No one owns the forest

French Guiana's equatorial rainforest contains some of the richest gold deposits in the world. In 2025, as gold reached €115 per gram, an estimated six tonnes were extracted outside legal channels. Illegal gold mining, steadily growing since the 1990s, has continually adapted and reinvented itself. Despite repeated military operations, the French state struggles to contain it. Miners, 96% of whom are Brazilian, operate in the interior, largely inhabited by Indigenous and Businenge communities. These populations bear the direct environmental, health, and social consequences: deforestation, mercury contamination of soil and rivers, and deep disruptions to food systems and social structures. Although this activity conflicts with traditional ways of life and relationships to the land, some community members take part in this contemporary gold rush. This photographic work focuses on gold mining among the Businenge Ndjuka, viewing it as a pragmatic and potentially emancipatory response to limited economic opportunities and the institutional marginalization of western Guiana. The Businenge (Maroons) are descendants of enslaved people who fled Surinamese plantations before abolition. Their history is one of resistance and self-determination. Settling along both banks of the Maroni River, the border between Suriname and French Guiana, they inhabit a fluid territory shaped by informal exchanges that largely escape state control. Skilled navigators, Businenge communities long worked as boatmen supporting mining logistics. Today, in areas like Grand-Santi, temporary work in gold mining has become common among Ndjuka men. While profit is a factor, it is above all a means of coping with limited access to education and scarce employment prospects, allowing many to remain with their families. Unlike large-scale Brazilian operations, Ndjuka mining is often small-scale and community-based, a monetized subsistence economy in a globalized context where farming, fishing, and hunting are no longer sufficient. For marginalized populations, gold mining represents both economic stability and a way to remain on their land. This project highlights the tension between state governance and lived realities. Gold mining may be illegal, but is it illegitimate to draw a livelihood from a land where one's ancestors fought for freedom?