We will be jaguars : a memoir of my people / Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson.

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REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK

Named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year by Library Journal



"An unforgettable memoir about fighting for your home and your heart." --Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club November '24 Pick)



From a fearless, internationally acclaimed activist comes an impassioned memoir about an indigenous childhood, a clash of cultures, and the fight to save the Amazon rainforest



We Will Be Jaguars is an astonishing memoir by an equally astonishing woman. Nenquimo is a winner of TIME magazine's Earth Award, and MS. magazine named this book among the Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2024.



Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador's Amazon rainforest--one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s--Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing.



She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. At age fourteen, she left the forest for the first time to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. Eventually, her ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture. She listened.



Two decades later, Nemonte has emerged as one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She has spearheaded the alliance of indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest. Her message is as sharp as a spear--honed by her experiences battling loggers, miners, oil companies and missionaries.



In We Will Be Jaguars , she partners with her husband, Mitch Anderson, founder of Amazon Frontlines, digging into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, hacking away at racist notions of indigenous peoples, and ultimately revealing a life story as rich, harsh, and vital as the Amazon rainforest herself.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In this impassioned autobiography, Nenquimo teams up with her husband, Anderson, to recount her journey from young Indigenous girl to renowned environmental activist. Nenquimo was born in 1985 and grew up in an Ecuadorian rainforest tribe called the Waorani, where she was subject to persistent conversion efforts by Christian missionaries. Though Nenquimo felt attached to Waorani traditions, she succumbed to the proselytizing as a teenager, agreeing to be baptized and moving to a nearby Christian village, where she was sexually abused by her host. After she returned home, Nenquimo was galvanized to protect Waorani ways of life and began organizing against oil companies' rapidly increasing interest in her tribe's rainforest land. As Nenquimo builds toward the landmark 2019 Ecuadorian court case she led, which successfully blocked a government plan to develop oil infrastructure on half a million acres of rainforest, she educates readers on Waorani customs--including vividly rendered afternoons spent with her community storyteller--and makes space for moments of profound joy (the birth of her daughter) and sadness (her mother's relinquishing of Nenquimo's baby sister to missionaries in hopes they will "teach her the white people's ways"). This fascinates and inspires. (Sept.)

Booklist Review

For decades, the Waorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon have fought to protect their lands from illegal logging and disastrous oil drilling. This eye-opening memoir by native Waorani activist Nenquimo and coauthor Anderson, her husband, shares family and tribal stories, dives into Waorani cosmology, and chronicles their hard-fought battles for clean water and autonomy over their lands. Throughout her telling, Nenquimo peppers the narration with endearing childhood memories (feeding grasshoppers to her family's pet monkey) and vivid sensory impressions, such as charred manioc, the iridescent chest feathers of black curassows, and the "oily purple gleam of the palm fruits." These details add engrossing texture to Nenquimo's stories of family, friends, and rainforest life, even as Christian missionaries and capitalist greed encroach on their culture. Readers will find themselves heartbroken, infuriated, and elated as the Waorani fight against (and alongside) soldiers, volunteers, and fellow tribespeople to achieve a momentous, if fragile, victory. "We had protected a half-million acres of our rainforest," Nenquimo reflects, paving a legal pathway for other native nations to extend their own collective reclamations of their ancestral lands. An indispensable testimony to Nenquimo's people, their history, and their homelands that continues the unceasing fight for Indigenous rights and environmental protection across the Americas.

Kirkus Book Review

A young woman's life among her people in the Ecuadorian rainforest, battling the onslaught of bulldozers and oil wells. It has long been an anthropological desideratum to describe the world from "the native's point of view." Nenquimo, a member of the Waorani people of Amazonian Ecuador, does far more: her memoir reveals her world directly through her eyes, albeit as rendered into English by her American husband while taking pains to assure readers that "these are her memories." Some of those memories are terrible; much of what she has seen, brutal. Her earliest encounter with non-Waorani people is with the earthly representatives of "Wengongi, the white man's big spirit in the sky," Christians whom Waorani warriors would once have speared to death but who now accuse the village's teenage boys of "being influenced by the communists" simply because they are skeptical about an oil company drilling on Waorani land. Against these values are posed a Waorani elder's assurance that Nenquimo's ailing brother would grow up to be a brave hunter, acting as an intermediary between the human world and the world of the deceased ancestors, who "roam in these woods" as spirit jaguars. A stint in a missionary school in Quito--"You're here to become God's servant. Not another pregnant jungle girl"--doesn't rid her of carefully guarded beliefs in the old ways. On returning to discover that her village is being besieged by invaders--foresters, cattlemen, and especially all-destructive oil companies--she becomes a fierce defender of her people, taking their arguments against dispossession up a steep legal ladder to victory: "We had protected a half-million acres of our rainforest. And we had opened a legal pathway, a bright trail, that other Indigenous nations could follow to protect their territories as well." An essential memoir of Indigenous resistance to economic subjugation and cultural extinction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.