Listening to the Forest: Conversations with Aurelio Quenamá

SELVA: WHISPER OF THE PINK DOLPHIN

8/4/2025

Listening to the Forest: Conversations with Aurelio Quenamá by Hummingbird

This is the first in a series of reflections on my time with Aurelio, a Cofán shaman, friend, and teacher whose presence shaped the course of my life. Through these conversations, I hope to preserve not only his memory, but the ancestral voice of the Amazon Rainforest itself—a voice increasingly threatened by silence. What follows is not biography. It is a listening.

Aurelio died less than a month ago. There is no gentler way to say it.

Aurelio, my teacher and friend, is gone. I worked alongside him for thirty years, and still, all I truly understand of the forest could barely fill a single page of the vast book he carried within him. He was the rainforest. Its memory. Its humour. Its discipline. Its vast and quiet depth.

Aurelio Quenamá: Keeper of the Forest’s Inner Law

Aurelio Quenamá was far more than a shaman. He stood, quiet and unassuming, as perhaps the last of the truly powerful traditional healers of his people—a man whose presence felt inseparable from the life of the forest. His mastery of medicinal plants and the unwritten laws of nature placed him in a league of his own. This knowledge did not come from books, laboratories, or formal study, but from the forest itself—its rhythms, its silences, its patient instruction. It was learned through a life of careful observation, humility, and reverence for all living things.

He was a soft-spoken man, kind in word and gesture, with a transparency of honesty and honour that radiated from his very presence. One needed only to observe his laughter—warm, understated, unguarded—or look into his profound, steady, dark brown eyes to sense the clarity of his soul. He was the kind of man in whom the truth could find refuge, and with whom pain could safely unravel.

This ancient knowledge was also his inheritance, passed down from his father, Guillermo Quenamá—one of the most respected shamans in Cofán memory. In the shadow of that lineage, Aurelio walked a path that demanded humility, precision, and total commitment. Later, he studied for more than a decade under the guidance of Colombian Taitas, learning the vast, intricate codes of the forest in a manner not unlike the rigours of Western medical training. It was a discipline rooted in silence and observation, in the reading of plants, of patterns, of the subtle language of all living things. Few could match the depth of his practice or the grace with which he embodied it.

His father was a towering figure in the collective memory of the upper Amazon—a man revered for his spiritual authority and his fierce defence of Indigenous land and sovereignty. He stood boldly against foreign missionaries, oil prospectors, and the long shadow of extractive industry, which he recognised as a mortal threat to the cultural and ecological integrity of Cofán territory. His healing was inseparable from his resistance, and his presence stirred both respect and fear.

Aurelio, though equally steeped in ancestral wisdom, chose a different path. Where his father confronted, he consoled. Where Guillermo spoke to power, Aurelio listened to pain. His healing work was an act of restoration, of returning harmony where it had been disrupted—within the body, the family, the community, and the land itself. His way was gentler, but no less powerful.

Together, father and son represented two expressions of a single truth: that the forest has its laws, and those who understand them must live not only by their guidance, but in their defence. Guillermo guarded the outer boundaries of that world. Aurelio tended its heart.

The first time I met Aurelio Quenamá was not in the forest, but in the luminous halls of the Presidential Palace in Quito, during my time as agrarian adviser to President Jaime Roldós Aguilera, working closely with Manuel Chiriboga and Luis Verdesoto

It was an occasion steeped in symbolism, a moment when two worlds—so often held apart—briefly stood face to face. President Jaime Roldós was preparing to make history. In his view, democracy and human rights were not abstract ideals to be reserved for courtrooms or foreign declarations; they were the living core of governance itself, the compass by which every decision must be measured—from international diplomacy to rural reform and agrarian justice.

On that day, he enacted a vision long overdue. For the first time in Ecuadorian history, the state formally recognised the ancestral land rights of an Amazonian Indigenous community. The legal title—no longer a concession, but an act of justice—was granted to the Cofán people of the Dureno–Pisurí region. It was handed directly to Aurelio Quenema, acknowledged in full as both Governor and Shaman of his people.

For Roldós, this was more than a legal transaction. It was a rebalancing of the scales. Until then, the ancestral territories of the Amazon had existed in legal limbo, open to the advances of oil exploration, logging concessions, and foreign speculation. With this act, the land became protected not only by spirit, but by law.

Aurelio stood with the quiet strength of someone who knew this truth already. Dressed in traditional tunic, adorned with the feathers of his nationality, he bore himself not as a supplicant but as a peer—calm, composed, unshaken by the polished air of power. He spoke little. He did not need to. It was, so far as I know, the first and only time he ever left the rainforest.

Our true friendship, however, began far from the marble halls of Quito—on foot, beneath the endless green. During the many long walks we came to share, he revealed more in presence than in speech. He moved through the forest with the ease of one in constant communion with it, as though each leaf and gust of wind carried a message meant only for him. There was no doubt: he belonged to it as much as any river, tree, or sky.

One day, he stopped beneath a towering Ceibo—the tree of spirits—and gestured for me to sit. Not to talk. To listen.

And so, I did—not only with my ears, but with everything I had. I listened with my skin, to the breath of wind across my arms. With my nose, to the wet scent of bark and leaf. With my eyes, to the language of light filtering through a thousand layers of green. I listened with the soles of my feet, pressed against the warm, living ground—anchored in soil that remembered everything.

In that moment, the forest ceased to be landscape. It entered me—slowly, silently—and became something else entirely: a second self, vast and knowing. The Amazon and nature became my soul, and Aurelio, my teacher and guide.

"This," he said, resting his palm on the warm, ribbed base of the tree, "is the first elder."

In Cofán tradition, the Ceibo is more than a tree. It is a portal. Its roots reach into the underworld, and its branches stretch upward into the realm of spirits. It is said to be one of the few places where souls pause before crossing over, where a shaman may receive visions from the ancestors, and where the living are reminded of their place in the vast design of existence. No serious ritual begins without its blessing. No true healer ignores its presence.

The silence that followed was not absence—it was presence, dense and listening. That, I would come to understand, was the first truth of shamanic culture: before the forest speaks, one must become still enough to hear it.

Later that afternoon, the heat pressed down from above, though the sun itself remained hidden. In the primary forest, light moves reluctantly, filtered through infinite veils. The air was thick with resin and the scent of crushed leaves. The only breeze came from our own slow movement. I was trying not to show how thirsty I was, but Aurelio gave me that look—half amused, half exasperated—that said clearly, You are about as subtle as a howler monkey.

Without a word, he veered off the trail, scanned the green, and sliced through a thick jungle vine hanging in a lazy arc from the canopy. From the cut end, clear water spilled. He fashioned a cup from folded leaves and handed it to me.

“Be careful when choosing the vine,” he said, almost casually. “They all look the same. But a few can leave you sterile.”

I blinked at the cup. He gave me the same look again—this time with a smile behind it.

“After you, Aurelio,” I said, handing it back. “Just to be sure. Monogamy is not exactly the bedrock of Cofán culture. We would not want to risk the future interests of any of your many wives.”

He let out a deep, delighted laugh, the kind that filled the space between us like sunlight on still water.

“You think I have many wives? You should meet my uncles.”

Then he drank.

With Aurelio, these moments were constant. The sacred and the practical, the cosmic and the comic—they always walked hand in hand. One moment you might be learning about the soul of a tree, the next warned about venomous frogs. That was his genius—he never let the forest become a metaphor. It was alive, with rules of its own. It could nourish you—or kill you—depending on how you behaved.

We paused at the edge of a small clearing where the canopy opened just enough to let a soft light spill through. A fallen tree—solid and dry—offered us a place to rest. In the forest, one learns quickly never to sit on a hollow log. That is where snakes curl and wasps nest. We sat, backs straight, breath slowing, as if the forest were exhaling around us.

We had not gone far, but it had been deliberate walking—the kind one does in old forest, where each step is a quiet negotiation with branches, stones, and unseen eyes. I had known Aurelio for years, but that day felt different. The moment felt open.

“Please tell me about your father,” I said.

Aurelio shifted slightly and looked into the green middle distance—not at something, but through it.

“People always speak of him as special,” I added. “Exceptional.”

He nodded. “He was. But not only because of what he knew. My father was a healer. People came to him from far upriver when nothing else worked. He treated sicknesses that Western doctors could not even name. But more than that—he was Governor of the Cofán.”

He turned slightly to face me.

“That means something deep in our culture. It is not just a title. It means you are responsible for the wellbeing of the people—not just their health, but their harmony. When there is conflict between families, it is the Governor who listens. He does not take sides. He carries the burden of justice.”

He looked down at his hands. “My father carried that burden with strength. He knew how to speak. And he knew when not to.”

The forest held its breath. Even the leaves seemed to hush.

He paused for a long moment, and then continued—his voice steady, each word weighed like an offering.

He spoke of resistance, not with anger but with clarity—of a legacy rooted in healing, not conquest.

“When the oil company came,” he said, “he was the one who stood in the way. Texaco brought contracts and promises. They wanted signatures. He refused. He told them, ‘We do not sign what we do not understand.’ He said that once the pen touched paper, the forest would never be the same.”

Then Aurelio looked directly at me. His words were slow, deliberate, unflinching.

“Texaco was a petroleum company from the United States. They called it progress. But it was the beginning of the forest’s death. They opened the ground like a wound and poured their poison into it. Rivers turned black. Fish floated to the surface. Children became sick. People could no longer drink from the streams. That is what they left. Not hope. Not a future. Only silence, sickness, and the slow death of ancestral land. Their arrival was the moment the roots of our world were cut.”

He was quiet. I waited.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“They poisoned him,” Aurelio said. His voice was flat, stripped of embellishment. “They brought a bottle of alcohol as a gift. Texaco workers. One of the missionaries from the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano ( ILV) was there too.”

He turned to me. “I saw his body.”

He spoke slowly, not to explain, but as if remembering each image aloud.

“His face was twisted. His tongue and mouth were black. There were fingerprints on his neck. My father was a strong man. He would not have died unless they meant him to.”

He turned away again, his voice calm, but final.

“They were afraid of him. He could not be bought. That is why he died.”

Another pause. Then, softly:

“When a shaman like my father is killed—not just dies, but is silenced—it is not only a crime against a man. It is a wound to the spirit of a people. The forest feels it. The balance shifts. The animals become restless. The dreams go dark.”

He looked toward the canopy, his voice hovering between memory and myth.

“A powerful shaman is not only a healer. He is a bridge. Between worlds. Between what is seen and what is not. When that bridge is broken by force, there are consequences. Not revenge. But correction. The spirit world does not forget. Sometimes the rivers rise without rain. Sometimes children are born without laughter. It is the earth reminding us that something sacred was taken, and must be returned.”

Then, after a silence thick with meaning, he turned back to me.

“And yet,” he said, “the worst part is not what the spirits do. It is what the people lose. Without a shaman, they become spiritually orphaned. The forest is still there, but they no longer know how to hear it.”

His words settled around us like mist—quiet, dense with meaning. We sat for a long while without speaking. The silence between us was no longer empty. It was reverent.

I looked at him carefully. "The Instituto Lingüístico de Verano," I said, slowly. "If I understand what you are saying... then they were part of it. Not just witnesses. Involved."

Aurelio’s expression changed—no scowl, no rage. Just stillness. As if the name itself carried weight he would not waste with emotion.

"They came with gifts," he said. "Bibles, medicines. They spoke of light. Of salvation. But the light came with a price. One of their first acts was to set up clinics—white tents with crosses, staffed by their own doctors. They administered injections. They distributed pills. And they brought a gas, a strange gas, which they said would help the women sleep during examinations and treatments. Many accepted the help. It was presented as kindness. As care.

But my father watched closely. He warned that nothing given in silence comes without consequence. He said the medicines were not only cures. He said the women were being changed. That some could no longer conceive. That something in their bodies had been altered."

He studied me for a moment.

"They spoke of money. Of roads. Of jobs for those who cooperated. They encouraged families to let the company drill. Sometimes they translated for the oil men. Sometimes they negotiated—but more often, they simply took the money and the so-called gifts: chainsaws, outboard motors, tools of convenience disguised as generosity. These were not gifts freely given, but instruments that carved dependence and invited extraction."

He looked at me, and in his eyes I saw no doubt. Only memory.

We did not understand it at the time. But later… we began to see it. Too many of our young women unable to have children. Too many wombs gone silent.

There were many possible causes, carried on the breath of the forest and echoed by the riverbanks.

The water no longer tasted as it once had—of rain filtered through leaves, of memory drawn from the deep roots of the earth. It came now with a bitter edge, marked by the blotches of oil that began to mix and spread like dark veins across the bark of dying trees.

The fish turned soft, the yucca grew hollow, and even the aiñekae—the chacras our mothers planted—began to forget how to bloom.

My father believed something irreversible might have been done to our people. Quietly. Without consent. Without warning.

He paused, lowering his voice.

"Who knows what really happened—and who cared?"

The words did not echo, but they settled, as heavy as the humidity that clings to the forest at dusk. It was not just a question—it was a verdict.

For all the eyes that looked down from above, all the treaties signed in distant lands, all the promises made beneath bright electric bulbs far from the reach of mosquitoes—what real importance had the so-called ‘civilised’ world ever given to the fate of Indigenous peoples entwined with the canopy of the Amazon Rainforest?

We were spoken of, mapped, displaced—but rarely listened to. Our lands were considered empty. Our knowledge, quaint. Our children, collateral.

Whether the damage was done by intent or by indifference no longer mattered. The rivers did not need witnesses to carry their poisons. The soil did not require signatures to go sterile. And the women—our sisters, our daughters—were left with diagnoses but no explanations.

There was no reckoning. No apology. No return.

“In the end,” he said, “perhaps it was not a question of intent at all—but of consequences unleashed, long before anyone bothered to ask what they might become.”

"And the shamans," he said slowly, "were the first to be undermined. Not with guns. Not even with laws. But with shame. They told our people that living with the forest—hunting, fishing, sleeping under stars, speaking with spirits—was a sign of ignorance. That walking bare-chested, that feeding a child from the breast in the open air, was lustful. That our bodies were something to cover, to hide, to fear."

He paused, and there was no bitterness in his tone—only weariness.

"They taught our children that our ways were uncivilised. That our elders were witches. That the forest was a place to be escaped."

He looked toward the trees, his voice softening.

"But we shamans... we do not hold books. We hold memory. We carry the names of plants, the movements of rivers, the moods of the wind. We know how to dream and come back with something useful. We know how to speak with silence."

He turned back to me.

"When the missionaries arrived, they did not see healers. They saw a threat. A different kind of authority. And so they replaced it—step by step—with their own. They wore white. We wore earth. We had fire. They came to save us. We had never been lost."

After a long silence, he added, more softly:

"They told our children we were drug addicts."

He said it without anger, just a kind of tired clarity.

“We use yagé,” he said, his voice calm, grounded. “Always with purpose. Always with care. It is never taken to escape. It is for learning. For healing. For remembering how to live in right relation. The forest does not offer itself to noise. Yagé teaches us how to receive.”

He paused, then continued.

“We take the Banisteriopsis vine—thick and brown like a coiled serpent—and combine it with the leaves of chacruna—tiny, bright, green as the eyes of a tree frog. The vine is washed and pounded until it softens and yields its essence. The leaves are added slowly, with intention. The brew is then cooked in a wide pot over a slow fire, sometimes for a full day. The steam alone can stir the edge of a vision.”

“When my father prepared yagé, he fasted. He prayed. He kept still. He spoke not in words but through presence. He watched the fire, the curve of the smoke, the shifting light on the forest floor. He was not taught in any school. His teachers are the rain, the silence, the pulse beneath the bark.”

Then Aurelio looked up, and for a moment, it was as though his father were there among us.

“During ceremony, my father could become a jaguar,” he said. “You would not see it—unless you were looking from within. But the forest knew. The spirits knew. He would move through the vision space as a predator—silent, exacting, unafraid. He hunted what could not be seen: sickness, spiritual confusion, fear that had taken root inside the body. When he found it, it fled. Even the darkness has its enemies.”

He let the words hang in limbo for a moment .

“Sometimes, the one receiving the medicine changes too. They might become a bird with torn feathers. A snake halfway through shedding. A monkey with a human face. These are not illusions. These are the stories the body has no other way to tell.”

He turned slightly toward me.

“A true shaman does not walk alone. He is never alone. He carries protectors—animal spirits who guide him, defend him, lend him their eyes. Jaguar. Caiman. Anaconda. Harpy eagle. They do not come when called. They come when you are ready. And if you are not—they stay hidden.”

His voice shifted, heavy now with memory.

He looked away into the trees.

“They came to take our spirits,” he said. “And offer us their God in return.”

Once the hymns were learned by heart and the Bibles distributed like bubble gum—sweet-tasting rubber handed out to children and elders alike, chewed for hours, then inflated into bright pink balloons and popped with a smack of the lips.

“They give you a book,” he said, “and something to keep your mouth busy so you do not ask what it means.”

Then came the next marvel of civilisation: Democracy.

In the old days—those apparently unfortunate centuries before enlightenment arrived by outboard motor—the Governor Shamans rose to their role through generations of observation, ceremony, and many years of studying the plants and animals with the most knowledgeable teachers of all: the elder shamans. Their authority did not depend on ballots or paperwork. It could not be faked.

This, of course, was deeply troubling to the missionaries.

“It hinders development,” they said. “A thing of the past.”

We were to enter a new age. A better age. One in which the community would vote, like the civilised world does. We would elect Presidents, Treasurers, Secretaries. Everyone would have a voice, though the voices tended to say what the financiers preferred to hear.

The missionaries, always helpful, assisted in the selection of candidates and, by miraculous coincidence, funded their campaigns.

Soon, a parallel structure emerged—official, legal, and State-approved. Our new democratic leaders began speaking for us in meetings with oil companies and mining officials, despite the Constitution whispering from its footnotes that this was not allowed.

Inevitably, the chosen ones moved to town. They wore buttoned shirts and tennis shoes—always two sizes too big, making them walk like iguanas on stilts—drove oil company trucks, and watched enormous televisions powered by electricity gifted to the compliant few.

Meanwhile, the shamans remained in the forest, unelected and increasingly invisible.

Then Aurelio stood.

"I shall be right back," he said. No explanation. He stepped off the path and vanished into the green as effortlessly as a tapir slipping into water.

Aurelio's absence allowed me to think and meditate over what he told me. It was not the first time I had heard these stories. During my time with President Roldós Aguilera, the matter had been given priority status. We sifted through reports, interviews, and documents—some of them classified—all pointing to a troubling pattern.

The Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (ILV), the Latin American branch of the United States-based evangelical organisation known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), was deeply entangled with oil interests and United States geopolitical strategy in the region. SIL maintained the global vision, research, and funding channels—often through partnerships with United States AID and other governmental bodies—while ILV functioned more locally, embedding itself in remote communities under the guise of linguistic research and translation. SIL crafted the overarching ideological and logistical framework, ILV delivered it on the ground, translating not just language but belief systems, in ways that often displaced Indigenous worldviews.

Internal reports reviewed by our team showed coordinated interactions between ILV personnel and United States AID-funded infrastructure projects, especially road-building efforts aimed at oil exploration zones. In effect, ILV’s cultural mapping became a kind of reconnaissance—softening resistance, paving the way, and cloaking industrial expansion beneath a veil of evangelical benevolence.

Behind their soft-spoken evangelism were negotiations, maps, aerial surveys. Their presence in Indigenous communities smoothed the way for exploration. They created trust—then passed it on to the companies.

The case of the Cofán was not an isolated one. Similar interventions unfolded in other areas of the Amazon.

Aurelio returned with his beautiful and very intelligent grand-daughter Maria, whom he had come across while she was searching for the leaves of a medicinal plant to take home—her younger brother had fallen ill.

He sat down beside me as if he had never left, a cocoa pod in his hand. He said nothing. With his machete, he split the thick husk and offered me the white pulp nestled inside.

A heavy downpour had delayed him, as it delays everything in the forest. The storm had come without warning—thunder cracking, lightning flaring across the sky, rain falling in dense, blinding sheets. Like the vast majority of animals—monkeys, sloths, parrots, even ocelots—he had taken shelter. Nothing in the rainforest confronts the storm; everything adapts.

Two hours had passed—though it may well have been one, or three. Time had slipped away without notice, absorbed into the rhythm of rain and foliage. There are no hours in the forest. Time curls and unspools like smoke, folding itself into the hush between raindrops.

Western minds, trained to the rhythm of ticking clocks and digital alerts, may find this disconcerting. In cities, time is a grid—a schedule, a deadline, a series of obligations stacked upon one another. The clock is sovereign. To arrive late is to sin against the system. Punctuality becomes a moral code.

But in the Amazon, time is not carved into fixed intervals. It is relational. Elastic. Alive. It does not obey the rigid hands of a wristwatch—or the ever-glowing screen of an iPhone—but flows and folds like the forest itself. One is reminded of Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, where clocks sag and melt across rock and branch. In that surreal landscape, time loses its tyranny. It becomes fluid, uncertain, organic—just as it is here.

In the Amazon, the weather is not an interruption—it is part of the rhythm. One adapts.

This stands in stark contrast to the worldview many inherit in industrial civilisation, where nature is often perceived as something made for human use. A resource to be harvested. A force to be overcome. A convenience, or an obstacle.

From the Genesis command to subdue the Earth, to the Enlightenment ideal of human dominion over nature, the prevailing belief has long been that the natural world exists to serve humanity’s needs.

But not here

In the Amazon, nature does not serve. It is. It is autonomous, animate, and—in many Indigenous cosmologies—alive. The river is not a resource; it is a being. The jaguar is not a threat; it is a spirit. The forest is not wild; it is wise.

I took the cocoa fruit from Aurelio’s hand and sucked the sweet, tangy pulp from the seeds. It melted on my tongue like time itself—soft, unhurried, and nourishing. In that gesture, I understood: this, too, is timekeeping. Not with numbers, but with care. Not in conquest, but in communion. He sat beside me again without a word, split the thick skin with his thumb, and offered me the white, sweet pulp.

"The forest provides," he said quietly. "Even when we forget to ask."

I nodded, the hunger easing in my body as the forest itself seemed to breathe with us.

"Tell me more," I said. "About your father. About what came after."

He looked into the cocoa pod for a moment, then back at me. The conversation was not over. It was only just beginning.

And somewhere above, a flock of tinamous burst from the canopy, their wings catching slivers of light like falling knives. A squirrel monkey barked from the shadows. A gust of wind twisted the leaves, and a single liana swung loose in the air, trembling.

Aurelio spoke again, his voice low but steady. "When a shaman like my father dies, he does not disappear. He dissolves into the memory of the forest. The vines remember his touch. The birds carry his songs. The river holds his name. If he was strong in spirit, if his heart walked straight, he becomes part of the dreaming. We can still speak to him. But you must know how to listen."

I asked, "Do you still speak with your father?"

Aurelio nodded without hesitation. "Not in words. But in signs. In dreams. In the wind that rises without cause. When the fire cracks just once, or when a jaguar crosses the path and does not look back. These are ways of speaking."

He handed me another piece of cocoa fruit. "And sometimes," he added with a glint of his old humour, "he speaks just to tell me I am being foolish."

We laughed softly, then allowed the quiet to settle again between us.

Aurelio tilted his head slightly, as if weighing something. Then he said, "You know, the missionaries and their book always speak of Divine justice and forgiveness. It is their answer to everything. They say it is the way to be clean, to be saved. But they never speak of justice—only mercy, only surrender. To them, forgiveness is an act of virtue. But for us, it must be part of balance. Without justice, forgiveness is just another word for forgetting."

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, gazing at the floor of the forest as if he was waiting for something to rise from it.

"Justice?" he said finally. "In our world, justice is not punishment. It is balance. If a tree falls, something must grow. If harm is done, the wound must be tended—not just with words, but with action. That is justice."

He looked up at the canopy where the light shimmered through. "Let the missionaries come back and listen, not preach. Let the oil men plant what they destroyed. Let them drink from the rivers they poisoned. Let them live like us. Then we will see what forgiveness means."

He sat back, the cocoa shell now empty between us.

"But we do not wait for them," he said. "The forest continues. So do we."

And in that moment, I felt it again—not just the presence of Aurelio, but of all those who came before him, sitting just beyond the edge of our vision, still listening.

It struck me, in that moment, how deeply Aurelio's understanding of justice and spirit echoed the philosophy of other spiritual traditions I had encountered. The Dalai Lama, when asked about forgiveness, once spoke not of excusing the wrong, but of releasing oneself from hatred—of seeking clarity, not vengeance. Aurelio, too, spoke of balance over blame, of healing over punishment. His forest did not forget, but neither did it cling. Both men, rooted in vastly different worlds, seemed to touch the same ancient thread: that justice is not the opposite of compassion, but its companion. And that true listening—whether to wind, memory, or silence—was where both began.

I turned to him again. "Aurelio," I said, "what about Randy Borman? What do you make of his story?" 

Aurelio paused. The question seemed to land differently. "Borman," he said, not unkindly, but with the weight of someone pronouncing an old name. "They call him the son of the forest. The white man who decided to become a Cofán leader and who dressed like a Shaman ."

He shook his head slowly. "It is a good story. One that foreigners like. A boy raised in the forest. A Tarzan. A protector."

The name struck me. Tarzan. I had not heard it in years, but it carried weight. In the early years of media attention, I remembered how some newspapers had referred to Borman as the 'Cofán Tarzan'—a missionary boy raised in the rainforest who fell in love with the Cofán equivalent of Jane. As if the rainforest needed a white hero and a love story to make it worthy of a headline.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, was unabashedly racist and colonialist. He wrote of Africans as 'savage brutes,' described native speech as 'jabbering,' and cast the white man as nature’s rightful master. That myth travelled far, cloaked in adventure, but at its heart was a tasteless and disrespectful fantasy—a romantic myth built on the bones of real people. Perhaps Aurelio knew this instinctively. But stories can be dangerous when they do not belong to the people who live them.

"Did he do harm?" I asked.

Aurelio did not answer immediately. His fingers tapped lightly on the shell of a cocoa pod resting in his lap, as if weighing his response in rhythm.

“He spoke our language. He lived among us. He told the world he was saving the Cofán. But in doing so, he made himself our voice. He stood before governments, oil companies, journalists—as though he alone understood us. As though we could not speak for ourselves.”

There was no anger in his tone, no apology either. Only the quiet weight of truth laid down without decoration.

“He made allies with the very powers we were resisting. Accepted deals. Drew lines on maps. And always, the cameras followed him.”

Aurelio looked out into the forest.

“When the oil companies identified reserves beneath our ancestral lands around Dureno and Pisuri, seismic teams from Texaco and Maxus arrived—with their drills and maps, sniffing at the rivers like wild boars. They began marking the territory we had long protected.

And Boreman—missionary of the ILV—did not stand in their way. He welcomed them. Spoke of opportunity. Of responsible development. Even assured us that Hutton, the head of Maxus, was a good Christian.”

He paused, then added,“As if that made the oil any cleaner.”

Aurelio’s voice remained calm.

“He encouraged families to move. Said it was for the best. Spoke of salvation. Not through force, but through persuasion. Not by bulldozer, but by blessing.”

He let the words settle.

“My father, Guillermo, had chosen Dureno and Pisuri for what they offered—firm ground, clean water, and a forest that could nourish and teach. That was tsampima coiraye—the careful tending of the forest as a living intelligence. It was not just where we lived. It was where we belonged.”

“But Boreman led us away from that. He proposed lower ground—swampy, flood-prone. Places like Zabalo, where the forest drowns for months at a time, where the soil is acidic and human life endures—but only just. He made it seem reasonable. Zabalo was framed as a new beginning, when in truth, it was a relocation aligned with oil interests. Quiet. Deliberate. Strategic.”

He smoothed the way. Cleared the ground. Never questioned whether helping them meant betraying us.

Aurelio turned to me.

“Zabalo was not a beginning. It was the echo of a door closed elsewhere—disguised as opportunity, but born of exclusion. It was never a home. It was a holding place. A future rewritten by others.”

Then, more quietly, “Land must carry your soul, or it is not your land.”He touched his chest with a quiet certainty.

"To be Cofán is not a story. It is a responsibility. You do not become one of us by growing up in the forest. You become one of us by carrying the weight of the forest. By listening. By asking permission. Not by taking the microphone and calling it yours."

There was a long pause between us. Then he added:

“He is not the only one who believed he was helping. But help without humility is just another kind of harm.”

Aurelio paused, letting the thought settle.

“Ah… that sly and treacherous Boreman,” he continued, and his tone was neither angry nor mocking, but his real feelings were coming to the surface.

“There is more you should know. He received foreign funding, even German aid—GTZ—which he used to produce fibreglass canoes. But instead of serving the whole community, the production became the monopoly of his Cofán wife’s family. Others had no access. What was meant to be development aid became a business.”

“And then came the travel agency. He invited outsiders to ‘experience’ the rainforest—as though it were an empty theatre, and he the owner of the stage. They floated in canoes, pointed cameras at our footpaths, and returned home believing they had seen something true. Sometimes I thought he might sell a slice of the sky, if someone were willing to pay.”

“What he created was not a path—it was an illusion. A marketable forest arranged beneath a borrowed narrative. Something distant. Manageable.”

He leaned back, his hands resting on his knees, eyes steady.

“And so we watched. As the forest was renamed. Repackaged. And the thread that once held us to this place began to fray.”

Aurelio was silent for a long moment. Then, with the calm gravity of someone long past surprise, he said:

“When a people lose the ground beneath their stories, they begin walking roads they would never have chosen.”

He looked to me—not for reassurance, but to be sure I had understood.

Some of Boreman’s political family, over time, entered dangerous trades. There were rumours—fibreglass canoes exchanged with FARC across the border, white gasoline traded for weapons. A quiet corridor opened—between our rivers and the shadows.

He placed one hand lightly on my shoulder.

"It is a long and difficult story. One for another time. But remember—when outsiders come to help, they must leave the forest stronger than they found it. Not more divided. Not more exposed."

Night was beginning to fall.

We should be leaving, I said, stretching my back, which was beginning to knot like a liana twisted by years of climbing.

But Aurelio, as if reluctant to let the moment pass, wanted to share one last thought.

He hesitated, then added, “One thing I never understood about Borman. He could learn our language, our plants, our trails—but not our way of living together. He despised our jïkï—our communal houses. Said they encouraged what he called sexual chaos.”

I blinked.Sexual chaos?

“Yes,” Aurelio said, with dry amusement. “He wanted everyone in separate houses. One man, one woman, one child, one Bible. He said communal living encouraged orgies.”

Not surprising, I replied. Borman was educated at the Alliance Academy in Quito. Probably the most puritanical school in the country. Sex, nudity, anything to do with the body—it all led straight to Satan.

I remember the Dutch chargé d’affaires telling me, utterly aghast, that the Netherlands had donated a beautiful and valuable collection of Dutch Masters prints to the school. The director believed in censorship and took his scissors to every last nipple, every sexual organ, every unclothed figure. Called it pornography. Even the shadows were suspect—too suggestive, he said.

Aurelio frowned. “Dutch Masters... shamans?”

Painters. From the seventeenth century.

He considered this for a moment. “And they painted the spirit world naked?”

No, I said, laughing, just ordinary people. But apparently, to the Alliance Academy, even Rembrandt was too risqué.

He raised an eyebrow—not in surprise, but in pity.

Well, perhaps beauty really does lie in the eye of the beholder—especially when the beholder is holding a Bible in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.

The shadows lengthened and the air grew cooler as the forest prepared for night.

We should be leaving, I said, standing slowly and trying to stretch—my back beginning to cramp like a liana twisting skyward in search of light it may never reach.

No closure. No final lesson. Only a deepening. Aurelio said no more, and neither did I. We had reached the edge of something sacred, and to go further would require another day—another kind of listening. The conversation would continue, I knew.

But for now, the forest had said enough .We rose without a word, and boarded our canoe—the river carrying us slowly through the nocturnal symphony the rainforest composes and orchestrates each night with effortless precision.

Letters To the Editor:

Review: “Listening to the Forest: Conversations with Aurelio” by Hummingbird

By: Professor Sebastián E. Navarro,

Researcher, Amazonian Thought and Territory – CLACSO

"Listening to the Forest: Conversations with Aurelio is a seminal contribution to the literature on Indigenous Amazonian lifeworlds, territorial defence, and the creation of a pluriversal historical record. Written with literary grace and spiritual intimacy under the pseudonym Hummingbird, it documents a rare, decades-long dialogue between the author and Aurelio Quenemá, a Cofán shaman and ancestral governor. The result is a compelling hybrid of memoir, ethnographic testimony, and historical witness.

What distinguishes this work is not only the lyrical portrayal of a profound intercultural friendship but also the way it centres the voice of an Indigenous authority speaking from within his own cosmovision—unmediated, unfiltered, and politically lucid.

Quenemá’s reflections on environmental devastation, cultural survival, and the enduring legacies of development and missionary expansion offer a trenchant critique that challenges dominant narratives of Amazonian progress. His words are not paraphrased or interpreted through an external lens; they appear in direct quotation—a deliberate editorial decision that affirms epistemic sovereignty and enacts a politics of listening.

The narrative also ventures into bold territory regarding the geopolitical entanglements of religion, oil extraction, and state power in late 20th-century Ecuador. Notably, it presents never-before-published information about the alleged covert ties between the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano and transnational corporate interests, including reflections about President Jaime Roldós Aguilera. These revelations elevate the piece from literary memoir to historical intervention.

Blending memory, spiritual ecology, and political critique, this work is groundbreaking across multiple fields: Indigenous studies, Amazonian ethnography, environmental humanities, and Latin American political history. It offers a rare view into the ethical and spiritual dimensions of territorial defence from the standpoint of a Cofán elder who understands the forest not as a resource, but as living kin.

In essence, Listening to the Forest is an act of testimonial justice and a literary offering of uncommon depth. It should be required reading for scholars, activists, and policymakers seeking to understand the Amazon not merely as a site of crisis but as a territory of ancestral knowledge and resistance.

As the first in a reflective series, this article stands apart for its extended narrative encounter with the late Cofán Governor-Shaman Aurelio. His voice is not an object of ethnographic interpretation, but a sovereign subject articulating his vision of the forest, justice, and spiritual continuity.

The most compelling innovation of this work lies in its narrative strategy: it resists analytic mediation, allowing Aurelio’s worldview to unfold in his own words.

In doing so, Hummingbird departs from prevailing models of academic writing about Indigenous leaders and healers. Aurelio is not presented as a symbol of cultural loss or a “last shaman,” but as a lucid political and spiritual thinker whose insights carry epistemic weight equal to any Western theorist.

To the best of this reviewer’s knowledge, this may be the first published text in which a sitting or former Amazonian Governor-Shaman speaks directly, in the first person, about the pressures confronting his people—from extractive industries and evangelical missions to internal fractures caused by co-optation and false development. While other accounts have documented these impacts, they often rely on third-person narration or externally framed activism. This article fills a critical gap by preserving Aurelio’s voice in a form that retains both philosophical integrity and emotional cadence.

Moreover, the article contributes to the scarcely documented written history of Amazonian cultures. The knowledge systems of the Cofán and other Indigenous peoples have traditionally been transmitted orally, shaped by ceremony, collective memory, and intimate ties to territory. In this context, Listening to the Forest is not merely a record of conversations—it is a decolonial archival act, giving permanence to a voice vulnerable to erasure. By presenting the direct political and spiritual thought of Shaman-Governor Aurelio, the piece challenges the asymmetries of knowledge production that have historically marginalised Amazonian perspectives.

The text navigates complex political terrain with clarity and restraint. It exposes, without sensationalism, the complicity of foreign missionaries with extractive interests—particularly the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano—the covert alliances of corporations like Texaco and Maxus, and the role of intermediaries who facilitated cultural disruption under the guise of aid or ecotourism.

Especially striking is the account of Boreman, a figure who epitomises the contradictions of externally imposed development: a self-proclaimed ally whose actions, according to Aurelio, were quietly subsidised by oil companies to displace the Cofán from resource-rich lands.

Equally powerful is the article’s treatment of justice, memory, and spiritual continuity. Aurelio’s notion of justice as “balance” rather than punishment offers a decolonial framework that unsettles Western legal and theological paradigms. His reflections on shamanic lineage, the agency of the dead, and the communicative presence of animals, wind, and forest spirits are presented not as myth, but as legitimate epistemologies—anchoring the text within current debates on Indigenous cosmopolitics and multispecies relations.

Stylistically, Hummingbird’s prose is literary yet precise. Though not academic in form, the article is informed by long-term ethnographic attentiveness and a depth of lived experience. The forest is never a metaphor or passive setting; it is a speaking, remembering presence—a protagonist in its own right.

In sum, Listening to the Forest is a landmark document. It preserves the voice of a major Indigenous leader in a form that is both accessible and intellectually rigorous. It will be of great interest to scholars in Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, anthropology, and Latin American political history. More importantly, it sets a powerful precedent for rethinking authorship, testimony, and intellectual sovereignty within the context of Amazonian knowledge traditions.

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Review: “Listening to the Forest: Conversations with Aurelio” by Hummingbird

By:Frank Pon

What a great piece again. It is so eloquently written, a true testimonial about honouring your teachers..

The red thread of deliberate and malicious action to destabilize the Cofan people and nature itself throughout Aurelio’s life fill my heart with melancholy.

Thank you for documenting the voices of the Amazon rainforest, the lessons they teach are invaluable to humanity.

Un abrazo,

Frank Pon

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