We Will Not Be Saved: A memoir of hope and resistance in the Amazon rainforest
By Nemonte Nenquimo, Mitch Anderson
Abrams Press, 2024
368pp
Waorani woman Nemonte Nenquimo grew up deep in the Amazon rainforest of eastern Ecuador, in a small village surrounded by abundance, maintained by careful agricultural and harvesting practices.
The Waorani were the last indigenous peoples to be exposed to colonialism in the country, first by missionaries and then oil companies looking to exploit rich reserves under their territory.
From the 1950s, missionaries — often working hand-in-hand with oil companies — had sought to make contact with the Waorani, to purportedly “save” their souls and impose a Christian way of life.
In her memoir, Nenquimo describes Rachel Saint, a Christian evangelical missionary from the United States living in her village, who constantly attempts to convert her people to Christianity, offering gifts in exchange for attending church and threatening damnation for not following God (Wengongi, in the the Waorani language of Wao Tededo).
As a child, Nenquimo is intrigued by the power of Wengongi that allows cowori (outsiders, namely white people) to fly in aeroplanes, make shiny jewellery and manufacture clothes.
While not mentioned in the book, Nenquimo’s village was established by collusion between Christian missionaries, transnational oil companies and the Ecuadorian government to colonise Waorani territory and encourage Waorani people to move there. The oil companies, missionaries and government then exploited introduced diseases like polio to further depopulate potential oil drilling areas in their territory and expand oil extraction.
Saint belonged to the same church as William Hutton, CEO of Dallas-based oil company Maxus, which built the first oil road into Waorani territory. The evangelical organisation that Saint worked for, Summer Institute of Linguistics, has been implicated globally in aiding US imperialism, undermining anti-colonial resistance and threatening the survival of indigenous cultures.
Nenquimo describes the day when Saint made an agreement with the oil company to build roads and drill for oil in the lands of her relatives, the Taromenane and Tagaeri, two uncontacted Waorani tribes that elected to live in isolation in the Amazon rainforest.
Saint tells the village: “The world needs oil. And there is a lot of oil beneath Waorani land … We are fortunate that we have met a good man, a Christian man, who will take the oil from underneath the ground and who will also help the Waorani.”
After Saint dies in 1994, the village finds among her possessions a metal box filled with money and wonder where she got it from. “The oil companies gave to Rachel so that she would let them into our lands,” says Moipa, the relative of a villager killed by an oil company.
As a teenager, intrigued by the seemingly all-powerful Wengongi, Nenquimo leaves her village to live with missionaries.
As Nenquimo is exposed to colonised Ecuador for the first time, she humorously captures the absurdities of so-called “civilisation”. Seeing a toilet for the first time, Nenquimo is shocked that “white people go pee and poo right next to where they eat and sleep”.
Nenquimo moves to a mission in Quito, praying to Wengongi every day, but never receiving a reply.
After years living at the mission, Nenquimo finally returns to the Amazon region, but too humiliated to return to her family, she moves to the outskirts of Shell, an ugly oil town named after the British oil giant that colonised it in the 1930s.
Nenquimo sees firsthand the destruction brought by the expanding oil frontiers in Waorani territory and the impact on indigenous peoples forced to join the growing oil towns and settlements. She notes the violence, disease, alcoholism, dependence on money and a loss of connection to the land among younger Waorani people caused by the expanding neocolonial oil frontiers.
As oil operations begin encroaching on the territories of the uncontacted tribes, who are trapped between the expanding roads, pipelines and wells, conflict escalates. Oil companies foment a war between the Waorani and their uncontacted relatives, the Taromenane, by supplying guns to massacre them.
Nenquimo passes a group of Waorani women gathered at the gates of an oil compound, collecting water from the oil company because the fresh water of their creeks has been contaminated.
“The company was taking the oil from our forests and contaminating our water sources. The oil was taken to the cities so that the white people could drive cars and fly planes while Waorani women were degraded in the dusty shadows of the barbed wire, left to beg for water.”
At around the same time, Nenquimo meets Mitch Anderson, a gringo (white man) from the US who is helping build rainwater harvesting systems in the Kofan, Siona and Siekopai communities. Her account of falling in love across cultural and language barriers is heartwarming and humorous.
Together, they visit a region that has been heavily contaminated, where the river is stained with crude oil. As “compensation” for the contamination, the oil company delivers to households a plastic bag with tuna, cooking oil, oatmeal, chocolate powder and a bottle of water.
Nenquimo comes to the realisation that the oil companies have “taken everything and given nothing back. No running water, no medical clinics, no schools.”
After finally returning to her family in the forest, Nenquimo and her village realise that the Ecuadorian government has put the entire south-central Amazon up for auction, including their village. Furthermore, a member of their community is tricked into signing away their land, thinking they will receive canoes, outboard motors and a new school.
As part of this process, the government maps of Waorani territory — showing how mapping is used as a colonial tool — have purposefully erased entire villages and territories, parcelling land into “blocks” to be sold off to oil companies. Nenquimo’s village becomes part of “Block 22”.
After ayahuasca-induced visions, Nenquimo realises her purpose: “I will lead my people in the fight against the oil companies.”
“I had left the forest many years ago because I believed in the white people. I had trusted them, thought they were better than us,” she reflects. “But now I knew they had no limits, that they wanted everything. They wanted to save our souls and change our stories and steal our lands.”
Nenquimo sees the need to form an alliance between representatives of the Siekopai, Siona, Kofan and Waorani peoples to create a unified front against extractivism. She is elected as one of the leaders of the Ceibo Alliance, named after the tree central to some of the foundation stories of the Amazon.
The alliance begins a mapping project of their territories, to render visible the vast ecological and cultural wealth of their land, while searching for legal avenues to challenge the government’s sell-off. From deep in the Amazon, they declare: “Our land is not for sale!”
News of the campaign spreads globally. Nenquimo notes that “our fight to protect our forests and our way of life was really a fight to protect the whole world. Lose our forest, I understood now; oceans away, there were floods. Continents away, there were fires and droughts.
“Many others around the world understood this too — that we were all connected, that to protect the Amazon was to protect the one home that we all share.”
The book climaxes with the Waorani winning a court case in 2019 that ruled that the government had conducted a flawed consultation process prior to selling off Waorani territory. The ruling protected half a million acres of rainforest from oil exploration, setting a precedent for other territories to be legally protected in the Amazon region.
While documenting the important legal victory for the Waorani (and the world), Nenquimo’s memoir beautifully captures the richness, beauty and vibrancy of life in the rainforest — the powerful kinships, wealth of knowledge and stunning biodiversity.
In the afterword, Nenquimo writes that one of the book’s aims is to “awaken a sense of connectedness between those living in the main oil-consuming nations and those living in the forests targeted for destruction by their oil economies, and to suggest that such connectedness involves responsibilities”.
As those living in a main oil-consuming nation, we have a responsibility to fight not just for the end of oil consumption in our country, but for the end of extractivism — often by Western multinationals — in countries like Ecuador.