‘This is Cofán land’: the fight to save Amazonia from intruders

We didn’t carry weapons when we Ecuadorian Cofán began working as state-recognized guardians of our forests. Machetes, yes, but those were for cutting brush. Our guards had GPS trackers and heavy backpacks, loaded with food and first aid kits, for long stretches of overnighting outdoors. Each team of five Cofán headed out for a month at a time, after training in how to handle the presence of illegal intruders: loggers, poachers, gold miners, drug couriers.

As a people, we call ourselves A’i, the speakers of A’ingae. There are about 1,500 of us Ecuadorian Cofán, with a few hundred more over the border in Colombia. Many of our guards had to learn enough Spanish to deliver their warnings: This is Cofán land, they would say. Ours, not yours. Confrontation was not the point; the guardians were empowered to call in the military as backup when the encounters turned dangerous. But that wasn’t usually necessary. Their very presence was enough to persuade most invaders to leave the forests that the Ecuadorian government—pressed by A’i leaders of my father’s generation—had officially designated Cofán-managed territory.

These forests, the homeland that Cofán have occupied since preconquest times, cover more than a million acres of Ecuador, from lowland Amazonia to the base of the Andes. And when our guardians program was at full strength, from 2003 to 2013, it was demonstrably successful. Satellite imagery during those years showed our forests remained robust and intact, even as the rest of Ecuador was losing forest at one of the continent’s highest rates. The teams also brought together Cofán from far-flung places. I now see this as a nation’s unification: mountain A’i and lowland A’i, all trading and expanding their expertise.

(In the heart of the Amazon, this pristine wilderness shows nature’s resilience.)

Given the chance, I would surely have worked my own stint as a forest guardian. But I couldn’t, because of a radical decision my community made about my upbringing.

Our history, like that of so many other Indigenous nations, includes defiant adaptation for survival purposes. The remote little village where I spent my early years exists only because during the 1980s about a dozen families, including my parents, began moving away from the oil-contaminated upriver town where they had lived. The new settlement of homes was named Zábalo, for the smaller (and cleaner) river nearby. My father and other elders grappled with new strategies to protect our forests, our waters, and our way of life in the decades to come.

So when I was 10, a monolingual boy who’d never seen an airplane or a sidewalk, the elders—and my parents—decided to send me away to the United States. In the care of an American who had been studying in Zábalo, I traveled from our village to Seattle and enrolled in fourth grade. I would receive a full U.S. education. The elders hoped that eventually, with summers home, I’d grow into a leader fluent in multiple languages and cultures. Maybe I’d help develop ecotourism or bring new ideas that might allow us a future without violation of our forests and waters.

As I completed high school in Seattle and worked my way through Brown University and into a graduate program at the University of Texas at San Antonio, this multiple-worlds coming-of-age was my life; tough and lonely at times, but not quite as jarring as it sounds. I had people who loved and looked after me in the U.S. My family embraced me every time I returned to Zábalo. Today, finally, I’m back on Cofán land at 37, constructing a home with my wife, Sadie, and our daughter, and completing an anthropology doctorate. My work is in English, Spanish, and A’ingae. I dream in all three.

What of our forest guardians program? It cost about $400,000 a year to run, with roughly half dedicated to guardians’ wages, and around a decade ago, the funding ran out. We’d been supported by foreign donors. In our experience, this is how philanthropy works: Support lasts until the funders decide that they’ve backed you long enough.

Which meant that although we retained legal authority over a portion of our homeland, we had lost the most effective and assertive way to watch for intruders. We began to see new river pollution from illegal small-scale mining. Commercial hunters and fishermen started showing up in places that were supposed to be protected.

We’ve received other help here and there. Some of us participate in a government program that discourages deforestation by paying landholders for not cutting their trees. I’m also a board member of our Cofan Survival Fund, which is an American nonprofit and has received recent grants from the North Dakota–based Azimuth World Foundation for reassembling a modest version of the guardians program. The current funding will let us train and mount a few patrols this year, covering a small part of Cofán territory, and provide small stipends.

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(The Amazon is burning at record rates—and deforestation is to blame.)

And this is crucial for us: The guardians will again be paid. If the world wants truly sustainable defense of its endangered forests and waters—not just for our sake, but for the planet’s—then the protective work of tribes like the Cofán needs to be recognized for what it is: the hard, ongoing labor of people who must feed their families and raise their children.

I’ve spent too much of my life resisting the Harmonious Indigenous People Who Live and Think the Same categorization. Our Cofán communities are complicated, probably like yours. My own experience—what I’ve learned from the elders who took the risk in sending me to the U.S.—has taught me that the best way I can help is to encourage greater mutual understanding and respect between outsiders and Cofán.

Sadie and I have a plan for that, in fact. We’re building a laboratory on an ancestral site we’ve picked out. We want foreign scholars and Cofán working here side by side, learning from each other, to produce research that combines outside scientists’ scholarship with botanical and cultural knowledge the A’i have developed over generations. Ultimately, we hope, this will become a place for new groups of wage-earning guardians to board and train—plus, a state-recognized hub for younger Cofán, who often don’t make it to graduation in Ecuadorian high schools. The broad focus of study we envision for everyone, of course: the natural life around us and the Cofán language, with the history and story it carries.

As the elders have told me all my life, without the forest and A’ingae, our nation will no longer be Cofán. Safeguarding both is now up to us.

(Indigenous peoples defend Earth's biodiversity—but they're in danger.)