We Will Be Jaguars

We Will Be Jaguars is Nemonte Nenquimo's memoir of growing up Waorani in the Ecuadorian Amazon and becoming one of the region's most consequential Indigenous rights and environmental leaders. Written with her husband and collaborator Mitch Anderson, the book moves between her childhood in the rainforest, her years at an evangelical missionary school that pulled her away from her culture, and her eventual return to her community.

The memoir traces how Nenquimo came to lead the Waorani's landmark 2019 legal victory against the Ecuadorian government, which blocked oil drilling across roughly half a million acres of Waorani territory and set a precedent other Indigenous nations in the Amazon have since used. Alongside the legal and political fight, the book is attentive to Waorani cosmology, forest knowledge, and the daily texture of life in a community under sustained pressure from missionaries, loggers, and oil companies.

Nenquimo writes candidly about the costs of leadership — family strain, the difficulty of moving between Indigenous and Western worlds, and the toll of representing her people on an international stage. The book won a Goldman Environmental Prize connection and has been widely praised as a firsthand account of Indigenous-led climate resistance.