The next morning, we left the village to return to Amisacho. The maps that we were making with the Waorani villages were just one part of our shared dream. As a Ceibo Alliance leader, I had to address other projects, solve other problems, and now there were threats mounting in various villages. Gunshots bounced between riverbanks. Chainsaws whined along the margins. Miners invaded the foothills. Companies poisoned the creeks.
Over the next moons and years, Amisacho became our home, the nest where Daime was raised, the hive where the youth of our communities rattled like hornets against the conquest.
I measured the passing of time through my daughter’s eyes.
Daime spoke her first word – epe, which means water in Wao Tededo – as we stood with Siona elders to block the construction of a pipeline along the Putumayo River. She discovered the taste of “wild sour” while eating kamu kamu fruits on a blackwater lagoon as we listened to Siekopai elders recount the horror story of their stolen lands. She hummed her first song in the candle-flickers of a ceremonial house that we had built in a Kofan village so that the elders could teach the youth about sacred medicine, and the medicine could teach the youth about the spirits of the forest. She planted her first ayahuasca vine in my mother’s garden as we installed solar panels and water systems in our villages. She was no longer nursing when we traveled into the foothills of the Andes and discovered illegal gold miners poisoning the Kofan people’s waterways with mercury.
And she was walking, clumsily, in my sandals, along the trumpet-flower trail of Amisacho in a dress turned to rags, carrying her first pet parrot, when Opi told me the news that I had feared for so long.
“It’s happening,” he said, holding his laptop awkwardly in the blinding sun.
“What is happening?”
He squinted into the screen.
“Block 22! The government is calling our forests Block 22!”
We had finished the maps of all our villages only a moon before. It had taken us two years. The maps were like colorful spiderwebs stretching across our lands, intricate webs that connected gardens to longhouses, toucans to fruit trees, bees to flowering vines, trails to villages, songs to memories. Like the forest, they were full of color, full of memories and surprises, the very opposite of the monochrome, meanly drawn government maps.
“Look at it!” he said, setting the computer in the shade of our balcony.
The red lines on this government map were straight and violent and formed a rectangular cage across an empty forest. Our villages were irrelevant black specks within the cage, which was labeled Block 22.
“The auction?” I asked.
“Yes, the government just announced the Oil Round,” Opi replied, biting his lip. “They are auctioning off fifteen oil blocks across the entire south-central Amazon.”
“Not just our lands?”
“No,” he said. “The lands of the Kichwa, the Záparo, the Shiwiar, the Shuar, the Achuar. The entire forest!”
I remembered our first failed attempt, all those years ago, to stop the Oil Round, Opi drunk in the market, licking at the rainstorm. Then, days later, the hard glass as I slammed my face into a building, watched by white men with briefcases inside.
This time would be different. This time we were ready.
“Waorani, my people!”
I stood at the front of the crowded longhouse that was perched on the edge of the Ëwengono River. Elders and youth from all of our villages had traveled to Nemonpare by foot. We were making a plan to defend our lands.
It was the season of the peach palm harvest. Our hands were stained orange and the rich fruit oils gleamed on our faces, beneath our feathered crowns. Streaks of achiote ink flashed across the women’s eyes. Slivers of sunlight fell upon our spears and jaguar-tooth necklaces.
My voice was quivering. I was struck by the knowledge that my ancestors were watching me through the bright open eyes of my elders, struck by the singular beauty of our faces, of our dangling earlobes, our long black hair, our tree-climbing toes.
“We are gathered here because the Ecuadorian Government think they are the owners of our land. They think we are aucas, ignorant savages! They think they can offer us little trinkets and beads in exchange for the blood of our ancestors, that they can sell our lands to the oil companies. And that we will just cross our arms and watch as they destroy our homes.”
Murmurs, scoffs, and shouts rolled defiantly across the assembly. The palm thatch of the longhouse trembled as if it too were a warrior readying for war.
Over the last few years, my people had recognized my leadership of the Ceibo Alliance, and they had honored me. I had been elected the first woman leader of all the villages along the headwaters of the Ewongono River – villages that were now threatened by the oil auction.
“When I was only a little girl, I left the forest because I thought that the white people were better than us, that they knew more than us. I liked how round their heads were. I liked the color of their skin. I hammered out my own teeth because I wanted the white people’s teeth.”
Tense laughter stirred across the longhouse. Tementa was sitting in the second row. He winced at the memory.
“I lived for many years in the cowori world. I tried to imitate them, become like them, please them. I was wrong! I was confused! The cowori are not better than us. They are afraid of us. We remind them of what they have forgotten. They don’t hear the voices of their ancestors anymore. They don’t plant their own food. They give birth in hospitals. They don’t live in communities. They try to conquer us, not because they are better but because, deep down, they are afraid.”
Mom was standing in the shadows, swaying my sleeping daughter in a shawl upon her chest. Dad sat quietly in the beating heart of the assembly, a peach palm spear resting on his shoulder.
“The auction is about more than oil. It is about ending our way of life. To get to the oil beneath our forests, they must first break us apart. That is the only way. They need to tear the community, rip up our connection to the forest, turn us into beggars. Make us believe that we need their money, their pills, and their things in order to survive.”
Michi watched me from behind a table of computers and cables and documents. He could not understand everything but he recognized what this moment meant.
“Moons ago, you elected me to be the leader of our people at a time when the government began planning to sell our lands to the oil companies. You elected a mother to defend our forests and rivers so that our children can live well here. You elected me, but I will not decide how and when we go to battle. You will decide. The assembly will decide. And, as your leader, I will listen. And, as a mother, I will be as fierce as a jaguar defending her cub.”
Opi was standing at the edge of the projector’s light, where the government’s map was displayed on a white sheet hanging from the rafters. I nodded at him.
“Block 22,” Opi announced, pointing at the black cage around our forests. “Right now, there are oil company engineers sitting in offices in big buildings across the world. They are examining this map! They are calculating how much oil lies beneath our forests and deciding how much money to offer the government for the right to drill wells in our hunting grounds and our gardens.”
“How can they see the oil beneath the land?” the elder Wiña asked suspiciously.
“Dynamite,” an elder replied, clutching his spear. His name was Dika, our word for stone. “I once walked with the oil workers when they exploded the dynamite across the forest, long ago, when Rachel Saint still lived.”
My father’s face turned sad. Something akin to shame flashed across his eyes. Many of our elder men had walked with the oil workers long ago. They had gone with the helicopters. They had cut big trails in the forest, straight lines. They had heard the painful thud of dynamite on the ridges above the waterfall. Had they understood what was happening? And when they had been given wads of money, useless paper that crinkled and blackened in the baskets above our smoldering fires, had they understood the nature of the exchange?
“I thought all you warriors stole the dynamite cables way back then!” an elder woman exclaimed. Her name was Omanka. Her face was narrow like a hawk’s, and her eyes were bright with humor. “Turns out you were helping the companies find the oil!”
“We made beautiful bracelets with those little wires!” Pava giggled.
A long-forgotten childhood memory surfaced: the swirling smoke of Nënëcawa’s longhouse, his voice booming from his wheelchair. His big, strong fingers twisting little yellow and green wires into bracelets. How strange to think now that our people made pretty bracelets out of the dynamite wire that the cowori were using to discover our ancestors’ blood beneath the land.
“It’s called seismic testing,” Opi continued. “The companies know that there are reservoirs of oil beneath our lands. But it doesn’t matter. Because as Indigenous peoples we have rights to our territory. International law says that we have the collective right to ‘free, prior, and informed consent.’”
His voice was serious. Over the last few years, he had found his path. He had studied the oil industry and dubbed himself a “Waorani Intellectual Revolutionary.” He read law books. He was widely called a “rights defender.” He traveled with lawyers and Indigenous leaders to the villages where the gunshots echoed and the miners poisoned the rivers. Among our people, he was known as a “jaguar warrior.”
The elders stared blankly at my brother. They hadn’t understood the last phrase, the strange Spanish words: “consentimiento libre, previo, e informado.”
“It means that we have the right to decide what happens in our territory,” Opi continued. “Under international law, the government can’t just sell our lands to the oil companies. They can’t just turn our lands into an oil block without our consent!”
“But what about the documents that we signed?” Gaba asked.
Opi glanced over at the table where Michi was sitting beside other members of Amazon Frontlines: the lawyers, Maria and Brian; the film-maker, Jeronimo; the media coordinator, Sophie. All these people had learned to listen to us, to walk with us, to fight with us. And by now, yes, finally, they had earned our trust.
“It doesn’t matter that we signed the documents,” Opi said. “We have made maps of our territory that prove our connection to the forest, showing this is the land of our ancestors. And now we must show the courts that the government violated our rights. That we did not know what we were signing, that the government is auctioning our lands without our consent.”
Daime was awake now, sitting on my lap and caressing a squeaking marmoset. I was watching my elders to see if they understood. They knew about the laws of fire, but not the laws that my brother was speaking about. They knew about war in the forest, but not about battles in the court. They knew that their spears weren’t enough anymore.
For the rest of the afternoon, our elders stood, one by one, before the cameras, the computers, and the lawyers, recounting what they remembered of the day that the plane had arrived.
“They gave us bread and Coca-Cola,” Wiña said quietly. “They spoke in Spanish, so I didn’t understand anything.”
“They told us that they would come back to build schools and medical clinics,” Dika recounted. “They put ink on my thumb and I pressed it onto the paper to show that I was the leader of our village.”
“They said that the government hadn’t forgotten about us,” Omanka remembered. “That the government was good and wanted to help the Waorani people.”
At night, the moon rose silver over the canopy, like a canoe gliding downriver through the stars. The fire throbbed blood-red in the heart of the longhouse, and our songs swirled upwards in the white smoke. Our people had decided that we would go to battle in the courts – but tonight we would drink chicha and dance until dawn.
“Listening to your elders today made me remember something that I read about the conquistadors,” Michi whispered. His eyes buzzed bright from the gourds of chicha. I reclined in the hammock. Daime was resting on my chest, achiote ink smeared across her face. “Centuries ago, when the Spanish conquistadors invaded the Americas . . .”
I was listening to him distractedly. Dad was dancing naked with the elder men. His penis was held upwards against his belly by a string wrapped around his waist. His eyes were wild with joy. His feet thudded against the earth, in unison with the pack of warriors. They were wild peccary. Their hunting chant echoed off the moon.
“The bearded men, with their muskets and swords, would stand outside the Indigenous villages,” Michi continued, “and read aloud from a document they called ‘The Requirement’ in a language that the people couldn’t understand.”
“And?”
“‘Accept our God, accept that we are the rightful rulers of your lands, and we will not make war upon you.’”
The elder women were whispering now in the ears of the men. They were glancing at Michi, Daime, and me, conspiring, plotting. They carried mischief in their eyes. I sat up in the hammock. Michi was oblivious.
“In five hundred years, nothing has really changed,” he continued. “The conquistadors rode horses and the oil companies fly in— Oh!”
It happened quickly. A sudden wind, a flood of water, a rush of peccary, a swarm of bees. My elders were upon us, around us, throbbing over us. They pressed my cheek against Michi’s. They clasped our hands together. Daime was wedged between us in the hammock, startled by the bodies that pressed, by the chants that pulsed, by the eyes that flashed.
“What the hell is this?” Michi whispered.
“They are marrying us,” I replied.
Michi struggled to look at me, but he couldn’t. Strong hands pressed our heads together. Hands that ripped manioc out of the earth, that wove baskets out of coarse bark, that scraped hardwoods into canoes, that forged unions between families in the smoky haze of longhouses.
The chants were counsel, songs heaving wisdom. Urgent voices sparking knowledge.
“When a pair of macaws fly together, then they fly always together until death.”
“Before the sun rises, a man and woman share their dreams. Never hiding dreams from each other.”
“The man must go to the garden with his wife, singing and laughing, always singing and laughing while in the garden.”
“The husband must not be lazy. He must walk far in the forest to hunt the peccary so that his wife is happy and his daughter grows strong.”
“Always bathe in the creek together. Never alone. At dawn and at dusk, the family bathes always together.”
“The fire must constantly burn in the longhouse. A happy family never lacks firewood.”
“Never speak when you are angry. Silence is better. Go to the waterfall together. Then speak.”
“What are they saying?” Michi asked. “What are they singing?”
“That you better not be a lazy white man!” I shrieked happily. “That a man must always listen to his woman!”
Michi laughed. “You’re making that up!”
My hand was clasped in his. I closed my eyes. My elders were bathing us in the throbbing chants of the ancestors. Laughter rose in me, the bellowing laughter of the jaguar, the laughter that sparked the fire at the heart of our existence.
Then my elders’ hands gripped our wrists, our forearms, our torsos. They were lifting us from the hammock, pulling us into the center of the longhouse.
“We must dance until sunrise,” I exclaimed. “They want to see if you know how to party like a Waorani!”
“Where’s the chicha!?” Michi hollered joyously, throwing his shirt high into the air.
Soon we became an endless, dizzying song that swirled around the fire. A hum of grunts, a pulse of feet, a wind that echoed upon the smoke and thatch beneath the canoe-shaped moon that splintered silver light across the night.
Daime clasped the tips of my fingers. Her bare feet pressed rhythmically onto the earth. Her lips imitated our women’s songs. Her eyes searched upwards for mine, as my eyes had once searched upwards for my mother’s.
This was our people’s happiness. This was our joy. These were the melodies that healed our spirits and gave us the strength to keep laughing, despite everything.
Michi wrapped his arms around my father’s shoulders, thudding his feet wildly, chanting words that he didn’t understand, imitating the elder warriors. Grunting like peccary, wailing like jaguars in heat, hooting like owls. Honoring the animals of the forest by becoming them.
I surrendered to the trance of our songs. Time evaporated. The canoe glided across the night’s waters. I thought of Rachel Saint, standing at the entrance of the longhouse beside Dayuma when I was a little girl, a cold reproach on her features and the devil on her tongue. She cut off our dancing. Rachel had made us ashamed of our nakedness, of our happiness.
I spit the memory on the ground. It had always been about fear. I knew that now. The missionaries were afraid of what they didn’t understand. Fearful of our people, of the other.
“My feet are blistered,” Michi shouted at me as the pack of men stomped around the fire one last time and the sun’s rays broke over the canopy. Daime was asleep in the hammock now. I thought to make fun of Michi, of the tender feet of the white man, of the shoes that protected his feet on the sidewalks of the cities, but I bit my tongue. His eyes were bloodshot. He had danced barefoot until dawn. He didn’t fear what he didn’t understand. He wasn’t afraid to grunt like a peccary. He didn’t want to change my people. He danced to be accepted by them.
At midday, we filed into the forest like leaf-cutter ants. An unbroken chain of ants, bearing the weight of the land on our sleepless backs. Michi carried Daime over his shoulders. The men carried spears and chants, the women baskets and songs. Opi carried the black box that held the flying insect, the drone. I carried the fever of the battle before us in my bones.
We marched to a light-well in the heart of the woods, a patch of earth where the wind had felled a giant tree. Where the drone could fly through the hole in the canopy.
“Waorani people,” I announced, standing barefoot, my toes clutching a twist of vines wrapped around the trunk of the fallen giant. “Soon we will travel to the courthouse in the city. The government lawyers will wear suits and ties. They will have briefcases—”
“Filled with money to give the judges!” Emontay hooted.
Mom bent silently over the earth with the elder women. They hacked their machetes at dried branches, scraped at the thicket, hissed at the leaves to scare the snakes away.
“Our ancestors will be with us,” I continued. “We will carry our spears into the courthouse. We will bring the forest with us. We will show the maps of our lands. We will have the laws on our side. But that won’t be enough!”
Dad was quietly picking up the broken branches with the other men. They hauled the bramble from the clearing into the shadows of the woods.
I knew they were listening, but my voice broke anyway: “Do you understand what I am saying?”
“That the white people’s world is corrupt,” Opi replied. He was crouched over the black box, fiddling with the cables and batteries and blinking lights.
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” I continued, watching a group of youth unroll the giant banner that we had painted earlier. “Oil companies poison the river where the children bathe and the fish run. And then they give money to the laboratories. Why? Because they don’t care about the truth! They don’t care about the people! Some companies pay the laboratories to lie, to tell the people that the river isn’t polluted. That the black water killing their children isn’t really killing their children.”
Michi was kneeling next to Daime beside the drone. He heard the Spanish words – oil, companies, laboratories, polluted – and knew the story that I was telling.
“From here in the heart of our forest we are going to send a message to the entire world,” I said, glancing up at the bright-blue hole in the canopy. “So when we go to the courthouse to look into the judges’ eyes, they will know that the eyes of the world are watching them!”
“Our land is not for sale!” Opi shouted. “Our land is not for sale!”
His voice faded into the hollows of the woods. His words nearly disappeared completely. But the elders wouldn’t let them go. They seized them from the shadows and held them with their tongues. Chanted them fiercely until the words echoed off the bones of the trees.
Omere goronte enamai! Omere goronte enamai! Omere goronte enamai!
We stretched the banner across the clearing, clutched it tightly in our hands. Two spears, black at the center. Our message to the world painted red, green, and black in three languages:
OMERE GORONTE ENAMAI!
¡NUESTRO TERRITORIO NO SE VENDE!
OUR LAND IS NOT FOR SALE!
The drone hovered above us. It buzzed like a wood-bee deaf to our chants, chopped at the air like the helicopter that had brought the soldiers, and the oil boss, and the pale, thin lady with the shiny earrings. All the people who had tried to take our lands. It shifted its one bulging eye strangely, like something only the white people could have invented. Then it shot upwards through the light-well in the beating heart of our forest, rising above the canopy, disappearing into the gleaming blue vault where, a long time ago, I thought the cowori lived.
Dad craned his neck, his mouth agape, astonished. Then he turned to me. His eyes were as bright as the forest that made them.
“I always knew that it would be good for something,” he said. “A flying insect has to be good for something!”