Our Everyday Life Is a Form of Protest
Would you consider walking into the heart of a forest to harvest wild medicines to heal your sick or wounded child to be a form of protest? Would you think that singing ancestral songs in a federal courthouse is an act of resistance? What about simply speaking your native language?
The Waorani Indigenous people’s territorial homelands in eastern Ecuador are continually under threat. In fact, our very physical and spiritual existence has been threatened for centuries. And yet we’re still here.
We’re here because our forest is still healthy. We have protected it because we know it gives us life. Our people have passed down to younger generations the knowledge of medicinal plants, how to make gardens, how to find animals, and how to respect the forest.
We’re here because we have defended our territories, first with peach palm spears and now with lawsuits and mass mobilizations.
We’re here because we do not accept the words of the outsiders who tell us that our way of life is backward, heathen, underdeveloped. We know that living in the forest is safe, healthy, and full of abundance. We know it gives us life.
The dominant civilization today values the oil and gold underneath our forest more than our knowledge, our stories and songs, more than our connection to the land and community, more than us as a people. Our ways—even our laughter and our celebrations—have become protests against an industrialized society that doesn’t value us. Every day that we hunt, fish, and garden, make new hunting trails, speak Wao Tededo and teach our language to our children, sing our ancestral songs, drink sacred plants, speak with the spirits, and connect with our dreams—every day that we continue to exist is a day of resistance, a day of protest against our disappearance.
Today, the escalating threats we face—oil drilling, mining, clear-cutting, arson fires to burn down the forest to plant soy or crops for raising cattle, catastrophic climate change—if left unchecked, will destroy the Amazon rainforest, and with it, our very existence.
In response, we are adapting our strategies of protest. We are innovating and incorporating new ideas into broad, collective struggles to meet the pressing threats we face today. And we are using protest as a way to communicate with the outside world, to tell people that we are here, that every day we see and feel the threats all around us, and that we are resisting. The Ceibo Alliance and Amazon Frontlines work with other Amazonian Indigenous nations and Western allies to defend our territories, Indigenous autonomy, and our global climate. We use lawsuits and grassroots organizing, communication strategies, mapping, and public education campaigns in our struggle. As a woman, I have also found protest through singing, joining other women to force the country’s courts to hear and feel our song. Together, we have won moral, spiritual, and legal victories, protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest.
Across the world in these times of threat and crisis, many people protest through single, isolated actions: one-off marches and digital activism, sending an email, signing an online petition, making a social media post, donating to a nonprofit organization, or they wait out election cycles to choose leaders and representatives.
While all those things may be important for us, continuing to live as Waorani is, in itself, our fundamental act of protest and defiance.
In fact, I encourage us all to make protest part of our daily life. Just as Indigenous traditions, customs, and ways of life are in and of themselves forms of protest and resistance, so is actively resisting the industrial ways of life that require us to extract every last drop of oil, every speck of gold, and every living tree. Consuming less and more sustainably must be a part of contemporary protest, a new way of life that protects the planet and its inhabitants.
What would it look like if protests in the world’s wealthy urban centers included not using so much, not accumulating what we don’t really need, not building and buying and selling so much stuff? Perhaps together we could transform the oil economy, develop less harmful forms of energy, stop pumping greenhouse gases into the air, stop burning down the Amazon, and sustain a world where many different ways of life can coexist. Then my people’s way of life could cease to be a form of protest and return to its roots as the song of the forest.
