Saamaka Apaki: A Territory of Life

Origin and description

We, the Saamaka, are a people of African origin. Our ancestors were brought to Suriname as enslaved people. From the late 1600s, they escaped into the forest and fought for their freedom for about 100 years. In 1762, they made peace with the colonial government and became a free people, living in our own autonomous communities with their own leaders and our own rules. For more than three centuries we have kept our culture, language, spirituality and governance alive, and all of them are deeply rooted in the tropical forest. We live from farming, hunting, fishing and gathering forest products.

Our territory covers 1,417,732 hectares, and 84% of it is forest.

Our territory and the threats it faces

Our territory of life (ICCA) has existed since our ancestors established the Saamaka as a free, self-governing people. As a tribal people, we depend on the forest for our existence , and our culture and spirituality comes from it. The forest is the home of our ancestral memory and of the spiritual beings, the gods (gadu), who protect the Saamaka people (sëmbe). Our ancestors and these gods live everywhere in our territory (pisi kamia): in the forest (matu), in the river, and even in the river stones, which hold and guard our sacred laws and ancestral wisdom.

The forest is not only a source of water or food. What we value most is the forest itself. If the forest disappears, our protection becomes weak, and illness, misfortune and imbalance fall upon us. The forest is the foundation of our well-being and spiritual strength.

This is why our customary management system is built around protecting the forest (Tyubi di Matu). In recent years, we have started calling our protected places Apaki. An Apaki is a calabash in which precious things are kept. Our Apaki include customary protected areas, sacred places, and places of cultural and historical importance.

Our Apaki, and our territory as a whole, face serious threats. The visible ones are commercial logging, gold mining and the new roads that come with them. Less visible, but just as serious, are the changes inside our communities: people respect our spiritual laws less, and our traditional knowledge is slowly being lost.

In response to these threats, our elders (gaan sembe) are working to revive our traditional rules and encourage people respect them again. By putting our knowledge into writing, we hope to preserve it and ensure that it continues to be shared across generations. We are also working to strengthen our capacity to defend our territory. This includes mapping our Apaki and our management system, so that we can better understand how these pressures affect them; training a team of community patrols who watch over the area and report alerts; and learning to make and use digital maps. By strengthening these capacities and gathering evidence about our territory, we aim to better defend our rights and advocate for their recognition and protection, including at the international level.

Conservation

“Conservation” is a western word. We did not know we were conserving. We have simply been taking care of our home, the home of our ancestors and of the spirits that protect us. We feel the impact of protecting the forest first in ourselves, in our mental, emotional and physical well-being. If our care has also given a home to wildlife, stored carbon or kept our waters healthy, that happened indirectly, as a result of the way we live.

Our territory is still forested because we live here and we protect it. Our customary laws divide the territory so that the forest is protected. National land use planning sees the same land differently, and some areas are marked for logging and mining concessions. When we place our map next to the national maps, the two ways of seeing the land become clear. We hope to bring them closer together, so that our way of caring for the forest is recognised. We will keep protecting our ancestral lands, as our ancestors did before us. In 2009, two of our leaders, Hugo Jabini and Wanze Eduards, received the Goldman Environmental Prize for defending Saamaka land rights and working for our recognition. This prize recognizes the strength and endurance of the Saamaka as a people.

Management and governance

We will continue to govern our ICCA through our own customary institutions and rules. We are bringing back respect for these rules and encouraging people to follow them. We are also adding new technology to the way we have always cared for the land, so that we can better watch over our territory and respond quickly to change.

Our dream and next steps

We are working towards our dream: that Saamaka women and men of all generations are stronger in deciding their own future and earn a better living from the forest in a sustainable way, while our collective rights to our ancestral land are respected and our traditional governance is strong. Our culture continues to guide how we live and care for our territory, and our youth keep a strong spiritual connection to the land. In this way, our forests are protected for today and for future generations.

To get there, we will:

• strengthen our traditional governance and adapt our rules to today, including through more accountable leaders

• continue patrolling and strengthen our capacity to protect and manage our territory

• write down our knowledge, keep our traditional food alive and revive our sacred places

• create income for women, men and youth, for example through fair markets for our farm products and respectful visits from outsiders, so that young people stay and take care of the land.

• collaborate with the government of Suriname for laws that let us keep caring for our forests in our own way.

What we need and what we have learned

Most of all, we need legal recognition of our Apaki as community conserved areas, and the autonomy to manage them ourselves. We also need support for our patrols, and training and income for our youth.

We have learned that our knowledge becomes stronger when it is written down and shown on maps, and that real change must come from inside, led by our elders and our own rules.

This case study was originally published by UNEP-WCMC in October 2026. The content was provided by the custodians of this ICCA. The ICCA has been self-declared and has not been through a peer-review process to verify its status. More details on this process can be found here. The contents of this website do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of UN Environment Programme or WCMC.