We Will Not Be Saved

It took me years to understand the strange and devastating violence of the savior. My great-grandparents lived deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, in the area now known as the Yasuní National Park. They listened as small propeller planes flew overhead announcing in our language, Wao Tededo, that those who wished to be saved must walk upstream toward the cowori outsider settlements. All who remained, the voices said, would burn. 

Around this time, my grandmother was poisoned in an inter-clan conflict. On her deathbed, she had a vision and told the family that if they followed the voices from the planes they would weaken, get sick, and die. My grandfather, devastated after her death and trying to avoid an inter-clan war, decided to heed the voices. 

My father was a small child then. He and some of my aunts and uncles have told me these stories since I was a little girl. They walked for a month, from the old lands, now Yasuní, to the river where the bocachico fish run, now Pastaza. On the walk my great-grandfather, Nenkemo, had a dream. In the dream he abandoned his daughter-in-law, my grandmother who had died. The next morning he woke up, ate breakfast, and refused to continue on with the rest. He said that his knee hurt, but everyone knew that he wanted to remain in the forest he loved. The others kept going, and Nenkemo turned back with his spear and blowgun. 

My grandfather and his family had seen the metal machetes, knives, and pots left by previous invaders and thrown from the planes. My grandfather thought of the power of the metal blades that were so resistant and did not rot. Perhaps they will have more of these upstream. They walked to the missionary communities in Pastaza. There they heard the talk of the devil and God and salvation. And within six months, they began to die. 

My grandfather and his brothers, themselves sick and dying, were terrified and irate. They wanted war. The lead missionary, a white woman named Rachel Saint, convinced the Waorani women to break all the men’s spears. She offered them clothes and processed food like sugar and flour, and she preached. The men and women who got close to her got sick. They became racked with fever, many became paralyzed, and many died, including a number of my aunts and uncles. My father, only still a small boy, crossed the river and hid, surviving on raw shrimp. Rachel preached salvation. My father saw slow torture and death. Our resistance was born there. My father later said: We will pretend to go to her church, but we will not believe in her god. She killed our family.

I grew up in the missionary village of Toñampare. My father told me these stories and taught me the beauty and bounty of the forest. At the same time, Rachel seemed to be everywhere, always scolding us, calling us savages, and trying to prohibit our songs and dances and sharing of dreams. Sometimes she would receive visitors from her world. My little brother and I would compete to see who could hear the approaching planes first. And we would sneak to the dirt landing strip to watch the people who seemed to descend from the sky. Once a young white girl visited and I thought she looked so pretty. I harmed myself terribly in a deluded attempt to look more like her. 

I became enchanted with the white people’s things and their promises of salvation. I wanted to learn to speak Spanish, to wear light cotton dresses, to have blue eyes and straight, white teeth. I wanted to know this god who offers eternal life and see what was beyond the horizon, the place that the planes came from. My worried mother tried to dissuade me, a tactic that rarely works with teenagers anywhere in the world. My gentle father did not approve, but did not stand in my way. My desire to learn led me into the arms of the missionaries, led me to face, survive, and escape from forms of abuse I had never imagined, led me to glimpse into the savior’s world and then, like my great grandfather, to turn back to my own.

And my world, the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, was at that moment facing an existential threat. The government had auctioned off Waorani territory to multinational oil companies behind our backs. I joined other Waorani and people from distinct Indigenous nations, some of which had a long and disastrous history of oil exploitation in their territories, to fight the government and oil companies. I realized that they too promised salvation. Oil, they said, would save us and the entire country from the very poverty they created. 

My relatives had sickened and died from polio upon contact with the missionaries. I soon met men and women from Indigenous Kofan territories whose relatives died from cancer and whose children died from bathing and drinking water in rivers contaminated by the oil companies.

And then it hit me: The authors of our destruction are the very ones who preach our salvation. Salvation from what? From being Waorani? From living healthy and rich lives in the forest? From discussing our dreams in the morning? From being irreverently funny and laughing all the time? From dancing naked in our palm-thatched longhouses? From living in harmony with the very place they want to destroy? 

If you would like to invade our territory and destroy our home, our people, our language, and culture, have the courage at least to say so. Stop offering salvation to the people you want to eliminate. And allow me to be clear as well: We will resist. We will fight to continue to make our lives in the forest, to speak Wao Tededo, to share our dreams in the mornings, to laugh at you and each other. We will fight to keep your oil companies from poisoning our land and rivers. We will fight, it turns out, even for you, by stopping the global devastation brought on by climate injustice. We will fight to continue to be Waorani. And we will not be saved. 

This essay is inspired by Nemonte Nenquimo’s forthcoming memoir, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People (titled We Will Not Be Saved in global editions) out on September 17, 2024.

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