Who were maroons in the New World history?

Maroons are descendants of Africans in the Americas who formed settlements away from slavery.

In the New World, as early as 1512, enslaved Africans escaped from Spanish captors and either joined indigenous peoples or eked out a living on their own.

When runaway Blacks and Amerindians banded together and subsisted independently they were called maroons. On the Caribbean islands, they formed bands and on some islands, armed camps. Maroon communities faced great odds against their surviving attacks by hostile colonists, obtaining food for subsistence living.

Maroon, which can have a more general sense of being abandoned without resources, entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective marron, meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive'.