Whenever the cowori (outsiders) came to visit the Waorani villages in the Ecuadorian Amazon, they brought gifts. Sometimes it would be a Bible that no one could read, offered by evangelicals who wanted the villagers to have Christian names. Other times, it was papers to sign that no one could understand, offered by “the chiefs of the oil company” who promised running water and new schools in exchange for a signature.

The evangelicals wanted Nemonte Nenquimo, which means “many stars,” to call herself Inés. And when she went to stay with them as a young child, she wanted to be Inés too—until she fell victim to a priest’s horrifying abuse. Nenquimo’s journey, from trauma to a life of resistance, drives her fiercely written autobiography, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People (Abrams, 2024).

Nenquimo and her husband and cowriter, Mitch Anderson, deliver lush, vivacious descriptions of a childhood spent deep in the rainforests, beneath haloed moons, where “the earth was moist and cold and breathing.” Over the years, she witnessed how oil companies reaped profit through coercion and deceit—leaving behind polluted lands and waterways, fish contaminated with metals and toxins, and roads deliberately sprayed with crude oil to keep the dust down.

In 2015, she cofounded the Ceibo Alliance to fight for Indigenous rights. When the Ecuadorian government later tried to give away Waorani lands to oil companies like ExxonMobil and Shell, Nenquimo helped unite villages into a regional resistance movement that found its way into the courts, and on to victory.

We Will Be Jaguars is as much a testament to the power of female leadership as it is an uncompromising celebration of the wild. “We women are the voices of the forest,” Nenquimo writes. “If we don’t speak for our mother, no one will.”