who are the maroons?

Ironically enough, here's the short answer from Julie, and the long answer from Matt:

Julie's answer: In short, the Maroons are descendants from Africans slaves who escaped into the deep Jamaican Bush when the British took over the island. Despite the British attempts to subdue them, they were never conquered. The British ended up having to sign a treaty with them to grant them their semi-autonomous land area. Impressive, huh?! As a result, the Maroon culture holds a close tie to African culture. The Maroons are the closest one can get to an indigenous culture within Jamaica, as all the Tainos and Arawaks (the original Natives) were all killed off by the Spanish. The Maroons have their own jurisdiction, a "gated" community, and operate under a council of elders, and of course are located in the deep Jamaican Bush.

Matt's answer: (using some outside sources)
In 1655, when the British army and fleet failed to capture Santo Domingo, Spain’s most prized colony, Gen. Penn and Adm. Venables decided to seize Jamaica so as not to return home empty handed. Lacking any organized defense, the Jamaican Spaniards fled to Cuba and released their slaves who, in the west, sought refuge in the inhospitable hills of the Cockpit Country. The “Maroons” here have a colorful history of outwitting and harassing the British who eventually negotiated a treaty in 1738. Sovereign lands were ceded to them and they were given the freedom and autonomy that slaves in the New World did not acquire for another 100 years. Their descendants still live in the Cockpit Country which remains uncharted and impenetrable.

And

The Maroons that made treaties with the British crown in Jamaica in 1739 were destined for special fame (or infamy, depending on the perspective).The maroons, though hugely outnumbered and poorly equipped, launched a highly effective armed resistance and nearly managed to bring economic development in parts of the island to a standstill. Unconquered, they persisted as free peoples in the heart of Britain's most important and notorious slave colony until long after the abolition of slavery in 1834. The fact that they were never defeated or assimilated into the larger population set them apart from most of the other Maroon groups spread across plantation America. Today they remain, after the Maroons of Suriname and French Guiana, the most culturally and politically distinctive of all surviving Maroon communities of the Americas.

And

The two treaties signed by the Maroons and their British antagonists in 1739 gave legal recognition to de facto ethnic groups that already differed culturally (despite significant areas of overlap) from the rest of the Jamaican population. Two major groups were covered by the treaties: those under the leadership of Cudjoe (Kojo) in the Cockpit Country in the western part of the island (Accompong), known as the Leeward Maroons; and those affiliated with Quao (Kwau), Nanny, and a variety of other leaders in the Blue Mountains in the east, known as the Windward Maroons. Over several decades, while building new societies in the island's interior, both groups had developed distinctive Afro-creole cultures to which new recruits from the plantations adapted and contributed. The treaties of 1739 reinforced and institutionalized preexisting cultural differences between the Maroons and the coastal slave population by legally sanctioning the Maroons' existence as semi-autonomous free peoples within a slave colony, and by providing them with bounded territories that came to symbolize their corporate identities as communities of common landowners.

After 1739, the British colonial government helped to further entrench the distinctions between Maroons and other Jamaicans by employing the former as a sort of internal police force whose responsibility it was to track down and capture future runaways and to aid in the suppression of slave insurrections. The deep divisions and resentments caused by the post-treaty Maroons' willingness to cooperate with the British in this way continue to haunt much of the thinking, both official and popular, about Maroons today.

With the general emancipation of slaves in 1834, things changed drastically for the Maroons. Since the British no longer needed their services as a tracking force, they had little interest in maintaining distinct, partially autonomous communities in the interior of their colony. The first formal attempt to encourage the assimilation of the Maroons into the wider population was the so-called Maroon Lands Allotment Act of 1842. This piece of legislation aimed to abrogate the treaties of 1739 and absorb the Maroons into the emergent peasantry by dividing the communally owned Maroon lands and parceling them out to individual owners. The Maroons, however, simply refused to comply, and the colonial government did not force the issue. It soon found that its interests were not, after all, necessarily served by dissolving the Maroon communities. As late as 1865, some three decades after slavery ended, the Maroons assisted the government in putting down the peasant rebellion led by Paul Bogle -- the last time they were to serve in this military capacity.