Maroons were self-liberated slaves who learned to survive in and make adaptations to the southeastern American wetlands in which they took refuge, including the Great Dismal Swamp spanning parts of North Carolina and Virginia, and the Louisiana Central Wetlands, covering nearly 30,000 acres adjacent to Lake Borgne in New Orleans. The Africans and African Americans who came to dwell in these places between 1718 — after the founding of the French colony of Louisiana — and 1863 — when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued — chose not to travel north to seek freedom. Instead they created free communal societies in an environment that challenged them with swampy ground, extreme heat, insects, snakes, and alligators, yet at the same time nourished and protected them. These landscapes were places of danger, beauty, and secrets, two worlds at once — neither solid nor submerged; not completely safe from slaveholders and slavecatchers, but not easily navigable by them. Maroon communities were separated from relatives and friends still enslaved on the plantations, yet maintained regular if clandestine communication with them.
Marronage is a powerful example of resistance to captivity, and since the publication in 1973 of the pathbreaking volume Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, edited by social anthropologist Richard Price, historical accounts have proliferated of maroons in the southeastern United States as well as in Haiti, Jamaica, and South America. 1 Broadly speaking, this scholarship has focused on the political and theoretical importance of marronage, particularly as a catalyst for and model of revolt. As historian Sylviane A. Diouf puts it in Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014), “autonomy was at the heart of their project and exile the means to achieve it.” 2 Less often discussed is the knowledge of wetland ecology and management of swampland resources that these people carried with them — sometimes direct from Africa — and developed via onsite practice. In the territory that would become the state of Louisiana, the Central Wetlands were a mix of “bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) and water tupelo (Nyssa aquatica) swamp, fresh marsh, and bottomland hardwood forest.” 3 It has been estimated that, prior to the arrival of the French, such habitats covered half the area in question. Today, it is less than a third. 4 Nevertheless, the ways in which maroons cultivated and cared for their unstable environment remain a vital cultural legacy that landscape architecture as a discipline should not overlook. More specifically, the maroons’ example is helping to inspire activists in New Orleans (and elsewhere) to consider how swamps and wetlands can be stewarded to support communities who are endangered, now, by climate crisis and environmental injustice.