The formation and growth of indigenous organisations and their operation in the spheres of local, national and international politics has been an important trend in recent decades, up to and including the recent adoption by the United Nations of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The history and background of these organisations is as diverse as the people that they represent, but their central significance remains in providing a voice for people who face ongoing threats to their territories, resources and ways of life. As such, studies of the history and workings of such organisations are of vital importance for understanding the internal and external obstacles that they face. This is of particular interest in the case of those Amazonian societies that have previously lacked explicit hierarchies and who must now find ways of electing leaders who will speak and make decisions on their behalf, as is the case with the Huaorani of Ecuador who are the focus of Ziegler-Otero's book.

Zielger-Otero's monograph focuses on the Organización de las Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana (ONHAE), a nongovernmental organisation set up by the Huaorani people of eastern Ecuador in 1990. Ziegler-Otero's stated aim is to evaluate the achievements and relative effectiveness of ONHAE. While this explicit appraisal of the organisation can become a little heavy-handed at times, the monograph offers a fascinating analysis of the individual personalities and relationships involved in the organisation as well as the leadership's wider connection to the Huaorani group as a whole.

The book begins with a brief history and background to the organisation. Ziegler-Otero notes that ONHAE's founders were a group of young, Spanish-literate men who deliberately emulated the organisational structures and processes of other Ecuadorian indigenous organisations such as the Shuar Federation and various Quichua equivalents. Their explicit aim was to become a voice for the Huaorani people as a whole, allowing the Huaorani to negotiate more effectively with outsiders including, oil companies, missionaries and state agencies.

After the introduction Ziegler-Otero begins with a brief account of Huaorani social life and culture. This is based mainly on previous academic sources as Ziegler-Otero appears to have little firsthand experience of life in a Huaorani longhouse or contemporary Amazonian settlement. While his descriptions fit the available literature, the lack of his own examples tends to essentialise aspects of Huaorani culture without giving an idea of the variable and negotiable nature of practice in everyday life. The monograph continues with an historical account of the Huaorani including their infamous interactions with missionaries and their current dealings with oil companies. He then moves on to a detailed description of the founding, ‘structures’ and ‘achievements’ of ONHAE, including both the individual personalities and wider political situation involved. Here Zeigler-Otero's intimate knowledge of ONHAE's office and personnel proves invaluable, allowing him to effectively draw out the tensions inherent for individuals caught between two separate worlds: the forest long-houses of their people and kin and the towns and cities of the nation state. Towards the end of this section, however, Ziegler-Otero's lack of experience of everyday life in Huaorani communities perhaps makes him overly critical of behaviour that he sees as little more than ‘relaxing and gossiping’ (p. 99) but that might be considered essential in terms of consensus building. Similarly, failures that he links to particular individuals might better be viewed as communal problems.

In the third chapter Ziegler-Otero gives us a detailed account of a Biye, a general meeting for all Huaorani, that seems to be a re-invention of older marriage conferences (p. 106). The author was one of the few non-Huaorani allowed at this meeting held in April 1996 and his detailed ethnography gives readers a real sense of the nuanced strategies and relationships of the various main actors of ONHAE, as well as the reactions of the wider Huaorani. It this chapter that forms the heart of the book and shows clearly the ways in which older Huaorani ideas and practices have been retained even as a new, centralised form of representation has been created for them and by them. The account attests to the continued strength and vitality of the Huaorani and the manner in which the entire population is effectively involved in this new political form.

After this excellent ethnography, the rest of the book is concerned with assessing the ‘effectiveness’ (p. 143) of ONHAE. Ziegler-Otero does this mainly by comparing the organisation's achievements with its own stated goals. These include the protection of territory, the protection of the forest from the depredations of the oil companies and improvements in the provision of education and health care (p. 143). Here Ziegler-Otero argues that results have been mixed. He emphasises ONHAE's failure to form a legally binding contract with the oil company, Maxus, which continues to operate in the region with impunity while giving relatively little back to the Huaorani. Indeed, he goes so far as to argue that the very setting up of ONHAE and the subsequent concentration of power and decision making in the hands of an elite few made it easier for such oil companies to exploit the Huaorani (pp. 155, 165). In a more positive light, however, he argues that a key success of ONHAE has been its ‘establishment as the undisputed legal, social, and political representative of the Huaorani people’ (p. 151) that has maintained its independence from the various outsiders it has encountered.

Overall, while I believe that the work might have been strengthened by additional knowledge of the Huaorani's forest communities (as well as by more direct engagement with the literature on the manner in which states and tribes, ‘secondary-tribes’ and para-statal organisations are mutually creative), this work provides an interesting and important account of one indigenous people's political struggles in contemporary Amazonia.