Women behind the lens: ‘The women watched the fuel tanker advance with uncertainty and fear’

In June 2025, I accompanied a group of Siekopai women along the Aguarico River in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Mothers, daughters, cousins and granddaughters had reunited to participate in the Binational Ceramics Gathering in Siekoya Remolino, a community that has remained free from oil extraction, mining and African palm monocultures.

They were welcomed by the Keñao Productive Women’s Association, which was founded in 2022 by 26 Siekopai female artisans to promote Indigenous women’s participation and economic autonomy.

The Siekopai Nation, which has historically occupied territories along the northern border between Ecuador and Peru, was separated and displaced during the 1941 border war between the two countries, a conflict with consequences that extended into the 1990s. According to Justino Piaguaje, leader of the Siekopai in Ecuador, the nation’s original population was close to 20,000 but diseases brought by colonisers, Jesuit missions, conditions of slavery during the rubber boom, and the impacts of the oil industry led to a drastic decline. Today they number about 800 in Ecuador and 1,200 in Peru.

I first visited Siekoya Remolino in 2024 to conduct a documentary photography and storytelling workshop with Indigenous women of several nationalities, as part of my work with the CatchLight global fellowship. But my connection with northern Ecuador’s Amazon began years earlier as a photojournalist documenting oil spills, gas flares burning day and night, monocultures, refineries, river erosion, obstetric violence against Indigenous women, and structural abandonment in the region.

Meeting the Keñao women and the Siekopai Nation transformed my understanding of territory, not as landscape, but as a living body and collective memory. The Siekopai people have lived for generations along the Aguarico and its tributaries: clay rivers whose mineral-rich sediments are essential for soil fertility, fish reproduction and forest regeneration. However, in Peru and Ecuador, oil spills and toxic waste contaminate the water and threaten the health of communities, especially women and children.

The Siekopai fight tirelessly to defend their territorial rights, protect the natural environment and preserve ancestral knowledge that safeguards one of the most biodiverse areas in the world.

Women are on the frontlines of this resistance: they organise community assemblies and act as Indigenous guards – legitimate community bodies that defend their culture and natural resources. They are also teachers, scientists, climbers and anthropologists who combine ancestral knowledge with research and modern technology, such as the use of drones, satellite internet antennas and plant-processing laboratories, to protect their families and land.

However, their leadership is often questioned: externally, by authorities who criminalise protest; internally, by gender norms reshaped after decades of missionary presence and state intervention.

As we made our way along the Aguarico River a large fuel tanker carried on a floating platform appeared behind us. It moved parallel to our boat. The women watched it advance with uncertainty and fear. Yadira Ocoguaje, a young Amazonian leader, said: “This is what we face, this is what we defend ourselves against.”

The tension captured in that moment, when our canoe and the fuel tanker moved in parallel, was not fleeting. It is enduring and structural. And the women resist: they seek one another, they reunite and they organise.

• Johanna Alarcón is a photographer, visual storyteller and community educator based in Ecuador. She leads projects and education programmes with Indigenous, Black and incarcerated communities in Ecuador, seeking to explore the intersections of social justice, gender and identity across Latin America. To see more of her work at Instagram.com/johis.alarcon