Marooned: a Western Frontier Dismal Swamp Narrative

Marooned: A Western Frontier Dismal Swamp Narrative centers the erased figure of Samuel Mars, a lost Black station master whose movements through the Great Dismal Swamp have been excluded from dominant Underground Railroad cartographies. Here, the term “Marooned” refers not to abandonment, but to the maroon geographies of Black and Indigenous resistance encoded in land, lineage, and fugitive infrastructure. Guided by Diasporic Maroon Memory Theory, Lineage as Method, and the Maroon Geographies Framework, this research reconstructs Mars’s trajectory through oral testimony, spatial patterning, and ancestral land memory. Rather than casting the Dismal Swamp merely as a site of refuge, this work positions it as an operational corridor of maroon resistance, a space where cosmological knowledge, ecological intuition, and strategic concealment converge. Through a Black-Indigenous interpretive lens, the research surfaces submerged geographies and behavioral codes embedded within slave testimonies, often overlooked by Western historical frameworks. These original methodologies together reveal maroonage not only as flight from enslavement but as a sophisticated knowledge system, a spatial technology rooted in kinship, spiritual inheritance, and freedom-making. The narrative reframes the swamp as a living epistemic site where insurgent geographies remain active across generations through memory, naming, and land. Ultimately, this paper restores the Dismal Swamp as an intellectual and tactical center of Black and Indigenous resistance. It contributes to Black Studies, curriculum theory, and decolonial historiography by proposing scalable methods to map erased freedom logics across the African Diaspora.