Ecological Stereotypes: Perceptions of Indigenous and Maroon Communities in Late Colonial Suriname

Abstract

The colonial historiography of Suriname has often portrayed the Indigenous and Maroon inhabitants of the Surinamese Amazon in stereotypical ways, according to which the former would be stewards of the rainforest whereas the latter would have a destructive relationship to nature. Such stereotypes have persisted in conservationist discourse and in the Surinamese nationalist literature of the first half of the twentieth century. As such, they were at the basis of the Surinamese national project prior to independence, and justified dispossessing Maroon populations of their ancestral lands. The alleged ecological differences between the two populations can, however, not be sustained within our current understanding of Amazonian history.