Posts Tagged ‘matawai’
Lands of Freedom: Preserving and Honoring the Heritage of the Matawai
The Matawai Maroons of Suriname—descendants of enslaved Africans who fled into the rainforest over 300 ago, where they have remained ever since— in partnership with ACT, are launching a new interactive Storytelling Map showcasing their centuries-old oral histories about their ancestral lands and culture.
Read MoreSuriname community uses new open-source app to preserve storytelling traditions
The Matawai of Suriname, a community that once felt forgotten by the rest of the world, is breaking ground by using a new open-source geostorytelling app to create an extraordinary repository of traditional knowledge through oral history storytelling. The goal of the work is to ensure that future generations of Matawai will be able to…
Read MoreLand and history among the Matawai of Suriname
Along the Saramacca River in central Suriname live the Matawai people. They are descendants of Africans who escaped slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries by fleeing into the jungles and fighting for their freedom. In the rainforest, the survival of the Matawai has always depended on an intimate knowledge of their territories. Place-based stories…
Read MoreACT partakes in Ruby for Good 2018 to develop offline geostorytelling app Terrastories for remote communities
At Ruby For Good 2018, a team of programmers in the Ruby language worked to develop the open-source and offline-compatible Terrastories application, designed for remote communities to map their place-based storytelling traditions. ACT will be using this application for oral histories projects with the Matawai Maroons in Suriname and other indigenous communities elsewhere in the Amazon.
Read MoreStorytelling empowers indigenous people to conserve their environments
Indigenous storytelling is a powerful tool for preserving biocultural diversity, says Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, an environmental researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Having heard stories in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Kenya and Madagascar, he has now proposed that storytelling could transform how conservationists work with native peoples. The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) embodies this philosophy. ACT partners with South American indigenous communities to preserve rainforests and traditional culture.
Read MoreMapping the traditional lands of the Matawai Maroons in Suriname, one creek at a time
In 2015, the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) began conducting participatory mapping fieldwork with the Matawai Maroons residing in ten villages along the upper Saramacca River of central Suriname. The process has been deeply enriching to all parties, with remarkable products.
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