Michi lived in a wooden bungalow beside an abandoned oil well. It was an improbable patch of forest at the end of a dirt road on the outskirts of the oil town Lago Agrio.
“Will you go back to your territory now?” he asked as we walked down a narrow path to a small creek that meandered through the land. “Will you tell your family what you saw here?”
“Waorani women are nomads,” I replied cryptically. “I will go home when my dream tells me to go home.”
The truth was that I didn’t know what to do. I was stunned, scared of my own feelings. Rage at the oil companies for provoking war between my people and the uncontacted. Pain at the thought of the little girls trapped in the shed, the girls whose family had been murdered. Sadness for the river and for all the Kofan families who had lost their children to the contamination. Worry about what would happen if the oil companies invaded my family’s home. Doubt about what must be done.
And yet my stomach was swirling with butterflies and my chest was flittering with hummingbirds as I walked down the trail with the white man. I wanted to hold his hand, wrap my arms around him.
“Does that mean you are going to stay here?” he asked, his voice softening.
We stopped on a narrow, mold-blackened footbridge that stretched across the creek.
“Come here,” he whispered, pulling me towards him and wrapping his arms around my body. I buried my head in his chest and began to tremble and heave and cry. He touched my hair with his face. I could hear his heartbeat.
“Ba, ba, ba, ba,” I whispered fiercely, to myself, to him, to the universe. “No, no, no, no.”
“I like you, Many Stars,” he said, kissing me on the forehead and then drawing away.
My eyes were black stones, crying. I felt like I was losing control of my face, of my body.
I turned to the creek, breathing hard. He stood behind me, wrapping his arms around me. I leaned my body backwards into his. Time ached sweetly and silently on that bridge above the creek. I closed my eyes, wondering if what I was feeling was love.
“I wanted to hold you from the first time I saw you,” he whispered, “that night in that strange hotel garden.”
“Me too,” I said.
I could hear my own heart beating in my chest, and I wondered if Michi could hear it too.
Was this how love was supposed to feel? A wild, dizzying heartbeat on a bridge above a creek far away from home?
“Look at all that foam,” Michi whispered, breaking the silence.
I opened my eyes and saw a school of sardines, swirling like silhouettes beneath the water’s surface.
Michi used the elder Delfín’s words: “The fish know the story of the river.”
“Why is there foam?” I asked.
“This creek runs smack through the oil company’s main base of operations. They wash the oil workers’ uniforms with industrial laundry detergent and then dump the wastewater into the creek.”
I spun around. The love feeling, or whatever that feeling had been, was gone.
“My mom . . .” I said, stuttering.
“Your mom what?”
“Nothing.” I decided not to tell him. “I just thought of her right now.”
In the evening, it rained hard and I lay next to him in his bed, staring at a pile of books on the floor of his room.
“Have you read all of these?” I asked.
“Not all of them.”
“Why do white people read so much?”
“To learn about . . .” He paused, staring out the window. “To see little parts of ourselves in other people’s stories.”
I reached for a book and stared at the black-and-white photograph on its cover. There was a young Indian boy in a tunic made of tree bark. A white man stood next to him, holding a musket, with a terrifyingly cold gaze. Inside the book were more pictures. More scenes of suffering, white people in white linens, the natives in chains.
“What do you see about yourself in this story?” I asked suddenly.
I didn’t really know what I expected him to say. He sat up against the wall, hesitating.
“I would understand if you didn’t trust me,” he whispered.
“I do trust you,” I said, glancing into his blue eyes and looking away. “I want to trust you.”
He flipped through the pages of the book silently.
“I want to help my women,” I said suddenly. “I want us to build water systems for my women on the Via Maxus road.”
He closed the book, then nodded. “Me too, Many Stars.”
One afternoon, a light rain pattered on the metal sheet roof of the open-air gathering hall. It was in the island of forest on the outskirts of the town. Emergildo held a manilla envelope in his hands. The shaman’s grandson, Hernán, stood beside him. Michi sat on a bamboo rail, watching a skittish troupe of dusky titi monkeys leaping in the branches.
“My name is Nemonte,” I said quietly to the woman sitting next to me. Her face was stunningly beautiful and her hands were calloused from gardening. She had earth under her fingernails.
She smiled at me. “My name is Flor.”
“Where are you from?” I asked, suddenly realizing how happy I was to be talking to another Indigenous woman.
“From a village downriver.”
“Where there was the oil spill?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am Kichwa but I am married to a Siona man. I live in a Siona village.”
“My mother is Kichwa-Záparo,” I told her proudly. “And my father is Waorani.”
She spoke warmly. “Michi told me about you. He wanted us to meet.”
I felt embarrassed suddenly. I wondered what he had said about me.
“Do you know what the papers say?” she asked, nodding at the manilla envelope.
I shook my head, though I knew they were documents from the laboratory.
“My children play all day in the river,” she said, watching Emergildo take out the papers, “and I’ve never known what’s in the water. Now I will find out.”
“Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” Emergildo stuttered, squinting through his eyeglasses at the paper. “Heavy metals,” he continued. “Cadmium, barium, lead . . .”
“So what does it mean?” Flor asked loudly, a fiery impatience in her voice.
“I don’t know these words,” Emergildo said, shrugging his shoulders and handing the papers to Hernán. “These are not Kofan words.”
Flor turned to Michi, her face a question. He said: “They’re pollutants. Poisons that oil brings to water.”
“But this list says they are not in the water,” Hernán said, tracing his finger across the document.
We watched him, following his finger.
“It says there are no hydrocarbons, no heavy metals.”
Everyone stared at him in silence.
Hernán looked up, frowning. “It’s as if the spill never happened.”
“What do you mean?” Flor asked. “The river was black!”
“It says that the water is perfectly fine,” Hernán continued, his monotone voice cracking ever so slightly.
Michi was peering over Hernán’s shoulders now at the papers. He looked dismayed, then furious. “The labs are in the pockets of the oil industry. They are lying to us.”
“They laugh at us,” Flor shouted. “They treat us like animals!”
Emergildo stood up, removing his glasses and regaining his composure.
“We will keep building the rainwater systems,” he said. His voice was tinged with surrender, as if deceit and corruption were woven into the fabric of the universe, as if the lies of the oil industry were part of the natural order. “That way our families will always have clean water, at least.”
“No!” Flor said. “We must do more than that!”
“What can we do?” Emergildo asked softly.
I glanced at Michi, then at Flor. Her cheeks were twitching in rage.
“I don’t know!” she yelled, standing up from the table. “Something! Something!”
We sat in heavy silence and my mind raced with many thoughts, many things to say. But I kept quiet. I was far away from home in a wounded land and I didn’t know how to tell what I saw, didn’t know how to explain what I felt: that we were all there together for a reason that we still couldn’t see clearly.
“Delfín is inviting us to a ceremony,” Michi said, kneeling over a pile of jungle-dampened books on the patio outside the bungalow.
“Ayahuasca?” I asked, crouching next to him.
“Yagé,” he replied, arranging the moldy paperbacks in a neat line to dry beneath the blistering sun. “The Siekopai word for ayahuasca is yagé.”
“Where will the ceremony be held?”
“In their territory, downriver. Would you like to go?”
“Who will be there?”
“I don’t know, probably just a small group of elders.”
“No young people?”
“Many of the youth are scared to drink yagé,” he said, disappearing into his room and reappearing with another armful of soggy books. “The missionaries struck the fear of the devil into the younger generation.”
My palms began to tingle and goose bumps rose on my neck.
“My grandfather was a shaman,” I said. “I used to think he was the devil.”
Michi dropped a hardback on the ground and stared at me curiously.
“Rachel Saint showed us a picture of the devil,” I said. “The devil had a wide nose and dark eyes and a hairy chest just like my grandfather.”
“And you believed . . .?”
“When I saw him poling up the river to our village, I used to run home shouting that the devil was coming.”
Michi laughed. Then asked: “So do you want to go to the ceremony?”
“Uuuu.” I nodded, my voice shaking with fearful resolve.
The next afternoon, we careened along a giant paved highway through an endless plantation of African palms. The sky seemed different to me. It was flatter, emptier, and less colored than a true forest sky. I wanted to tell Michi about it, but the window was down and the music was blaring and I was beginning to feel dizzy.
“What is that smell?” I yelled.
He lowered the volume and rolled the window halfway up and inhaled deeply.
“A lovely blend of gas fumes, pesticides, and palm oil rot,” he said comically, pointing past the blurry columns of palm trees to a plume of smoke in the distance.
“This is the Siekopai people’s territory?” I asked.
“It was their old hunting grounds,” he said. “Now it’s just roads, plantations, oil fields, and settler towns.”
We had been driving for an hour through colonist settlements and precarious ranches, where oil wells were named after prostitutes, mestizo farmers dried cacao under gas flares, and oil pipelines cut through grassy settler cemeteries.
My stomach was empty, my mouth was parched, my body was faint, and I was starting to feel scared about the yagé ceremony. I was nervous about drinking ayahuasca with elders from a different tribe in a wounded forest, an island of woods that had been cut off from the rest of the Amazon along a river that had been poisoned by oil. What if there were no spirits left in this forest? Or what if the spirits were angry? What if they sought revenge?
I stared out the window, in silence. A sun-bleached sign at the end of the road read: Oil is Progress.
Michi held his gaze on the sign for a moment, and then turned to me.
“I wish that the people of my country could see this, could feel this, could understand this. Most of the oil from these forests gets shipped up to California, where our entire society, all of our comfort, is built on the destruction of the rivers and the forests and the lives . . .”
His voice was shaky.
“And then the fucking companies have the gall to put up a bullshit sign like this on the edge of the river that they’ve poisoned.”
For my entire life, I had known the United States as the “Land of Rachel.” The land of the blue-eyed sky people. A feeling of bitterness washed over me now.
“There’s something about these Siekopai elders.” His voice was brighter now. “They are beyond all of this shit. They are tapped into something deeper . . .”
I stared out the window at the Siekopai village: clapboard huts with metal roofs and rainwater systems.
“When Delfín steps into the forest,” Michi said, “he can hear the plants – I mean, literally. He listens to them.”
I opened the car door. It was stuffy without the wind.
“My only question is: when did your people stop listening to the plants?” I asked.
I knew I sounded aggressive. He looked at me, slightly hurt. I had created distance between us, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because I was fasting for the ceremony and I wasn’t used to this empty burn in my gut. Maybe it was because it was his world that was destroying our world. Or because I had fallen in love with a cowori from a faraway place I knew nothing about, and I was scared of what the medicine would show me. About him, about me, about my path in life.
“All I really wanted to say, Many Stars, was that you can trust these elders,” he said, lifting a huge bag filled with blankets, hammocks, and rope out of the bed of his truck. “They’re good folk.”
“Okay.” I grabbed my small bag and my rubber boots.
At nightfall, we lay silently next to each other in separate hammocks strung from the crossbeams of a leaf-thatch ceremonial house, perched on the high banks of the Aguarico River.
Four elders in brightly colored tunics smoked cigarettes and swayed in their hammocks by a fire at the end of the hut. Occasionally, a motorized canoe could be heard on the river amidst the faint thumps of settler-town nightclubs echoing over the canopy.
“Nemo, Nemo,” Michi whispered, kneeling next to me. “Are you asleep?”
I didn’t even know that I had fallen asleep.
“Nemo,” he continued, “the elders are calling you to drink.”
I opened my eyes, bewildered.
“We all drank,” he said. “Are you still going to drink yagé?”
I shook my head, confused. The night was dizzy with copal and tobacco and jasmine.
I stood up and walked barefoot, silent, stone-faced towards the fire and knelt quietly on the wood floor before the elder Delfín. The firelight flickered warmly on his face, on the red markings across his forehead and his cheeks. He wore fragrant plants around his wrists and arms, and a jaguar-tooth necklace around his neck. He cradled a ceramic cup and blew and whistled on it, like wind rushing through a ravine, echoing off leaves and streams and faraway caves.
Whoosh, whoosh, woooshhoooo, wooshhoooo.
“Strong medicine,” he said good-humoredly, handing me the cup. “Muy bueno, muy, muy bueno.”
I closed my eyes and cradled the cup at my chest.
What did I want to see? What did I want to know? What did I want to become?
I tilted my head back and poured the medicine into my body. It was thick and warm and bittersweet. I felt my spirit shiver.
“Oko,” he said, handing me a gourd of fragrant water. “To rinse your mouth.”
I walked to the edge of the hut and spit the cold water out into the darkness.
“Before light,” Delfín whispered, in Spanish. “Healing, you come to me.”
“Thank you,” I said, clasping my hands together and wondering what the elder saw in me. Deep down, I knew that I had buried my stories, hidden away the hardest memories. Deep down, I knew that I needed healing.
I lay back down in my hammock, breathing through a wave of nausea.
“Buena pinta,” Michi said. “I wish you good visions, Many Stars.”
“You too.” I exhaled deeply.
The elders blew out the candles and the fire died down of its own accord. The night became still and dark, and I became sleepy again.
“Give me strength, Grandpa. Ancestors, protect me,” I whispered, slipping away.
I awoke in total darkness to the clank of a dugout canoe against my body and a sharp awareness of a quivering animal nearby.
What are you doing?
The canoe tapped softly against my side again.
Don’t do that. You are filling me with water.
My stomach was swelling. I inhaled gently, noticing little beads of starlight in the corner of the universe. Then I inhaled deeply, sucking it right into my mouth. The starlight tasted like tamarind. My chest rose and fell, rose and fell, until I was hovering above the canoe that had clanked against me.
Who are you?
I was unsure where the voice had come from, whether I was asking the visitor or the visitor was asking me.
I shook my head and exhaled fiercely. The animal trembled intensely nearby, but I couldn’t see it, I just knew it was there. I was upside down now, looking backwards at myself.
My skin became terribly cold. I wrapped myself in the blanket.
Here I am.
It was a woman’s voice.
She wouldn’t let me see her. I tried to open my eyes but found they were already open. So I closed them again, and then opened them, and closed them again, as if it were a sacred language, some kind of existential game that I had just discovered, a way of pleasing this mysterious woman.
But eyes open or closed there was no difference in what I saw.
The woman paddled a canoe across the night sky, swerving majestically between stars. Her long black hair trailed upon the water. She dipped her paddle into the night and swirled the water noiselessly, spawning wave after wave of silver ripples, until she disappeared completely. She had become the ripples. I could feel her swelling inside of me, shaping herself into a long, bone-stretching, blood-warming yawn. My body began to cramp.
Who are you?
She shook her head enticingly and pressed her claws against my body. Her touch was fierce and tender. The cramps disappeared.
I am jaguar.
Her eyes were jet-black and buzzing with flames and yellowjackets. I yawned uncontrollably. I thought my jawbones would dislocate. My body shivered. Her breath was musty and sour. I began to feel queasy. The jaguar showed me her teeth.
I shook my head, exhaling fiercely. I couldn’t tell if I was making sounds, if I was whimpering. My body was burning cold now. I wanted to run away. But the jaguar opened her mouth wide and blew a cloud of brightly feathered hummingbirds onto my chest and neck and head.
See yourself.
The hummingbird wings smelled like starlight. My skin began to tingle. The birds were very busy. They were good-natured and meticulous. They fastened tiny threads of light to very specific parts of my body. I felt the blurred, colorful beat of their wings. My body began to hum. At first, it was a delicate humming in my feet and shins. But then the humming spread in colorful spirals. It grew deep into my ribs, deeper than surrender.
It was obvious what they were doing. They were fastening starlight to my spirit and lifting me out of my body, turning me into a hummingbird.
For a split second I was nothing more than a vibration in the devastating stillness of space. Yellow was the first color. A tiny feather fluttering into existence. Buzzing inside of me, quivering in my vagina, shivering in my ear. A blur of wings everywhere.
Suddenly, I became a tiny bird with golden-green wings in a towering, forested canyon, hovering before a young girl on a familiar trail. I knew this girl. She was me. I was walking on the trail to see the missionaries. I was escaping with my yellow bucket, filled with peach palms and fishhooks and a black Bible.
Who are you?
A wild, deranged smile flashed across the jaguar’s face. The young girl rattled the bucket. Thrashed it against her palm. Screamed, frightened, at the woods. And then everything became completely still, the kind of stillness that oozes if left alone.
Forgive me. Forgive me.
Then there was a boa, and the boa was oily and shiny and slow and inevitable. I watched how she wrapped around me, heard crinkling, brushing, rasping, squirming sounds everywhere. Until my stomach was oozing with worms and liquids, and my entire life was flooding into a narrow gorge, retching through my stomach into my chest and up my throat and out of my mouth.
I leaned over the side of the hammock and vomited my life onto the wood floor until everything became peaceful.
“Many Stars,” a voice whispered.
“Mmm,” I grunted.
Pleasant electric shivers were coursing through my veins and some preposterous force was pulling my head downwards.
The voice said: “Strong yagé.”
It was Michi. He struck a match and lit a cigarette.
“Are you okay?”
“Mmm,” I grunted again.
Time was quivering like a nerve and lapping like water on the shore of the night.
“When you are strong enough to walk,” he whispered, exhaling a cloud of smoke into the darkness, “go to Delfín for a healing.”
“Mmm,” I sighed, mustering the strength to lift half my body back into the hammock and cover myself with the blanket. I couldn’t keep my eyes open and my entire body was prickling cold. I couldn’t stop my body from moaning. The moans wanted to be heard.
“Come,” Michi whispered, kneeling next to my hammock.
I sat up and lunged at him, wrapping my arms around his neck. It felt strange to touch him.
“You’re scratching me,” he whispered.
He lifted me out of the hammock and walked with me towards the embers and the smoke and the elders.
“Sit here,” he said quietly, bracing my body with his arms, easing me onto the floor. I didn’t have the strength to sit, so I let my head and neck and back fall forward between my legs.
Michi said something to the elders that I couldn’t distinguish. I didn’t want to look at him, didn’t know what I would see, or what he would see in me. My body heaved up and down. Michi walked away. I breathed out of my nostrils, and my eyes rolled back into my head.
Delfín was beside me. He struck a match.
I saw that I was kneeling in a candlelit garden of flowering plants and ceramic vases. The garden was an endless castle of vivid, shimmering vines and plants. There were children playing all around me and the elders were harvesting medicine. The children wore tunics and crowns, and had intricate achiote drawings on their faces that radiated bright colors. Delfín was now patiently tying leaves into a medicine-bundle and bathing the garden in smoke and chants.
Whooosh, whooosh, whooosh, whooosh.
Delfín swooshed the leaves over my head, and the wind was sweet and rich and colorful on my body and spirit.
Whooosh, whooosh, whooosh, whooosh.
The children smiled at me playfully. The elders weaved brightly colored threads, drawing them mysteriously from the earth. The jaguar appeared at the edge of the garden, tilting her head from side to side.
We have been waiting for you.
Her eyes were tunnels of misty light. The garden shivered when she blinked.
Do you understand?
She snarled violently, and the creek ran black and the plants turned brown, and the elders knelt on the parched earth, digging a grave with their bare hands. A little girl was resting, her eyes open, at the bottom of the grave, and the elders placed macaw feathers over her body, and one by one the feathers turned to crinkled, moldy dollar bills.
Can you see now?
A wailing, moaning song rose from my body. I pressed my forehead onto the earth.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
Tobacco smoke bathed my body. Delfín began to sing. The medicine wind washed across the garden, and the candles flickered, and the night became very delicate and still.
Do you know who you are?
I nodded my head.
Who?
“I am your daughter,” I whispered, staring into the jaguar’s eyes. “I am the jaguar’s daughter.”
Suddenly, there was nothing but a tiny speck of orange light in the heart of the garden. The shimmering vines and vases, the children, the elders, the grave, the creek, everything had disappeared. All that was left was a spark of fire burning at the center of a wispy strand of kapok cotton, and the laughter of the jaguar inside of me. The unbearably sweet laughter stoked the fire into the brightest flames.