Uneasy Neighbors: Maroons and Indians in Suriname

This paper presents a history of relations between Saramaka Maroons and Amerindians in Suriname, which ran the gamut from limited friendship and solidarity to bitter enmity. During the seventeenth century, as African plantation slaves fled into the forest, individual Indians served as occasional advisors and spouses for Saramakas. During the decades of war between the nascent Saramaka people and the colonial government, Indians served the Government as the most effective of jungle scouts and bounty hunters against Saramakas. By the time of the 1762 peace, one Saramaka village included about a dozen Akurio Indians as well as several Arawak captives and another included the famous “Tufinga” group. The paper ends with consideration of the antiMaroon role of Indians during the Suriname Civil War (1986-1992) and the current land-rights struggle in which Indians and Maroons are at last cooperating. Cet essai presente l’histoire des rapports entre les Marrons Saramaka et les Amerindiens au Suriname, ou il s’agissait parfois d’amitie ou de solidarite, parfois d’inimitie acharnee. Pendant le XVIIe siecle, les Amerindiens partageaient souvent leurs connaissances de la foret avec les esclaves qui se sont echappes, et dans certains cas devenaient leurs epouses. Au temps de la guerre entre les premiers Saramaka et les colons, les Amerindiens utilisaient leurs connaissances de la foret au service du gouvernement, servant de scouts pour trouver les campements des marrons. Souvent c’etait des Amerindiens qui les capturaient, tuaient ou les ramenaient a la cote. Au moment de la paix en 1762, il y avait un village Saramaka qui comprenait environ 12 Indiens Akurio et plusieurs Indiens Arawak captures ; un autre hebergeait les fameux Indiens « Tufinga ». L’essai se termine avec une discussion du role des Amerindiens qui luttaient contre les Marrons au cours de la guerre civile au Suriname (1986-1992) et la lutte pour les droits territoriaux dans laquelle les Amerindiens et les Saramaka se sont enfin devenus solidaires. Throughout the colonial Americas, enslaved Africans who escaped to the wilderness encountered the Indians whose land it was[2]. In some cases, such encounters led to genetic and social mixing that produced whole new societies and cultures (as in the case of the Garifuna of Belize/Guatemala/Honduras, the Black Seminoles of the USA, or many mocambos in Brazil), in others to the effective policing of the territory by Indians who largely prevented the formation of Maroon communities (as in British Guiana), and in still others to the broad retreat of the Indians farther into the forests. Given such diversity of historical processes and outcomes, it may be revealing to focus on a particular case about which relatively much is known. The Saramaka Maroons of Suriname (today some 55,000 people) are the descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped from coastal plantations to the 1 Price: Uneasy Neighbors: Maroons and Indians in Suriname Published by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2010 forest in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, fought a fierce guerrilla war against the colonists for many decades, and in 1762 forced the Dutch crown to make a lasting peace treaty with them—granting them their liberty and territory forever. This paper attempts to pull together what is known about relations between Saramakas and Indians[3]. Because my own relevant previous writings, and those of other scholars, are extremely scattered (and are often in footnotes), it has sometimes been hard to see the forest for the trees. This exercise permits me to foreground a significant yet neglected topic and reveals larger patterns, such as the fundamental role played by the state, from the earliest years of the colony to the most recent events in the Republic, in “cultivating ethnic difference ... a [deliberate] atomization of related struggles,” as John Collins has argued for Latin America more generally (Collins 2003).