I was a mother and a leader now.
I knew what had to be done. Dad had given me the idea. The government maps of our forests were empty. What if we made our own map of our territory and filled it with our history, our stories, our knowledge? Then, when the government next tried to auction our lands to the oil companies – as we knew they would, one day soon – we could show them that our forest was not a big empty space, make them see that it was so full and flourishing with life that there was no room for oil wells and pipelines.
I was eager to get back to Amisacho, to be with my fellow warriors of the Ceibo Alliance, to feel the support again of the cowori who had joined us. I wanted to experience the warmth and love of our whole team for my newborn girl. I was full of fire for the battles ahead.
But I had forgotten one thing: the cruel beating heart of the city.
It started with a question, the whisper of an Ecuadorian woman with dyed blonde hair who sat across from the reception desk at the pediatric clinic in Quito.
“Where is the mother?” She smiled flirtatiously at Michi.
At first, I didn’t understand. Had I misheard? No, she really had said that.
“Here is the mother,” Michi replied, reaching out to touch my arm affectionately. But his response to her wasn’t harsh enough, there wasn’t enough outrage. I recoiled from him. Fury seized my heart. Soon we were called.
The doctor wore a white coat and sat behind a desk in an office filled with colorful blocks and other toys.
“Does she speak Spanish?” the doctor asked Michi.
“Yes,” Michi replied, glancing at me, trying to bridge the cold that was now shuddering between us. “You should speak to her directly.”
But my shell had already shut closed. I nursed my daughter, felt her lips tugging on my nipples. I clenched my teeth in ferocious silence.
The doctor was concerned about the birth. He was surprised that a white man would be so careless as to have his child born in the middle of the forest. What if there had been complications? After all, Michi had an “impressive muscular-skeletal physique,” very different from “our indigenous populations.”
We went next to the registrar’s office to get Daime a birth certificate. It reeked of sweaty taxi drivers and cheap perfume. Our bodies were pressed together in chaotic lines and I read the people’s eyes on us: the white man standing tall above the Ecuadorian masses, above the nanny who carried his baby. Where was the mother?
“Are you sure you want to name her this?” the man at the counter asked Michi, as he struggled to pronounce Daime’s name.
“What kind of question is that?” Michi replied. His voice was harsher now. He was trying to defend our family against a world that insisted on driving a wedge between us. He wasn’t doing enough though. “That’s her name. Just write it down.”
We took our daughter’s birth certificate to the US Embassy. Michi wanted her to be a US citizen as well as an Ecuadorian citizen. We had printed out pictures of our life together: Michi caressing my pregnant womb with his hand; Michi holding Daime in his arms beside me in the birthing hammock. In spite of that, the US Embassy didn’t believe that Michi was the father. Or that I was the mother. I couldn’t tell what the problem was. Why would we lie? Was it impossible for a white man to be with an Indigenous woman? They took samples of our blood and sent them to a faraway laboratory, saying something about DNA.
Blood is sacred. I was betraying my ancestors. I had left my village, where the fire burned and my people sang, to wage war against the conquest, but instead I had let them take my daughter’s blood, let them pierce her veins and poke at my dignity.
I took it all out on Michi. Just as I had wanted him to suffer the pain of birth, now I wanted him to suffer the pain of racism. The more loving he became to me, the more a shell closed over my heart.
After more than a moon, we finally began the journey from Quito to Lago Agrio – from the Andes to the Amazon. The mountain pass was lined with oil pipelines and rocky waterfalls and alpacas and cattle grazing on steep ridges. I heard voices in my head, then cold wind in my blood, then snakes slithering on my skin.
“No, no, no! Stop it!” I cried. “Leave me alone.”
“What is it?” Michi asked.
“They are attacking me . . .” I was shaking.
“Who?”
“The spirits.”
Michi pulled the car onto the shoulder of the pass, and I vomited and wept in the wet grass beside the pipeline that carried oil from our lands over the mountains to the refineries and ships on the coast.
“Give me strength,” I whispered to my ancestors. But they were far away, muted by the rush of oil within the rusty pipes.
At dusk, we rattled across the oil platform that the colonist kids had turned into a soccer pitch and creaked down the shady driveway into Amisacho.
“You’re here!” Flor shrieked, running up the trail towards the truck. “Let me see her! Let me hold your beautiful daughter!”
I opened the door. Flor was crying with joy. She took our daughter into her arms.
“Ohhhh, she’s gorgeous! Look at her!”
Flor kissed Daime’s forehead, then smiled at me.
“We missed you here! We needed you back!”
My spirit lightened suddenly. I didn’t want to suffer. I wanted to be happy. Emergildo walked up the trail, followed by Hernán and Opi. Soon we were surrounded by the love of our people, by the tenderness of warriors, by mothers and fathers who knew what it meant to protect a child against the cruelty of the cities.
“It’s going to be okay,” Michi whispered, reaching for my hand. “We’re a team. We’re on the same side.”
For the first time in a moon, I let my fingers weave with his and let the shell open around my heart.
“Look, she’s laughing!” Flor giggled, rubbing her nose against Daime’s nose. “Your daughter is laughing!”
Joy rinsed away the tension in my shoulders and neck, and hope glimmered inside me. Maybe here it was possible to be a good mother and a fierce warrior.
The next moons raced across the sky above Amisacho. We were bees building a hive. Bees that hummed one dream in eight different languages: Wao Tededo, Aingue, Pai’coca, Mai’coca, Spanish, English, Italian, French.
The Ceibo Alliance had assembled a twenty-person team of young community leaders from all our tribes. And Michi had built a support team of cowori activists, who were now living with us: human rights defenders, tropical forest experts, humanitarians, engineers, filmmakers. I was so close to them. But even so, sometimes, when I woke in the night, I asked myself if even they would do that cowori thing and try to save us, just when we were saving ourselves.
We turned our three-room bungalow into the office of the Ceibo Alliance leadership council. Troupes of dusky titi monkeys peered curiously from the fruit trees at the blinking lights of wireless routers and HF radio antennas while our youth learned about GPS devices, drones, and camera traps. Trucks rumbled and oil derricks clanked in the distance while lawyers and community leaders discussed how to turn our rights into spears to defend and reclaim our lands. Yellow-rumped cacique birds fluttered at the windows while our women envisioned community-based economies that wouldn’t destroy our forests and cultures. Daime nursed while we assembled water systems and solar panels to install in our villages downriver from the wells and pipelines.
We had agreed that making our own maps of our territories to show their richness and complexity was the next important step. I knew it was time to go home and do this. But here I was, still in our office, staring at numbers and lines on the screen of my new laptop. I felt something like anger with it all.
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” I hissed at Michi. He was hovering over my shoulder with a cowori colleague. I had nicknamed Alex “Itota,” or “Jesus,” because of his long hair. I said: “Maybe I should ask Itota to save me from this computer?”
I was insecure about numbers. My ancestors didn’t need them. They only counted the fingers on their hands. Anything more was just baskets and bundles and tree-loads of ripeness. The missionaries had tried to teach me about numbers, but they were shapes that tangled in my brain like weeds on a jungle landing strip.
“Nemonte, we are trying to make a budget,” Itota said calmly.
“See, I don’t even know what that word means.” I switched Daime to my other breast. “What is a budget? Why can’t we just buy what we need and go back to the forest?”
Michi exhaled deeply.
“Because . . .” I sensed frustration in his voice. “. . . the donors have given the Ceibo Alliance money to do many things. To build water systems and install solar panels, to train the youth in law and filmmaking and new technologies—”
“Why are you telling me that? I know that!”
“I’m trying to say that budgets are like plans. A plan for how to spend the money. If we don’t make budgets, then we won’t know how much money we’ll need for each strategy. Everything will become chaotic.”
Emergildo was sitting with Hernán and Flor at the table next to mine. He said: “Budgets are just the white people’s word for what our people already know. When a hunter brings home meat to the longhouse, the woman looks at the meat and says: ‘We will make a stew with the forelegs, and we will smoke the hindquarters, and we will give the ribs and the head to our neighbors so that there will be harmony between our families.’”
“Why didn’t you just say that?” I looked pointedly at Michi, then at Itota. “That was easy for a Waorani woman to understand.”
Itota grinned. Michi said: “That’s a better way of putting it.”
“So if money is the raw meat on the floor of the longhouse,” I replied, smiling, “the first thing that needs to happen is the hunter should take the baby so the woman can butcher the meat and make the budget!”
I shoved Daime into Michi’s arms. He laughed, then headed for the door.
“I’ll take Daime to see the monkeys down in the cacao orchard. That’s where I’ll be if you need me.”
I turned back to the bewildering grid called Excel. I hated not knowing things. I was a thirty-year-old mother and leader of the Ceibo Alliance, and the computer embarrassed me. The numbers embarrassed me.
“I’ll help you,” said Itota quietly, sitting down next to me and pointing to the first line on the screen. I had always liked him, and now I liked him even more. He said: “Tell me what you want to do and I’ll help you make it happen on the screen.”
It took me until dusk, with the help of Itota and sometimes Hernán too, to calculate how much our trip into the forest to make the map would cost: the gasoline and food, the butcher-block paper and markers, the rubber boots and machetes, the GPS and camera traps, the jungle flights. At nightfall, I lit a pile of palo santo wood on the porch of our tiny cabana, which looked over the trumpet flowers and jasmine plants on the slope that led to the poisoned creek.
“My parents are talking about us now,” I said to Michi. I could feel them by the faraway fire in their longhouse.
“We will go soon,” Michi said. “When Opi gets back, we will go.”
My brother was in a village on the Putumayo River, where gunshots ricocheted over the water, participating in a human rights training camp with community leaders. I was proud of him for finally pursuing his dream to become a lawyer.
By now Michi had named the group of cowori who were supporting us: Amazon Frontlines. The camp was led by Amazon Frontlines’ legal team, which consisted of a fierce and brilliant Colombian woman named Maria Espinosa and an American lawyer, Brian Parker. Here were two more cowori who had become my friends. And, as Opi and I often reminded each other, friendship means trust.
I blew on the embers, staring into the sweet, milky smoke.
Michi said: “Daime had a hallucinogenic trumpet flower in her mouth earlier today.”
“Did she swallow it?” I asked urgently.
“No, I took it out of her mouth, and then she looked at me and spoke her first words.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it was amazing.”
“What did she say?”
Michi’s face became tender with fatherly pride. Was her first word in my language? Or in Spanish? Or English?
Bara? Mamá? Mom?
Mempo? Papá? Dad?
“It was unbelievable,” Michi continued. “She looked up at me and said . . .”
“What?”
“When is Mommy going to finish that fucking budget? I want to go home to be with Grandma.”
I burst out laughing.
“Our little girl is so wise,” Michi grinned. “Like a jaguar shaman! She must get it from her father!”
The butcher-block paper was crinkled over the very earth where my daughter was born. The colored markers were jumbled where my placenta had dropped. The elder women knelt, mystified and eager, over the blank sheet where they would make the first drawing of our territory.
“Draw the river, then the gardens,” Wiña said.
“What about where the parrots nest?” Watora asked.
“Or where the liana grows for our baskets?” Pava whispered.
My mom paced around the circle of women in the longhouse, carrying my sleeping daughter in a shawl wrap that hung from her shoulders. Time had ground her stony love into something softer. I could feel it in my bone memory, the way she had carried us children hard across the tough earth of motherhood. It was different now. She swayed my daughter tenderly, like a canoe lilting upon the calmer waters of grandmahood.
“There is good medicine on the ridges,” Mom said quietly. “That’s where the liver leaves grow.”
“My feet know how to walk there,” Wiña announced, “but these old fingers don’t know how to draw!”
Pava hooted. I knelt at the edge of the blank sheet, uncapped the blue pen, and closed my eyes. I would start the drawing for my elders. It would begin with the river at Toñampare, the straight stretch of water by the beach where the missionaries had screamed “Hallelujah” at the sky and my brother Víctor had convulsed for the first time beside the log.
I drew the river’s bends slowly. We passed the shady narrows of the miwagos, the waterfalls and the oxbow lakes, the palm swamps and the creek mouths. I would have reached the bamboo cluster on the banks of Nemonpare. Except that the river was running into the edge of the paper.
Michi nodded over at the men crouched on the other side of the longhouse. “This is going to be very different from what the old hunters are drawing.”
Pava giggled, glancing at the men: “Battle sites and hunting paths, that’s what they’re drawing. Nothing more!”
“There is more paper,” I said, pointing to the folded sheets near the thatch wall. “Draw everything that you see in the forest, everything you know. Tape the sheets of paper together, and when you’re done, we’ll walk to all the places that you have drawn.”
Wiña uncapped a brown pen and started drawing a garden along the banks of the river. Pava drew a green palm tree.
The men were hovering intently over their paper. I saw a maze of interconnecting hunting trails and game trails. The footprints of peccary packs swirled like wind. Jaguars slept within the buttress roots of kapok trees and harpy eagles nested in the branches. Caves lurked beside waterfalls. Landing strips were gouged beside villages. Capybaras walked across beaches strewn with turtle eggs. Our ancestors were buried everywhere. And our uncontacted relatives were ghostlike footprints at the edge of the map.
“Where do you think chicha comes from?” I jeered at the men. “How is it possible that you draw a map of the forest without any gardens?”
Opi grinned up at me. “We figured the women would draw the gardens.”
“And what about the medicines?” I replied. “When you men are moaning in your hammocks, waiting for the women to heal you, we’ll remember that you didn’t draw a single medicinal plant in the entire forest!”
Tementa pointed to a twisted liana beside a cave drawing.
“Curare,” he announced, referring to the bitter poison that our ancestors discovered millennia ago. “Good for hunting monkeys.”
My dad looked at Michi.
“Did you bring the flying insect?”
Dad had spent much of the morning surveying the gadgets that we had brought from Amisacho. He was mystified, but unimpressed, by the yellow handheld GPS devices. He was suspicious of the camera traps. How could a little brown plastic box catch any animals? But he was fascinated by the drone.
“Do you know how to make it fly?” he asked Opi. “When we walk in the forest, will you make the insect fly with us?”
What did my father imagine that the flying insect could do? The planes had flown over his childhood, and he had thought they were spirits. Then they dropped salt, sugar, machetes, and axes into his memories, the useful things that had lured his clan into the missionary village. Now he was an old man with an aching knee, a grandfather who wanted his grandchildren to enjoy a good, simple, hunting-and-fishing life in the forest. But there was something about the flying insect that attracted him, some mysterious usefulness that he couldn’t yet put into words.
“Your knowledge of the forest is more important than the flying insect,” I said to him. “The drone is just a tool, like a machete or an axe, nothing more.”
“But it flies,” Dad replied.
The next morning we pushed through the bramble and cut-grass at the edge of the runway, then entered the shadows of a narrow trail that would lead us through the gardens and fruit orchards, past the burial sites and the wallowing holes, and across the creeks and hills that our elders had drawn.
“This is an anti-venom for snake bites,” Wiña announced, prying a plant root from the mulch.
Opi stood beside several other Waorani youth. GPS devices and cameras hung from their necks.
“Let’s take a GPS point here. Medicine for snake bites,” Opi said excitedly, scribbling in his notebook.
“A puma sharpened her claws yesterday on the bark of this tree,” Tementa said.
“Tree for puma-claw-sharpening,” Opi muttered, scribbling frantically. “Take a point of that, and a picture too!”
My mom crouched beside a cluster of spade-shaped leaves, then touched them lightly with her fingers. The leaves magically curled up to sleep. “These are the sleeping leaves. Good for bathing newborns so that they sleep at night.”
Opi toggled rapidly between his notebook and the GPS device. “Hold on a second! We need to take the point, write the coordinates, and then the description.”
Watora shouted from somewhere down the trail: “Palm leaves for making thatch!”
The sun was soon overhead and we had barely moved. We had spent three hours in a tiny patch of woods and had already collected over a hundred GPS points. Opi looked exhausted.
Daime was dangling, face down, from Michi’s swaying forearms. He was standing next to another cowori, an American named Luke who had lived with the Siekopai people for over twenty years, speaking their language, learning their way of life in the forest. He truly straddled two worlds and was greatly valued by both Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance. Right now, he was teaching the Waorani youth how to use the GPS devices.
“If we take points off every plant, every bird sighting, every animal print,” Luke said, “then your map will need to be literally as big as the entire forest.”
I was confused. “My elders want to show the world everything they know.”
“Yeah . . .” Michi agreed. “But we could spend an entire year here and never leave this little neck of the woods.”
Luke added: “Yesterday, when the elders drew the map, they saw special features in different parts of the forest. The ridge where the liver medicine grows surely has anti-venoms and wood for canoe paddles and harpy eagle nests, like many places. But the leaves that cure hepatitis, that is what makes the ridge special.”
Opi was quick to agree with him. “If we aren’t more selective, this GPS device is going to explode with all the information.”
That night we made a plan. Each day we would walk to a different part of the forest, knowing beforehand where we were going and why we were going there. What story did we want to tell about that part of our territory? Was it a waterfall that healed our spirits and named our children? Was it a ridge where Pava gathered sturdy palm leaves for her brooms? Was it a fruit-laden swamp where the mother animals fattened up before giving birth?
We walked every day for nearly a moon. We discovered old memories during those walks. They welled up in our elders, like stony creeks after a big rain. We recorded songs, filmed rituals, photographed plants, listened to stories.
Then, one rainy morning, Dad’s eyes turned sad.
“What is it?” I asked.
The breeze blew dark and cold through the thatch, and he rubbed his hands together by the fire.
“There is a place that we haven’t been yet. Near the garden where your mother has planted the kompago.” These were plants with milky roots that clouded the water and dizzied the fish just long enough to scoop them into our baskets.
“Do you want to go there?” I asked. “You want us to put this place on our map?”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
The sky drizzled gray rain and thunder clapped in the distance. We crossed a swamp by balancing on a slippery log that sucked and bobbed in the mud. Michi nearly pitched in, but recovered his footing. Opi chided him for being a clumsy cowori.
“Do you know where we are?” Dad asked, staring quietly at a twig-strewn patch of earth.
“In Mom’s garden?”
“Mengatowe’s grave,” Opi whispered.
I shivered. The drizzle prickled my neck. Víctor was buried here. There were no markers, no tombstones. Just twigs and branches and plants that rooted down.
My little brother’s death remained a mystery, unsolved. We did not speak about it. We did not want to talk about the possibility that he had been poisoned by someone, or attacked by sorcery. Or that Víctor had killed himself. We did not want to believe that he had succumbed to the boa’s tongue.
Dad’s voice was calm: Time had softened the hurt. “After we buried your brother, I lay awake all night, listening to the wails of a jaguar just beyond the turned soil of his grave.” Dad nodded his head towards the interior of the forest. “Then, at dawn, I heard the cries of a jaguar cub.”
“Did you go see?” I asked urgently.
Dad nodded. “The earth was broken and cracked and a jaguar cub was curled up, whimpering, in the hollows of a log.”
Why hadn’t our father ever told us this before? My little brother Víctor had returned to the forest as a jaguar cub. I had always known this about our people; I was raised on stories of our ancestors prowling the woods as spirit jaguars. But there was something about the cracked earth and the whimpering cub, the visceral image of my little jaguar brother beside his own burial site. The little brother who had followed me everywhere, who had spoken to the animals, and seen spirits with those faraway eyes.
I began to cry. Michi touched my shoulder.
“The sky is too thick with fog,” Opi whispered, fumbling with his GPS device. His eyes were glassy. I knew that his heart was aching, and that he was trying to hide it with his gadgets. “It can’t connect with the satellites.”
Dad was bewildered. “That thing talks with the machines above? The ones that look down on us from the stars?”
“Yes,” Opi said. “That’s how it gives us the location, the GPS coordinates.”
Dad winced, then went very still. He didn’t like the idea of putting Víctor’s grave on the map anymore.
“Turn it off,” Dad said suddenly to Opi. “Mengatowe is a jaguar now, a mother jaguar. She visits us sometimes. She comes back here. Better that the machines don’t know anything about her.”
“Ponemopa, Mengatowe,” I whispered. “I love you, Víctor.” The rain came down harder; it felt like little thorns on my shoulders.