In the village of Apetina, in southeastern Suriname, the daily life of the Wayana Indigenous People depends almost entirely on the forest that surrounds them. Apetina is situated on gentle hills along the Tapanahony River, in a country where Indigenous peoples lack legal recognition of their territories and a legal framework guaranteeing their collective land rights. 

The dependence on the forest and rivers for the people living in Apetina is, in fact, common to all the villages and communities that make up the Guiana Shield in Suriname. The Wayana people, in particular, live in communities located along the Lawa, Litani, and Oelemari rivers and the upper reaches of the Tapanahony river, an area spanning at least 2.4 million hectares.

There are approximately 900 Wayana people in Suriname who engage in hunting, fishing, and the cultivation of cassava and other crops on their lands. They speak their own language and have their own oral traditions, cultural practices, and cosmogony, despite increasing acculturation in recent years. As a means of self-defense and knowledge preservation, they founded their own indigenous organization called Mulokot, with a team composed almost entirely of Wayana people, back in 2018.

With support from the International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI) and funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), through its Indigenous Peoples’ Assistance Facility (IPAF), this organization has developed a strategy that combines technological tools with direct knowledge of the territory to gather information and data that help them combat misinformation about the Wayana people in Suriname. Aylin Díaz, head of the finance department at Mulokot, explains that the project includes everything from digital forms to register births and deaths to camera traps to monitor wildlife, audio recorders to identify birds, and maps created by the communities themselves.

According to data from Navegador Indígena, the Surinamese government does not have detailed information on the Indigenous peoples inhabiting the south of the country and has not recognized their right to self-determination. “Our government doesn’t even have maps of this territory. They don’t know the different rivers, the different streams. They have satellite images, but that’s all,” says André Verhoogt, Mulokot’s executive director, who also serves as the organization’s liaison with external partners and donors.

Given the lack of data, the Mulokot project began as a territorial demarcation effort led by Wayana leaders in the Sipaliwini district, but it soon expanded into a more complex system that integrates environmental, social, and cultural information into a single analytical framework. This system, which André describes as a control panel, has allowed them to cross-reference variables such as water quality, fish presence, changes in rainfall, or temperature, with the aim of identifying trends and anticipating problems.

The guiding principle behind the project is that, without systematized information, it is impossible to defend the territory or make a case against external actors, whether state or private. In that sense, monitoring is a political tool that seeks to position the Wayana as informed stakeholders in a context that has historically displaced them.

In Kawemhakan, one of the villages where Mulokot works, recent water tests revealed high levels of contamination, forcing several families to travel much farther to fish and hunt. This phenomenon is directly linked to the expansion of gold mining in the region, which is also associated with the use of mercury, a highly toxic substance that accumulates in rivers and living organisms. Although these data require independent verification, they align with a regional trend that ecologist and professor Timothy J. Killeen explains in The Environmental and Social Impacts of Gold Mining in the Pan-Amazon Region: gold mining in this region generates severe environmental impacts that affect the lives and health of its population.

As the only country in South America that does not legally recognize collective rights to land and territories, based on colonial legislation, the Surinamese State has been able to grant mining concessions within areas inhabited by Indigenous Peoples such as the Trio and the Wayana. This has generated recurring conflicts with external actors and has limited the communities’ ability to protect their territory. In this context, Mulokot has sought to preempt formal recognition processes. The strategy is to gather evidence before the state intervenes, so that any future negotiations are based on information generated by the communities themselves.

The implementation of this strategy, however, faces several obstacles. The first and most important is funding. Many donors, Aylin explains, do not understand the real costs of working in such remote and hard-to-reach territories, since getting there involves small-plane flights or multi-day river journeys, and implementing any organizational or monitoring system requires constant updates, a presence on the ground, and sustained community participation.

But despite the limitations, the project upholds a vital principle: monitoring activities, expeditions, and data collection must always be carried out with the Wayana people. One of the medium-term objectives is to train local teams that can take on these tasks on a permanent basis. “Why bring in outsiders when the Wayana can do it themselves?” André asks, emphasizing how full knowledge of this territory belongs solely to the Wayana people and must be strengthened.

The project also includes documenting and transmitting traditional knowledge, which seeks to record language, textiles, crafts, and ancestral wisdom before they are lost entirely. According to André, they have already produced audiovisual materials accessible online, aimed primarily at young people growing up in a context of transition, where elements of traditional life coexist with new technologies. Mulokot also serves as a space for intergenerational exchange, where the knowledge of elders is documented and shared through digital tools.

According to the account of a Wayana woman from the village of Apetina, the forest, for this town, is a vital infrastructure: it is the source of food, medicine, materials for crafts, and also of spiritual meaning. “For us, the forest is everything. Money can’t buy what we have here. We don’t need concessions or gold miners. We need the forest to survive,” André explains, recalling the conversation he had with this woman, in Apetina, a year and a half ago.

He also mentions that this rejection by the Wayana people does not imply absolute isolation, but rather a conscious choice about what kind of changes to accept and how to do so. The Wayana communities do not seek to build roads or achieve full integration into the dominant economic model, because they know that such infrastructure facilitates the entry of extractive activities. Instead, they aspire to maintain their way of life with some adaptations, such as the use of cell phones or digital tools on their own terms.

The vision they describe is, in André’s words, the possibility that Wayana territory will continue to exist under the same conditions two or three hundred years from now, that mining companies will disappear in the coming decades, and that decisions regarding the use of their lands will remain in their hands. To achieve this, in a country that still does not recognize them, the Wayana have chosen to begin producing knowledge about themselves; to create their own systematic and verifiable record of how they live and who they are.