachel was dead. I felt her cold, soft hands on my neck and I shivered.
She had been gone for so many moons, but no one knew why. Maybe she had been living with the oil company but I was sure now that she had gone away to die.
The Waorani pastors, the ones who had killed Rachel’s brother, carried her body in the wooden box to her house. Steve stood beside them. He was tall and lanky and his shoulders were slouched.
The entire village gathered in her yard beside the coffin, and Dayuma stood before us.
She said: “Now my sister is up above with the Lord, the Lord Wengongi. She came to live with us to teach us God’s path, and now she is with Him. And those of us who follow God’s trail, we will see Rachel in the sky one day.”
Then she fell silent for a moment. No one spoke, no one cried, no one prayed.
When Dayuma continued, she sounded angry. “Lord God wants to hear you cry for our sister! Whoever cries the loudest will receive many things from Rachel’s house.”
Suddenly, there was a loud wail from the edge of the crowd. An elder woman, who was sitting in the shade, threw herself on the ground, crying desperately: “My sister, my sister, why have you left us?” And within seconds, all of the women of the village were wailing at the top of their lungs.
My brother Opi began to laugh. I couldn’t see my mom in the crowd. I wondered if she was crying too. I did not think that was likely.
Dayuma’s husband, Komé, raised up his big hands. His voice boomed. “There are many pots and pans and clothes and blankets and toys for everyone. Rachel is watching. She is very happy with all of us. She has many things in her house . . . but they are only for those who mourn her.”
I walked through the cries and the shrieks and the singing wails towards her body. Rachel was pale blue and her mouth was open. I didn’t feel any sadness.
“Now you won’t boss me around anymore,” I said to her, without moving my lips. “Now you won’t tell us what to do.”
I reached my hand into the box to feel her skin. It was cold. Then I reached my fingers into her mouth and I touched her teeth.
Dayuma saw and hissed at me venomously. I ran away, back into the crowd, but I could hear Komé shouting behind me, threatening me with stinging nettles.
Eventually, Steve and the Waorani pastors nailed the coffin shut. The hole was deep. Yowe stood inside the grave, helping to lower the coffin down. But then he got trapped beneath it and he had to scramble out up the side of the grave, and as he did so he knocked the coffin sideways! It fell with a thud. We all heard Rachel’s body knock against the wooden box. Everyone gasped and then went silent.
Suddenly, Mincaye burst into laughter. Almost instantly, everyone joined in, laughing beside the grave.
There was no one left to punish us, no one left to tell us what to do. Suddenly, I felt happy. Deep down inside, I had not liked the way our elders’ songs changed and people’s smiles were different when Rachel and the cowori were around. We were warriors – why were we always trying to please them? Now there was no more Rachel and maybe no more cowori! While the Waorani pastors shoveled dirt over her, I ran down the landing strip, skipping and twirling, singing at the top of my voice to the clouds floating above. No one tried to stop me.
Soon, the distribution of Rachel’s things began: metal spoons, cups, bowls, cotton diapers. When they found her metal box full of money, after some discussion it was agreed that this was worthless and bad, so it should all be burnt.
“Where did that come from?” people asked as the smoke curled up through the trees. No one had ever seen Rachel with this paper money.
“The oil companies gave it to Rachel so that she would let them into our lands,” said a quiet voice. It was Moipa, who had thrown the money into Amo’s coffin. His words were met with silence.