Ecuador – Feminism and Religion

Part 1 was posted yesterday.

Eventually, Nemonte is fully taken in and away from her village by the missionaries to the city where she is indoctrinated further into White world with sexual abuse and rape. After years of this she is raging and lost, separated from her people and living in the city. She finds her brother and they decide to return to their people and try to find a way to change the trajectory.

“I couldn’t go home anymore. It was too late for that. I had left the forest many years ago because I believed in the white people. I had trusted them, thought they were better than us. Their skin, their teeth, their clothes, their planes, their promises. But now I knew they had no limits, that they wanted everything. They wanted to save our souls and change our stories and steal our lands. Those distant oil wells rumbling in the depths of the village night—those wells were creeping closer and closer. I still didn’t know what to do about it”(198).

Now she can speak, read, and write Spanish. Now she is educated in the White people ways. Now she can be a bridge. And what a bridge she will become.

On November 6^th, the day after the election in the middle of writing through my own anger/grief I suddenly stopped and got up – heeding that inner voice that often interrupted my train of thought. Picking up the lights I opened the door to adorn my young cedar for the very first time ever.

I planted this twelve-inch-tall seedling in 2020 to replace my original Cedar Guardian Tree that had been decimated by deer during a year-long absence. To my astonishment in four years, this seedling had become a seven-foot-high Guardian Tree. Of course, in the interim I have carefully tended this cedar, watering her, talking with her, touching her, loving her, calling her ‘my guardian’ but this species is very slow growing so even as I began to festoon the tree with lights, I experienced a sense of awe. I was of course talking with this tree as I adorned her… I told her that I would be lighting her as a Tree for Life.

When the air around the tree suddenly exploded with the scent of cedar, I experienced a powerful sense of relatedness with this cedar, and with all nature that is impossible to describe. That she was communicating with me using her own words moved me deeply. Although I have had these experiences before each one remains a revelation, especially when I have one during times of deep distress. When I plugged in the lights, I saw the unintentional spiral that I had created when I wound the strings so carefully around and across her delicate fronds. Just perfect I thought as a breeze rustled through her branches making the lights twinkle for a moment.