Nemonte Nenquimo’s extraordinary book tells the story of her journey from isolated Amazonian community to international activism – extraordinary because it is one of the very few accounts of an indigenous society written by an insider.

The Waorani of the rainforests of eastern Ecuador have been famous for a century. Since the 1920s, when they were identified as a separate group, their hardwood spears and murderous ways have posed challenges not only to outsiders but to themselves as well. No outsiders spoke their language – it is an ‘isolate’ with no relatives. No outsiders knew what they called themselves – to their neighbours, the Quechua, they were aucas (‘savages’) and the name stuck, to the dismay of today’s Waorani. No one knows their origins. They came from ‘downriver, long ago’, they say, which suggests they were part of the massive tribal dislocation along the Amazon that followed the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. Settling in the vast forested hills to the south and west of the Napo, a tributary of the Upper Amazon, the Waorani learned to avoid rivers, the main routes of colonists and traders. Only a few hundred in total, they lived on ridges in small groups, occupying palm-thatched houses with palm-fibre hammocks and going without clothing except for a cotton string around the waist, into which the men tucked their foreskins. Outsiders said they went naked, but to them a waistband was clothing. It marked their identity, along with decorations: zigzags painted in black and red, feathered headbands and balsa wood discs worn in pierced earlobes. Experts in forest ecology, they lived as semi-nomads, commuting between manioc plantations, gathering seasonal fruits, spearing wild pigs and hunting monkeys and birds with three-metre blowguns and darts tipped with curare poison. Before contact was made in the 1950s, they were a ‘Stone Age’ people, making tools from stones left on the forest floor by earlier groups.

The Waorani lived in a world of spirits presided over by Waengongi, a remote and impersonal creator god. To them, all outsiders (cowori is their disparaging word) were cannibals and killers. Overall, it was a harsh life of many dangers. Snakebite was a common cause of death. And theirs was