Thanks to Renzo Duin’s annotated translation, the voice of Lodewijk Schmidt – an Afrodiasporic Saramaka Maroon from Suriname – by means of his mid-twentieth century ethnographic accounts, is finally put into circulation to be read by Anglophone audiences worldwide. More than anything else, Schmidt’s ethnographic account, which Duin has herewith translated, tells the tragic story of Indigenous Peoples of the Eastern Guiana Highlands (northern Brazil, and southern Suriname and French Guiana): they were brought to the brink of extinction by Western disease resulting in a rapid depopulation to which Schmidt bears testimony. The sad death and mourning of a magnificent leader, Alapité, on 13–14 August 1941, is told with a succinctness that suggests the discretion of deep respect on the part of Schmidt. Moreover, Schmidt’s is a story that takes account of the pathological mechanisms of colonialism, in which Indigenous Peoples and African Diaspora Communities, both victims of colonialism, vilify each other falling privy to the divide-and-conquer mechanisms of colonialism. Notably, Schmidt, who himself was a Saramaka Maroon, is particularly sensitive to the antagonisms. Beyond the nature of the ethnographic accounts, Duin argues that Schmidt was sent on a covert mission to determine whether or not the Nazis had engaged in covert missions and if they had established bases and airfields in the region. Today, as the ecological disaster incurred by neocolonial, neoliberal and geopolitical practices threatens to completely destroy the Amazonian forests that Schmidt describes, his succinctly, meticulous account only underscores the predetermined tragedy that is the result of the European and later North American presence in present-day Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil. Duin’s profound knowledge of the history, topography, and fauna of the region, contextualizes Schmidt’s ethnographic accounts and forces us to take account of the catastrophe that is deforestation and ethnocide of the Indigenous Peoples of the Eastern Guiana Highlands.