“People from the outside [of Waorani territory] see empty land but to us [Waorani people] the jungle is our pharmacy, our grocery shop, our home supplies shop. People just see gold and wood when they see our land, but this is our home, our diversity. We do not want to destroy our life,” says Nemonte Nenquimo over a Zoom call from her office in the Ecuadorian city of Puyo.
The 36-year-old Waorani leader and land defender is referring to the 802,220 hectares (about 2 million acres) of Waorani territory in the Amazon Pastaza province, of which Puyo is the capital, in Ecuador.
One of the most biodiverse rainforests on earth, it is home to 600 types of birds, 200 different mammal species, 300 types of fish and thousands of plants with medicinal properties, according to Amazon Frontlines, an NGO that works alongside Indigenous communities in the Amazon.
Nemonte calls it Omere, meaning both “jungle” and “our house” in her native Wao language. About 2,000 people in 54 communities make up the Waorani nation.
Nemonte’s eyes light up as she describes her community Nemonpare, at the heart of the territory.
Located in the basin of the Curaray River and surrounded by tapirs, jaguars, streams and sacred waterfalls, she describes the sounds of parrots and leaves creaking under feet as people go about their day harvesting cassava or fishing by the river. About 40 people, including her family, live there.
“When you are in the rainforest, you feel free, at peace in harmony. You bathe in the river or walk in the jungle…it soothes your soul,” she says.
Yet the pristine rivers and animals in the forest are facing extinction as a result of oil drilling, road construction and other operations nearby.
The Waorani people first faced colonisation in 1958 when Christian missionaries moved in, followed by settlers, loggers and Ecuadorian authorities looking for oil. Despite the Waorani’s fight to stop them, road construction for oil extraction began in the 1960s and has had a deep impact on their way of living.
The Ecuador government has also divided the land into blocks to be auctioned to oil companies – covering four provinces and millions of hectares of land, threatening most of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Six of these blocks cover Waorani territory, including Nemonpare.
Many Waorani reject this contact and move deeper into the forest.
For the Waorani, the changes in climate and the impact on the rainforest are not new; they have seen it firsthand for decades.
“People talk and talk about climate change just now, but we saw it coming for years before it was talked about,” explains Nemonte, as she describes the floods and river fluctuations she has witnessed in the last few years – the sort that have never been seen before.
“My dad used to have his small plot with different produce, cassava and plantain. My dad and my mom both had small pieces of land as they had all their life. Their chacras (land to plant food) on the riverbanks were destroyed by the river flooding. This did not happen before; the river is unpredictable now.”
Nemonte’s appreciation and love of her land and her Waorani heritage drove her to lead a legal battle against oil drilling in their territory. In 2019, they won a lawsuit that suspended the auctioning of 180,000 hectares (445,000 acres) of their land for oil drilling, setting an important legal precedent for Indigenous communities fighting extraction operations in the Amazon.
While Nemonte’s leadership has been recognised internationally – Time Magazine named her one of 2020’s most influential people in the world and she won the Goldman Environmental Prize that same year – she is not fazed.
When speaking about her work, her conversation always goes back to her compass: the elderly women in her community, or as she calls them, Abuelas. It is their wisdom and advice, she says, that have shown her the way forward and given her the strength to keep working for a clean future in the Amazon.
2021 Al Jazeera Media Network