Must read for everyone, the book “We Will Be Jaguars” by Nemonte Nenquimo and her husband Mitch Anderson. The book shares the story of Nemonte and her life in the Amazon.
It gives an insight into the damage of oil companies in the Amazon and also shares spiritual insights of how it is like to grow up and live in a community that is connected to Mother Earth.
I am sharing some of the things I read and found interesting. There is no need to share my notes since I feel like it speaks for itself.
My dreams are filled with snakes. That means people talk too much.
There were never rats until the cowori (white people) came with their planes. They like to eat cowori, rice sugar paste candy. It is food for the rats. The anke (white people) only eat chickens and cows and drink beer and coca cola, that is why their bodies are so soft and their minds are so confused. The forest has our people. All that we need to live well, the anke try to deceive us. They tell us that we are poor, that our young people should work for them and cut down our forest, that we should be careful with our money and always think of tomorrow, tomorrow.
Years ago, I had left the forest because I believed in white people. I had trusted them. I thought they were better than us. But now I knew that they knew no boundaries. That they wanted everything. They wanted to save our souls, change our stories, and steal our land.
Why do white people read so much? To learn about, to see small parts of ourselves in the stories of others.
Oil is progress, a plate. I wish the people in my country could see this, feel this and understand this. Most of the oil from these forests is shipped to California where our entire society all our comfort is built on the destruction of the rivers, the forests and the lives.
There is something about those siekopai elders, they are above all that nonsense they have tapped into something deeper. When did your people stop listening to the plants?
Laughter was the medicine of the jaguar. That is what my ancestors had tried to teach me all those years. To laugh at my own suffering, to laugh like the wind in the forest, to laugh even when you were struggling.
White. People always try to save us, and in the end it only leads to misery. The young men have forgotten how to hunt and the young women prefer to stare at their cell phones.
My grandfather in Pai coca tells us that he wants us to remind the young people that the forest has always been generous to us, our pharmacy, our market, our hardware store. If the young people don’t realize that, they will be just as confused as the anke.
I suddenly realized that my father, that our people, only knew what we knew ourselves. We knew about spirits and dreams, about fire and water, about plants and animals. We knew how to live and die in the forest. About everything else, about how the white man’s world worked we had no idea.
The Chants were advice. Songs that spoke wisdom. Urgent voices that called for knowledge. When two macaws fly together, they fly together until death. Before the sun rises, a man and a woman tell each other their dreams. They never hide their dreams from each other. The man must go to the garden with his wife, sing and laugh. The man must not be lazy, hunt. Always bathe together in the creek, never alone. At sunrise and sunset. The fire must always burn. Never speak when you are angry, silence is better, go together to the waterfall, then speak.
Lawyers of the Amazon
miracles of the moon ☽ 