Book description
Rainforest Warriors is a historical, ethnographic, and
documentary account of a people, their threatened rainforest, and
their successful attempt to harness international human rights law in
their fight to protect their way of life-part of a larger story of
tribal and indigenous peoples that is unfolding all over the globe.
The Republic of Suriname, in northeastern South America,
contains the highest proportion of rainforest within its national
territory, and the most forest per person, of any country in the
world. During the 1990s, its government began awarding extensive
logging and mining concessions to multinational companies from China,
Indonesia, Canada, and elsewhere. Saramaka Maroons, the descendants of
self-liberated African slaves who had lived in that rainforest for
more than 300 years, resisted, bringing their complaints to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In 2008, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered
its landmark judgment in their favor, their efforts to protect their
threatened rainforest were thrust into the international spotlight.
Two leaders of the struggle to protect their way of life, Saramaka
Headcaptain Wazen Eduards and Saramaka law student Hugo Jabini, were
awarded the Goldman Prize for the Environment (often referred to as
the environmental Nobel Prize), under the banner of "A New
Precedent for Indigenous and Tribal Peoples."
Anthropologist Richard Price, who has worked with Saramakas for
more than forty years and who participated actively in this struggle,
tells the gripping story of how Saramakas harnessed international
human rights law to win control of their own piece of the Amazonian
forest and guarantee their cultural survival.
"An extraordinary work of remarkable depth and consequence. .
. . Price is an exceptional ethnographer of Saramaka communities,
histories, and individual lives. He is also a clear and informed
ethnographer of emergent human rights regimes. Humane, reflective,
actively written, and exceptionally thought-provoking, Rainforest
Warriors will be a classic."-Donald Brennis, University of
California, Santa Cruz
Richard Price divides his time between rural Martinique and the
College of William and Mary, where he is Duane A. and Virginia S.
Dittman Professor of American Studies and Professor of Anthropology and
History. His award-winning books include First-Time, Alabi's World, The
Convict and the Colonel, and Travels with Tooy. He is the coauthor, with
Sally Price, of Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension, also available
from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
