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History and Culture

Colonial Origins

In the mid-seventeenth century, the area known today as Suriname was settled by the British from Barbados, who began shipping Africans to Suriname as slaves to work on their plantations. At the Peace of Breda in 1667, ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Suriname was relinquished to the Dutch, and English settlers withdrew. Dutch plantation owners followed in the footsteps of the English and continued the importation of African slaves into the nineteenth century.

Oneida Oral Tradition

The Creation Story

Long, long ago, people did not live on the Earth. Instead, they lived in the Sky World, and things were very similar to what we think of as life on Earth. There were people, birds, animals, and everything else in the Sky World.

The Fur Trade

When the first European explorers came to North America, they hoped to find vast amounts of gold and silver.

This was not an unrealistic expectation, for when Hernando Cortes conquered the Aztec Empire in Mexico in 1518 and 1519, he found incredible quantities of precious metals, as did Francisco Pizarro when he conquered the Inca Empire in 1534. A French explorer, Jacques Cartier, explored the St.