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For centuries, the legend of El Dorado has drawn speculators into the South American jungles, looking for the fabled city of gold.

In a way, this fantasy is still driving the economics of extraction in the Guyana Shield, a multi-country region composed of Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and parts of Brazil and Venezuela. Forest communities are still being marginalized and exploited, as outside interests seek resources including lumber and — even now — gold.

��ñ�� Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Giovanna Montenegro is currently working on a project exploring the subject, called “Subverting Colonial Fantasies: Maroon and Indigenous Environmental Resistance in Surinam and the Guianas.” She recently received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities that will allow her to complete her book.

“I’m asking a basic question: Is there really a kind of El Dorado in the Guianas? And why do neo-colonial, extractivist projects continue to see the region as such?” said Montenegro, who also directs ��ñ��’s Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies Program.

Her research centers on the history of environmental organization from the 1650s to today in northern South America by both Indigenous communities and those descended from Africans who liberated themselves and fled from different plantations, known as Maroons.

“They fled into the forests and formed their own communities. They have their own Creole languages and lineage systems,” Montenegro explained.

Surinam has six Maroon groups, and Montenegro works most closely with the Saramaka, who live along the Upper Suriname River. The region’s Indigenous peoples are also diverse, split between Arawak- and Carib-speaking groups.

Indigenous and Maroon communities have established treaties with colonial governments for centuries; for example, the Dutch colonial government recognized autonomous Saramaka lands in 1762, a full 100 years before emancipation.

“But what we’re seeing since the 1960s is a continuation of the usurpation of resources, including land and water,” Montenegro explained.

Forest communities

Popularized by Sir Walter Raleigh, the myth of El Dorado has played out a kind of colonial theater in the region, with real environmental consequences.

That includes a massive dam built to provide water for bauxite processing in central Suriname that displaced many Maroon communities. Multinational logging companies have been the most recent culprit, setting up camps without the consent or knowledge of affected communities. The Maroons have traditionally tended garden plots both in their villages and the forests, which are threatened by this incursion.

The Saramaka organized more than 60 villages in protest, bringing a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — which ruled in their favor in 2008.

“They were demanding that the Surinamese government give them informed prior consent and consult their communities before logging or other extractive activities take place on their land,” she said. “But they’re still fighting for recognition of their autonomous rights.”

There are other issues, too, such as mercury toxicity in water sources connected with gold mining. These environmental challenges are compounded by climate change, which has resulted in a major drought over the past two years, drying the creeks upon which forest communities rely for potable water.

Forest communities, however, have a long tradition of survival — and of protecting the ecosystem they call home.

“It’s both looking at colonial history and how the colonial era never really ended, and how the Indigenous and Maroon communities have been key to preserving forest environments that they’ve been inhabiting for centuries or more,” Montenegro said.