By the early 16th century, the term "maroon" (cimarron) was used throughout the Americas to designate slaves who had escaped from slavery and set up independent communities beyond colonists' control.

They were relocated to allow flooding of approximately half their tribal territory for a hydroelectric project built to supply electricity for an aluminum smelter.

[8]: 1  Coming from a variety of West and Central African peoples speaking many different languages, they escaped into the dense rainforest – individually, in small groups, and sometimes in great collective rebellions.

[9] In 1762, a full century before the general emancipation of slaves in Suriname, the Maroons won their freedom and signed a treaty with the Dutch Crown to acknowledge their territorial rights and trading privileges.

United States Peace Corps volunteers lived and worked in Saramaka villages, and Brazilian gold-miners arrived on the Suriname river.

Such economic activities as prostitution, casino gambling, and drug smuggling became major industries in coastal Suriname and accompanied the miners to the interior.

For more than two centuries, the economy has been based on full exploitation of the forest environment and on periodic work trips by men to the coast to bring back Western goods.

In addition, they carved a wide range of wooden objects for domestic use, such as stools, paddles, winnowing trays, cooking utensils, and combs.

Numerous genres of singing, dance, drumming, and tale telling continue to be a vibrant part of Saramaka culture.

Men have long devoted a large portion of their adult years to earning money in work in coastal Suriname or French Guiana.

This allows them to buy the Western goods considered essential to life in their home villages, such as shotguns and powder, tools, pots, cloth, hammocks, soap, kerosene, and rum.

The matrilineal clans (lo) own land, based on claims staked out in the early 18th century as the original Maroons fled southward to freedom.

The Saramaka treat marriage as an ongoing courtship, with frequent exchanges of gifts such as men's woodcarving and women's decorative sewing.

The 2007 ruling of the Inter-American Court for Human Rights helps define the spheres of influence in which the national government and Saramaka authorities hold sway.

Traditionally, the role of these officials in political and social control was exercised in a context replete with oracles, spirit possession, and other forms of divination.

In a type of reconciliation justice, guilty parties are usually required to pay for their misdeeds with material offerings to the lineage of the offended person.

Today, men caught in flagrante delicto with the wife of another man are either beaten by the woman's kinsmen or made to pay them a fine.

Aside from adultery disputes, which sometimes mobilize a full canoe-load of men seeking revenge in a public fistfight, intra-Saramaka conflict rarely surpasses the level of personal relations.

Their reintegration into Saramaka (and Ndyuka) society has been difficult, though their migration to the coast and French Guiana has provided a safety valve, if not for the receiving areas.

[25] Such decisions as where to clear a garden or build a house, whether to undertake a trip, or how to deal with theft or adultery are made in consultation with village deities, ancestors, forest spirits, and snake gods.

The rituals surrounding birth, death, and other life passages are extensive, as are those relating to more mundane activities, from hunting a tapir to planting a rice field.

Intimately involved in the ongoing events of daily life, these beings communicate to humans mainly through divination and spirit possession.

The Saramaka believe that all evil originates in human action; not only does each misfortune, illness, or death stem from a specific past misdeed, but every offense, whether against people or gods, has eventual consequences.

Individual specialists who supervise rites oversee the major village- and clan-owned shrines that serve large numbers of clients, as well as the various categories of possession gods, and various kinds of minor divination.

The most important ceremonies include those surrounding funerals and the appeasement of ancestors, public curing rites, rituals in honor of kúnus (in particular snake gods and forest spirits), and the installation of political officials.

A death occasions a series of complex rituals that lasts about a year, culminating in the final passage of the deceased to the status of ancestor.

The initial rites, which are carried out over a period of one week to three months, depending on the importance of the deceased, end with the burial of the corpse in an elaborately constructed coffin filled with personal belongings.

These rites include divination with the coffin (to consult the spirit of the deceased) by carrying it on the heads of two men, feasts for the ancestors, all-night drum/song/dance performances, and the telling of folktales.

[27] In the latter part of 1993, a local, independent missionary by the name of Steve Groseclose and a small group of Saramaka men from other less remote villages ventured beyond the main barrier point called Tapa Wata Sula, translated as Shut Off Rapids.

[27] A local Saramaka man named Pompeia had left one of the uncontacted villages to visit the capital city of Paramaribo earlier that year.