Mining offers cash, but injury and forest loss shape Saamaka choices
Gold mining and logging, both legal and illegal, have expanded across Suriname’s forested interior, offering the possibility of income while bringing significant risks and environmental damage. A Saamaka gold miner, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals from his employers, told The Associated Press that an excavator crushed his arm in a gold mine in 2016. He lost the arm but eventually went back. He spoke from beneath a makeshift shelter with a tarp roof shielding workers from the intense sun.
The miner supports two adults and five children and sees few alternatives capable of providing the money he needs. He hopes eventually to earn enough from mining to expand a chicken farm on land he already owns. “I came back to this work because I have a goal I want to achieve, and I believe I can achieve it this way,” he said.
Before losing his arm, the miner carved traditional wooden hair combs. He said many of the trees he used have since been cut down, forcing people to travel farther to find suitable wood. He still knows how to make the combs but can no longer physically do so. Alingo Doekoe said he sometimes goes two months without selling anything, and younger men can see others their age return from the gold fields with money to buy cars and other things. “There is definitely pressure on young men to go into gold mining,” the miner said. “You have to make your own way in life.”
For carver Josasath Liefde, the departure of young men is a loss for the community. He said he had warned his own children against working in the gold fields and that some young men who left the village for work had died. “The person who leaves may see it as an opportunity for himself,” Liefde said. “I see it as a loss for the village.” For the carvers who remain, that shift is about more than the loss of an art form.
In Piki Seei — the Saamaka name for the village officially known in Dutch as Pikin Slee — tembe, the Saamaka tradition of woodcarving and decorative art, has long been part of everyday life. At the Totomboti workshop, 63-year-old Alingo Doekoe stands atop a giant block of wood, swings a traditional pick and chisels away shards of timber as he shapes a board for Adji-boto, a traditional Saamaka game with roots in West Africa. Doekoe has spent decades carving and working to preserve Saamaka traditions.
Tembe is mostly practiced by men and passed from fathers and elders to younger generations. Its work appears in benches, paddles, boats, combs, doors and the wooden houses that line communities along the river; the craft turns wood into objects used in daily life, while geometric designs can carry meanings and stories. The Saamaka are one of six tribal peoples in Suriname whose ancestors escaped slavery during Dutch colonial rule and built independent communities in the country’s forested interior more than three centuries ago. Doekoe said Saamaka music, language and art preserve elements of the African cultures of ancestors forcibly transported to Suriname during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “There is knowledge hidden within our art,” he said.
Doekoe is involved with Totomboti, a collective in Piki Seei that brings carvers together and works to pass cultural knowledge to younger generations. Several of its carvers are Rastafarians, followers of a spiritual movement that originated in Jamaica in the 1930s and emphasizes African identity and a connection to nature. Rastafari is not practiced by all Saamaka, but the faith has a particularly strong presence in Piki Seei. Doekoe said he and other men in the village embraced it after recognizing similarities with their own spiritual traditions and knowledge of the natural world.
“Woodcarving is part of who we are,” 50-year-old carver Josasath Liefde said. “It is a Saamaka tradition that will continue to live on.” Liefde learned from his father how to turn trees into objects his family and community needed. He makes benches and paddles and builds boats as long as 15 meters (49 feet). “If you have to leave this place, you need a boat, and the wood used to make that boat comes from this forest,” he said. “So, this is our livelihood.” The surrounding forest has sustained Saamaka communities for centuries, providing food, building materials and resources central to their cultural traditions.
At the workshop, blocks of wood and shavings cover the ground as carvers work on pieces at various stages of completion. Doekoe said they use fallen trees when possible and occasionally cut down others, taking care to limit their impact on the forest. According to the collective, its woodworkers use just one or two logs a year, selectively harvesting hardwood trees suited to their craft.
In Piki Seei, some carvers are trying to ensure the next generation has another choice. Carvers associated with Totomboti have worked with local children, arranging lessons outside school hours where the children learn to measure and shape wood and make objects themselves. Doekoe said young people still come to him wanting to learn. He might start a beginner with a small piece of wood, showing the beginner how to mark and shape it into a hair comb that could then be given to a friend. The Saamaka Museum in the village displays and sells carvings, and visitors from outside the community provide another market. Carvers who live or work elsewhere also return to the village to practice their skills.
Doekoe said tourism and sales to foreign visitors can give artists an incentive to remain in their communities. Preserving the craft requires more than finding buyers. He described days at the Totomboti workshop when the men deliberately put down their tools, sit together, exchange ideas and tell stories handed down by their ancestors. “It is spiritual, and it is life,” he said. “It lives in our stories.”
Passing on those skills also depends on protecting the forest that provides the materials and inspiration for the work. Doekoe warned that gold mining and logging are leaving damage he believes cannot be reversed. He said the two industries are transforming waterways and destroying the conditions that allow forests to regenerate. “The forest is no longer the same, and it will never recover to what God created,” he said. He fears the next generation will bear the consequences. “When the seeds of the trees that should grow can no longer grow, the children who grow up here will not experience the forest as it is today,” he said.
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