“laughter was jaguar medicine.”
In 1956, Nate Saint and four other missionaries, were killed by the Waorani people of the Amazon. His sister, Rachel Saint, felt some sort of connection to the location and the people, and made it her life’s mission to “save” them. This is the still shielded world Nemonte Nenquimo was born into in the 1980s. We will be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People (Harry N. Abrams 2024), cowritten with her husband, Mitch Anderson, is her story, the story of her people, and the story of colonization and destruction. Every so often, I read a book that makes me long to sit cross-legged on Gay’s floor, surrounded by stacks and stacks of books, and talk about the “Three C’s” of colonization – Christianity, Colonialism, and commercialism – and how Nenquimo beautifully and brutally captures a childhood marked by all three.
When Nemonte is a little girl, all she wants is a dress. A beautiful dress that falls past her knees and billows in the breeze. The dresses are handed out to the children who attend church. When her brother becomes ill, her family reaches out to Rachel Saint and the church. Nemonte gets a dress. She eventually gets a “Christian” name – becoming Inez. She craves the things of the modern world – their clothes, their teeth. Her innocence is repeatedly taken by a missionary, her voice nearly forever stuck in her throat when she realizes his wife knew. What follows is a young woman struggling with identity, forever stuck between her people and society. In time, she finds her way back. She hears the jaguar and finds her voice, her history.
Nemonte turns to activism, focusing on how drilling for oil has decimated her people and the land. How lands and stories and lives had routinely been stolen from the Waorani and other tribes.
We will be Jaguars prowls and pounces, never skittish.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 