The aim of the presentation is to explore the presence of the Maroon Ndyuka families in Moengo, Marowijne District – a Surinamese settlement constructed by a post-colonial modern, urban US factory-based bauxite extraction project at the start of the twentieth century - within different ‘existential spaces’.
From the viewpoint of the Maroon families who not only live today in Moengo but form the majority of its population, the territory of the former concession can be described as a point of connection, a zone of contact in which a few histories of the town and Suralco merge with many memories of life in the villages of the Cottica River, the presence of spirits, ancestors, sacred animal and trees, and non-human agencies which inhabit landscapes of transformation.
The presentation, in charge of Olivia Gomes da Cunha, aims to explore how Ndyuka families coming from refugee camps in Guianese territory, who arrived in Moengo during the first half of the 1990s, have been transforming these sacred and colonial landscapes. The paper describes Ndyuka sociality in a territory saturated by human and non-human presences sharing relations associated with the space-times of the villages. Seen as an ancient Maroon village situated in a sacred territory of some matriclans, and where are buried their ancestors, Moengo’s colonial history is contested and evoked in conversations about Ndyuka's rights who inhabiting the former concessie.
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