We Will Be Jaguars (Reese's Book Club Pick): A Memoir of My People

by Nemonte Nenquimo, Mitch Anderson

Overview

REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647007799
Publisher:	Abrams Press
Publication date:	09/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	33,876
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Nemonte Nenquimo is a leader of the Waorani people, cofounder of the Ceibo Alliance, and an internationally acclaimed activist. Born in the Amazon region of Ecuador in 1985, she is a winner of the 2020 Goldman Environmental Prize and was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020 list (lauded by Leonardo DiCaprio). Mitch Anderson is the founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines, which supports the struggles of Indigenous peoples to defend their rights to land, life, and cultural survival in the Amazon rainforest. A native of the Bay Area, he is Nemonte’s partner, and they have two young children.

Editorial Reviews

If you want to understand the climate crisis and do something about it, read this book. Nemonte’s writing is as provocative as it is inspiring, a heroine speaking her truth which is exactly what we need to hear. Had we listened long ago to these voices we wouldn’t be in the eye of the storm now.”—Emma Thompson

“We Will Be Jaguars is the story of the humanity and fierce determination of Nemonte Nenquimo, one of the most effective leaders for Indigenous rights and environmental justice. In her gripping memoir, Nenquimo shares her journey from childhood to warrior leader, fighting the forces of greed and destruction that threaten the Waorani People and their vast, spectacular rainforest. Her story highlights the love and strength required to overcome the forces that threaten our planet.”—Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president, Emerson Collective

“On one level, Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir is inspiring, moving, and unforgettable; a rarely seen, firsthand insight into a childhood spent in the Amazon rainforest and the extraordinary story of her fight to save it from oil companies. On another level, this intimate and motivating book should spur action from all of us: the fight to save our planet from exploitation is something that affects us all and is the responsibility of us all. Nenquimo’s leadership and example should shame those of us in industrialized countries into changing the way we live and the way we see our world.”—Rowan Hooper, author of How to Save the World for Just a Trillion Dollars and senior editor of the N


“Everyone should read this––never has a book been more urgent. Truly soul-stirring, Nemonte’s book is a radical manifesto for our times. It moved me to tears. Her story flows like a mighty river, and I was utterly taken by its current.”
—Vanessa Kirby, actress and activist

"Full of wisdom, sadness, flourishes of joy and more than a few psychedelic visions, We Will Not be Saved is testament not only to Nenquimo’s resilience but also her deep spiritual connection to her land and ancestors. ... [It] plant[s] readers right in the heart of the rainforest, immersing them in its sounds, smells and kaleidoscopic landscapes. Many are the memoirs that profess to tell untold stories, but here that claim is watertight."—The Guardian

From the Publisher

“Everyone should read this––never has a book been more urgent. Truly soul-stirring, Nemonte’s book is a radical manifesto for our times. It moved me to tears. Her story flows like a mighty river, and I was utterly taken by its current.”

actress and activist Vanessa Kirby

"Full of wisdom, sadness, flourishes of joy and more than a few psychedelic visions, We Will Not be Saved is testament not only to Nenquimo’s resilience but also her deep spiritual connection to her land and ancestors. ... [It] plant[s] readers right in the heart of the rainforest, immersing them in its sounds, smells and kaleidoscopic landscapes. Many are the memoirs that profess to tell untold stories, but here that claim is watertight."

The Guardian

We Will Be Jaguars is the story of the humanity and fierce determination of Nemonte Nenquimo, one of the most effective leaders for Indigenous rights and environmental justice. In her gripping memoir, Nenquimo shares her journey from childhood to warrior leader, fighting the forces of greed and destruction that threaten the Waorani People and their vast, spectacular rainforest. Her story highlights the love and strength required to overcome the forces that threaten our planet.

Laurene Powell Jobs

On one level, Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir is inspiring, moving, and unforgettable; a rarely seen, firsthand insight into a childhood spent in the Amazon rainforest and the extraordinary story of her fight to save it from oil companies. On another level, this intimate and motivating book should spur action from all of us: the fight to save our planet from exploitation is something that affects us all and is the responsibility of us all. Nenquimo’s leadership and example should shame those of us in industrialized countries into changing the way we live and the way we see our world.

author of How to Save the World for Just a Trillio Rowan Hooper

If you want to understand the climate crisis and do something about it, read this book. Nemonte’s writing is as provocative as it is inspiring, a heroine speaking her truth which is exactly what we need to hear. Had we listened long ago to these voices we wouldn’t be in the eye of the storm now.

Emma Thompson

★ 09/20/2024

Activist Nenquimo, a leader of the Waorani people, grew up in Tonampare, a village of 30 families in the Ecuadorian rainforest. In her memoir, written with Anderson (founder and executive director, Amazon Frontline), she describes the Waorani people's homes and food and the lessons they learned from their elders. She recalled watching white missionaries arrive by plane and how her siblings invented stories of the missionaries' lives in the sky. At one point, her family left Tonampare to start a new village that was a two-day walk from an active oil well. There, Nenquimo's world changed rapidly: new clothes, work, encounters with authorities, and more. She asserts that the church, government, and oil companies abused, polluted and destroyed the Waorani land, leaving people in her village displaced and estranged from the forest. She recalled what her father told her, that the spirits of their ancestors live as jaguars, carrying experiences and knowledge from generation to generation. So, Nenquimo decided to fight the oil companies like a jaguar as she advocated for the Waorani people and built alliances with other communities too. VERDICT This stunning memoir offers compelling details about Nenquimo's parallel journeys from student to activist and from child to mother, in a way that will appeal to readers of many generations.—Catherine Lantz

Library Journal

★ 2024-08-02
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.

Kirkus Reviews