The River's Edge is our Home

What do we stop seeing and fighting for when we believe a place is lost?Along the Napo River, on the frontlines of extractivism, Kichwa women and girls remind us that life persists, weaving stories of kinship, grief, and hope in a living Amazon.

Rebirth - this is our rebirth. We are daughters of jaguars, of rains that refuse to surrender, of living rivers and forests, of grandmothers who healed with songs and with hands full of mud and fire. Healing is not simply returning, It is remembering. It is resisting. It is being reborn. May our actions and dreams become the echo that guides future generations. For those who are here and those who are yet to come.

“For us Kichwa women, the river is where we get our strength,” our grandmother would say. Her memory has begun to fade but I remember the power of her words and I live by it. Some years ago when I first owned a camera, gold mining was at its peak. The world was being shown images of a destroyed place. I wanted to photograph what those images left out: the river remained alive, and so did we. The River's Edge is Our Home, is a longterm photography project in collaboration with the women in my family, our extended relatives, and the rainforest we call home.

Through years of shared life and trust, I photograph Kichwa women and girls whose worlds are woven with the river. Jaguar women emerge at dusk. Bodies dance to invoke rain. Woven baskets carry the knowledge of gathering food. People fish in ponds left by gold mining. Here, grief and joy exist together, as they always have. Our home is often portrayed as an empty wilderness, as if people do not belong to the Amazon. But this is a living world of relationships, memory, and knowledge. We have always shaped the land just as it has shaped us.

Today, women are leading efforts to protect and restore our river, whose waters travel from the Amazon headwaters toward the Atlantic, connecting our lives to places far beyond our banks. Storytelling is one of the deepest forms of love. These photographs are a love letter to the Earth, to my home river, and to the women and girls who shape it and are shaped by it. I hope they remind us that the river is not only something we must save. It is someone we belong to. Together we braid our grief into something sweet, with a sprinkle of rage and love, it becomes a powerful storm - we declare that the River is Alive.