I was afraid to ask. I just wanted to hold it. Ever since we arrived here, the blowgun was beckoning to me. I knew that actually shooting it was out of the question. When Nenquerei, our guide, handed me the blowgun and said we were going to do target practice, I felt like I was violating some kind of ancient code. He assured me that it was alright.
I thought about how Waorani have been hunting in this exact way, in this exact place for generations. I wondered how many monkeys’ lives the blowgun had taken, how many people it had fed. I could sense the reverence in Nenquerei’s voice as he explained the craftsmanship of the blowgun, oh-maina in the Waorani language. He ran his hand over the smooth wood, explaining how beeswax was used to seal the creases in the rock-hard wood. He described how a shaman prepared the curare, or poison, which was used to tip the darts from a secret blend of plants. To prepare the curare, a shaman remained isolated and celibate in a special hut where he worked, without food or drink, for days on end. I glanced over at the tube containing the poison-tipped darts and felt chills run down my spine as I thought about the generational knowledge going into their creation. Nenquerei handed me a curare-free dart, an ompa, and pinched a penny-sized amount of Ceiba tree fluff around the base of the dart to create an air seal in the gun. Like any good teacher, he encouraged me to try again. “Otra vez mas,” one more time.
We were ten days into our journey on the Rio Curaray. We were initially confused as to why Nemoneya, Nenquerei’s wife, asked to join us on the river trip with her infant son, Pigemo. It became clear why she wanted to come with us when she told us her mom and sister lived along the river on ancestral Waorani land. It had been over ten years since she’s seen her mom. Of course, they weren’t expecting us when we pulled our canoe ashore in front of their home. I was expecting a tearful embrace, or shouts of joy when Nemoneya’s sister, Omari, saw us from shore. Instead, she quietly greeted her family as if they were coming home from a day of work. She didn’t even acknowledge the rest of us. Sara, Kira, and I unloaded the canoe while everyone else talked inside the house. Were we unwelcome here? Should we offer to go camp in the jungle? Eventually, we heard some joyful yelling and laughing coming from inside the palm-thatched house, and Nemoneya motioned for us to come inside. We were greeted with smiles from Omari and their mom. I studied Omari, she was broad-shouldered with long, braided black hair. Her weathered, working hands moved rhythmically as she wove palm fibers together. Nenquerei motioned to a stack of massive smoking catfish above the smoldering coals. He told us that Omari had caught all of them. We all wanted to be like Omari.
Nemoneya introduced us to Pigemo’s Nehneh, or grandma. In the confusion, we thought Nehneh was her name. We continued to simply call her grandma for the duration of our stay. We greeted Nehneh, but it immediately became clear she didn’t speak much Spanish. She rocked back and forth in a hand-woven hammock, weaving a bag from palm fibers while talking and laughing loudly. Meanwhile, Omari stopped weaving and started to chew yucca, continuously spitting into a bowl as she mixed the remnants with her bare hands. After a few minutes, the bowl was passed around for everyone to drink. Chicha is a traditional fermented Amazonian drink made from Yucca. The fermentation process is accelerated when Waorani women chew the yucca before spitting it back into the fermentation container. Enzymes in the saliva break carbohydrates into simple sugars. The natural yeast that lives in our mouth then converts the sugars into acetic acid and alcohol as waste products. It’s a genius way to start the digestion of a notoriously tough food before it’s even consumed. I was pleasantly surprised by the taste. Somewhere between plain greek yogurt and mashed potatoes. “Probiotics,” I said silently before taking another swig and passing the bowl to Kira.
I struggled to comprehend the uniqueness of our current situation. I wasn’t sure if I was experiencing culture shock or if I was simply in awe of this radically different way of life. Within minutes we were transported into a different, pre-industrial time. I looked around their home. Nothing was made from plastic, every item had a functional use and was crafted by hand from materials collected in the jungle. Nenquerei told me that each family had a slightly different style of constructing their homes. I studied the thatched roof of their shack; intricately woven from palm fronds. This house, or oko, had borne constant rain and relentless equatorial sun characteristic of weather in the Amazon. Built by Nemoneya’s dad over 20 years before, their home looked ready to endure another 20. I took a deep breath and smiled at Kira and Sara. I wasn’t dreaming. “I hope we can stay here a while,” Sara said. I agreed.
Not long after the sunset, Omari yelled that she had found a frog near the house. In unison, we grabbed our headlamps and found her standing with a giant Leptodactylus frog. Everyone was excited to touch the massive frog and ask questions. We were off to a good start. Omari appointed herself as our new guide (sorry Nenquerei). She stood in gym shorts and rubber boots by the forest’s edge, excited to show us the trails around her home. She was proud that this land had so many frogs, or weke in Waorani. We laughed as she demonstrated her extensive knowledge of frog calls with hilarious imitations as we walked through the jungle. Sometimes she would sing as we walked. Sara did her best to join the singing. First, she mumbled the tune and later used all the Waorani words she knew to write her own. Her song was deemed a hit, and soon Omari had joined in. The lyrics, Wapone Beneke, Weke Waorani," translated to "Good morning, Waorani Frog," and they rang out through the night
One night as we walked through the jungle searching for frogs, Omari slipped into a story about a Waorani woman who felt more like a frog than a person. She would paint her body to look like a frog and on rainy nights, she would wander into the jungle to be with the other frogs. Eventually, she married a frog and to this day they live together in the jungle. Nenquerei also entertained us with his habit of animated nighttime storytelling. After eating boiled catfish and plantains one evening he crouched low in the sand and told us a sort of Waorani legend about a man who lived in the next community downstream. After several mistranslations, we figured out that in the story this man was an incredible fisherman. He was so good at fishing that an anaconda fell in love with him. Nenquerei traced the shape of a snake with his finger in the sand as he talked. The man married the anaconda and started living underwater and riding on a turtle’s back. When his friends went looking for him, they saw him emerge from the water with bone-dry clothing.
At first, I dismissed the story as some kind of ayahuasca vision or fever dream, maybe just one of Nenquerei’s eccentricities. As we heard more and more of these stories, I realized these kinds of legends were an important part of Waorani culture. They weren’t just folk tales, these were ways of connecting with the natural world. Omari and Nenquerei’s stories frequently involved humans and animals falling in love and were always told as if they had actually happened. The stories sound bizarre to us, but they would probably be less strange if we’d grown up in a culture with such an intimate relationship with nature.
The Waorani were generous teachers. They went out of their way to share knowledge with us, even if our clumsy hands slowed down their work. Our days became filled with hikes to the lake to fish for piranha, tutorials on basket weaving, plantain harvesting, tree climbing, grub foraging, and collecting firewood. Reflecting one evening after dinner, I started to journal:
"It just dawned on me that we had been “working” all day, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like play. We were laughing the entire time. When your work directly feeds you and your family, it becomes inherently meaningful. I don’t think people who live like this struggle with finding a purpose in life. When you live in this way, you don’t need to come up with a story in your head to justify why going to work every day is important. It’s intuitive, it’s survival. Seeing Pigemo learn this as a baby is amazing."
At first, Pigemo had shocked us because he was a baby coming on our trip. Later he would shock us with his ability to completely adapt to his surroundings. He was content to play in the sand for hours with no plastic toys. Early in the trip, we watched him lean over the boat, fall in, get yanked out, and after ten seconds of startled crying, return to his chill demeanor. He was one year old and potty trained. He had no problem sleeping on the ground in the jungle. Such resilience was baked into living. No one rushed to his side if he fell in the sand. No one coddled him after falling into the water. He was tough because he had been taught to be tough. Sometimes the lessons were shocking, like the time Omari returned from the jungle with a bouquet of stinging nettle leaves. She flipped Pigemo on his back and started pressing the painful leaves into the skin on his hands, legs, and feet. This was to toughen him up, she said. He only cried for a few minutes.
On our last night at Omari and Nehneh’s, we were sitting outside throwing scraps to her skinny, flea-covered dog. I turned to Sara and Kira. “Would you rather be a dog that lived here - ultimate freedom, able to run through the jungle every day - or a golden retriever that lived in the suburban U.S.? Lots of comfort and security.” We debated the pros and cons of each for a long while. Late at night, as we lay in our hammocks before bed, I pondered what we were doing in the jungle. I looked at a journal entry from one of the first nights:
“My legs are so fucked with bug bites. I used my swiss army knife to cut out a couple of tick-like insects that were deeply buried in my ankles. One of my boots has a hole and I flooded the other one. Walking in hot rubber boots with wet socks all night has made my legs and feet look like the photos in a tropical diseases textbook. I’m not really sure what to do.”
We were missing the comforts of home and simultaneously dreading the stress that comes with life in the industrialized world. Sara rocked back and forth in her hammock, “The golden retriever question is kind of a good analogy for the same question with people, and I don’t know the answer.” Of course, the Waorani are grappling with this question too. Nenquerei and Nemoneya left the jungle to live in Shell, where they could send their six children to school. They are trading freedom and connection to the land for economic opportunities. Pigemo is losing valuable cultural knowledge but gaining opportunities that come with Western education.
Throughout our time on the river, questions nagged me. How long will this way of life be a reality? Will Pigemo’s kids learn to use a blowgun or make chicha? Waorani culture is threatened. Nehneh has the scars to prove it, something we learned when she showed us an old bullet wound from an attack by colonists decades ago. The Waorani have been defending their way of life from outsiders for generations. In 1956, a group of Waorani speared five missionaries to death on a sandbar along the Rio Curaray. Encroachments continued until 1990 when the Waorani won a legal battle in Ecuador’s courts, granting them a huge swath of protected ancestral land. This was a temporary victory though, as illegal drilling and deforestation continued on Waorani land. In 2021, Ecuador’s new right-wing president vowed to double domestic oil extraction and new oil concessions are being proposed in Yasuni National park and the Waorani Ethnic Reserve. Just yesterday, I heard about another massive oil spill in Ecuador’s Amazon. Over 27,000 indigenous people are living downstream from where the pipe ruptured on the Rio Coca.
Seemingly wherever I travel in the world, only one thing is constant everywhere. There’s an oil company fucking over poor people and wildlife. Oil in the water threatens both frogs and people. A major parallel between indigenous communities and amphibian populations is that they are both affected by environmental changes first. I can hop on a plane, fly to Ecuador, and not feel the impact of fossil fuel extraction until long after the frogs have died and the Waorani’s drinking water has been poisoned by oil. The Waorani fighting to protect their land is an example of modern-day reciprocity between people and the natural world. People like indigenous rights activist Nemonte Nenquimo defend their land from companies looking for profit, which in turn protects frogs and other wildlife. Meanwhile, conservationists leverage the presence of endemic or endangered species of frogs to justify protecting wild areas like Yasuni National Park from oil extraction. This directly benefits the Waorani who call Yasuni home. Though it may seem like an unlikely partnership, it’s simply a reflection of an age-old philosophy of interconnectedness and mutual dependence.
Several days after we left Omari and Nehneh’s home we had a mind-blowing night of surveying. The most frog diversity we encountered at a single site throughout our entire time in Ecuador. We chose to survey a flooded riverbank before a big storm. We didn’t know that a storm was approaching, but the frogs seemed to know. As the sun lowered in the sky, the songs of unfamiliar frogs began to fill the air. We were giddy with excitement by the time Kira spotted him.
We didn’t know the species name at the time but eventually identified his scientific nickname as Trachycephalus macrotis, the Amazonian Milk Frog. He had a seafoam green stomach and green hands proportioned like an NFL receiver. He gripped my hand, absolutely the strongest frog I’ve ever held. The super glue-like mucous secreting from glands on his skin smelled like teriyaki sauce, burning my nostrils. It made me sad to think that his section of rainforest could soon be gone. The threats are endless. I still smiled though. As long as frogs like him are out in the world singing and making babies, I’ll have hope. A badass, powerful, and resilient frog. I thought of Omari. This is the Weke Waorani. Good morning, Waorani frog.
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