What initially drew me to Amazonia was the tendency of its Indigenous inhabitants to consider the forest and river where they lived as a delicate society populated by beings similar, in crucial respects, to humans. An ecology of persons. This is what led me to Andoque territory in 2018, and why I spent more than a year living with families like Rosa’s. I had set out as an anthropologist seeking to study their notions of power, and how this power is bound up with nonhuman persons – like dolphins. For the Andoque, these beings may wear the bodies of trees, plants, animals and insects, but they have wishes, thoughts, fears and cultural customs like humans do. What would power look like in such a world, I wondered. A deeper interest lay hidden within the word ‘power’ – hidden, back then, even from myself. I longed for a first-hand encounter with something truly powerful: the dangerous web of life and death that makes up the forest; the intricate wisdom of a people attuned to it. I wanted to bask in that power. I wanted to admire it, decipher it, crash against it.

But the world of the Andoque had been battered long before I arrived. Far from the postcard ‘isolated tribe’, they place relations with whites at the centre of their culture. ‘Whites’ is a term that, for them, refers not to skin colour but simply to anyone external to the forest and its ways. These outsiders are closely linked in Andoque mythology with the Caquetá river mouth, as it was from there, where the water meets the main Amazon River, that European merchants first arrived as early as the 17th century.