Meet Sheryl and her work in Suriname

Sheryl’s research journey began in 2007 at a bustling city market in Paramaribo, where she spotted a howler monkey for sale. It was the closed hunting season, a time when hunting on specific species was forbidden, yet there the monkey was. This encounter sparked a lifelong interest in bush meat trade in Suriname. What started as a focus on wildlife populations evolved into a PhD research incorporating both ecological as well as sociopolitical dimensions of bush meat.

While diving deeper and deeper into her research, Sheryl concluded that sustainable land and wildlife management cannot succeed if local inhabitants lack legal authority over their lands. Without land titles communities constantly face the threat of displacement in favor of industries such as gold and timber. The survival of Indigenous communities is inextricably linked to the survival of ‘hunting species’ like the tapir, which eventually all depends on the protection of the lands by securing land rights. In order to address this problem, her research adopts ecological as well as social and legal perspectives, which shows the multifaceted reality of ecological struggles.

Socioecological research requires a diverse range of research methods. Sheryl will deploy wildlife camera traps in the forest to gather data on animal populations. For now, this remains one of her biggest challenges: setting them up and deciding where to place them together with the communities, as they will be placed on their lands.

Simultaneously, she will organize workshops where villagers use pen and paper to map their territories; visualizing residential areas, hunting grounds, and sacred sites. These maps will serve as a social translation of the landscape, turning local lived experience into a robust body of land documentation. For Sheryl, this is the most important part of her research, as her biggest hope is for these maps to become strong evidence for Indigenous groups to use in their lobby for land rights.

With this PhD, Sheryl aims to bridge the gap between Indigenous land sovereignty and environmental preservation, but also hopes to instill a collective awareness that Suriname’s natural resources are finite, and require careful guardianship if it is to survive for those who follow.

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