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.
