Over the last decade, I and many others like me have tried to bridge this gap in understanding. We have participated in interviews with anthropologists, journalists and documentary filmmakers. We have travelled and spoken at all kinds of international panels and conferences.
We launched an indigenous mapping project to show the government and the oil companies that our territory is not a huge empty green space on their map. In our cartography, the forest is full of life: it is where we find our grocery stores and hardware stores, our pharmacies and temples, our burial sites and ancient villages, our beauty salons, cultural centers and art supply stores, our living history. Our stories and memories are all there.
We had to sue the Ecuadorian government to make them listen to us, look at our maps and ensure that our right to decide what happens in our territories is respected. We won in court against the interests of big oil companies and protected hundreds of thousands of hectares of indigenous territory and pristine rainforest. And yet the dangers and threats remain.
The book I wrote with my husband Mitch took us a few years because our stories take time. I come from a culture of oral storytelling: we talk in the morning, we talk late into the night, we talk while walking in the woods, while we work, and while we eat together. I told Mitch my stories for many years, and then, after a while, Mitch started taking notes and recording some conversations.
He didn’t listen like an anthropologist does. He listened differently; he listened with love and respect, and so I decided to tell him my story.
After more than a year of taking notes and journaling, Mitch began to write. Sometimes in the evenings he would excitedly read his latest pages to me. Often he would narrate them to me. An editor recently referred to Mitch as my translator.
In a sense, he is doing a cultural translation between the Waorani world and the English-speaking world. But he did not translate my book: we wrote it together. In that sense, our book itself is an embodied offering of the desire to understand and communicate, the desire to respect and do no harm.
Which brings me to the title of the book: We will not be saved. For centuries, the people who have done the most harm to my people and the forests we live in have been the very people who claimed to save us. They said they were bringing us salvation and the Word of God. But they brought disease, slavery, murder, dispossession and racism.
Later they came back, with bulldozers and drills instead of horses and Bibles, and said they were going to save us from “poverty,” a condition we had never known before their arrival.
People must not understand what they destroy so easily. We don’t want to be saved – which has always been synonymous with conquest or extinction – we want to be respected. And we hope that our book can help to increase understanding and respect and protect the lives of the indigenous people and the rainforest we call home.
We Will Not Be Saved: A Memoir of Hope and Resistance in the Amazon Rainforest by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson is out now (Headline, £20). You can Buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, supporting The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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