Pedagogy of the Waters in Costa Rica’s Caribbean: Tidalectics* in Feminist Citizenry Sciences—Lived Experiences** Are the Patterns that Connect***

MATRIARCHY FOR FUTURE FESTIVAL
(www.matriarchy-for-future-net)
July 4, 2025
Venlo, Netherlands

by María Suárez Toro,
INMAR Cribe, CCBEEM

Costa Rica’s southeastern Caribbean region of Talamanca, bordering Panama, spans both mountainous and coastal landscapes.

It is the ancestral homeland of Bribri, Cabécar, and Afro-descendant peoples. Over time, it has also welcomed individuals from more than 52 nationalities across its roughly 1,084-square-mile territory.

Approximately 450,000 people reside here (INEC, 2023). Half are Indigenous and/or of mixed heritage; the remainder includes about half Afro-descendant and mixed populations and half descendants from mostly European, North American (mainly the U.S.), and other Costa Rican regions.

Talamanca’s vibrant ocean and land is rich in biodiversity. Around 89 percent of its territory is protected—encompassing turtle nesting sites, coral reefs, mangroves, tropical forests, and Indigenous territories.

The shoreline was long believed to have been first inhabited by Afro-descendant fisherfolk in the early 1800s, when turtle hunters from other Caribbean islands and continental coasts began settling here.

Recently, however, a local youth scuba diving center revealed an even earlier history. Evidence now suggests that a century earlier, in 1710, two Danish slave ships mistakenly arrived in the area. A mutiny by the sailors and enslaved Africans led to one ship burning and the other wrecking on the coral reef. The survivors reached shore—free.

In 2014, together with four Afro-Bribri youth, I helped establish a youth scuba diving camp, which led to the later discovery of this untold story of submersion that is now reshaping Costa Rica’s history.

I have documented this journey in a book, in which an ancestral, matriarchal African character narrates the saga. Through her voice, we follow how these young divers—guided by dreams of ocean conservation—discover their own roots in the process of exploration. 

The narrator’s name is Tona Ina in Yoruba—Sea Light in English, Dejë Boe in Bribri, and Meereslicht in German. Her debut as a literary character in 2015 on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast served to tell the stories of the planet’s waters and their deep connections to identity, ancestral knowledge, and humanity’s symbiosis with nature.

Afro-descendant and Bribri/Cabécar communities speak of a mysterious light that appears on the darkest nights at Punta Cahuita, in Cahuita National Park. Close by, two shipwrecks—currently being researched by local Afro-descendant and native youth divers—are believed to be remnants of slave ships, offering newfound insight into the identity and complex history of this place and its peoples.

Tona Ina holds the memory of these waters, bringing to light veiled historical facts about slavery and its ties to patriarchal, predatory, capitalist, and supremacist systems of power.

Another historical truth carried in Tona Ina’s ancestral voice is the story of women’s tenacity as “vital reserves” of a species pushed to its biological limits through centuries of predatory practices. Women have had the fortitude to create and live by alternative standards and paradigms in their holistic approaches to:

Citizen science: Bridging scientific inquiry with ancestral knowledge.

Mythic truths: Affirming that all life shares a common spirit, and that the Mesoamerican human journey is one of restoring wholeness of who we are in the universe.

Maternal gift economies: Being born and receiving, learning, and sharing the gifts of nature in the early-life lived experiences of all human beings.

Human-ecosystem symbiosis: Revitalizing our connections.

Feminist activism and movement-building: Converting isolated lived experiences into collective memory and power—reclaiming histories erased under patriarchy, and restoring a matrifocal narrative that includes women’s honored role in society.

Tona Ina is the memory of the waters, the ancestral memory held in Earth’s womb: the ocean—source of all of life. She is also the memory of our mothers’ bodies—both actual and ancestral—reminding us to continue learning how to coexist with the other gifts of life, so that we may become whole again.

But that is not the story I want to tell you today.

You can read about that one elsewhere—in local, national, and international media—because, by changing who researches and who tells the untold stories, we are making history. We are uncovering hidden truths about the slave trade in Costa Rica and about the resistance of Africans who struggled against it—and who continue to overcome its legacies. 

What I want to share with you today is my personal journey in co-creating a Children’s Pedagogy of the Waters on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast—rooted in a feminist, “tidalectic” perspective and grounded in lived experience.

Why? Because we are facing the devastation and near-total hegemonization of global systems dominated by capitalism, patriarchy, supremacism, and extractivism.

In such times, when humanity seems to have lost its moral compass, this hegemony appears in cyclical tides of abuse of power through systemic violence and commodification that—like waves—crash and recede, yet persist.

The waves do not let up, because humanity’s essence will never stop coming up for air from the depths of the ocean, even when our quest feels nearly broken. We build movements because we must—struggling together under the very systems that make humanity sick with greed, to begin healing by dismantling these destructive systems.

Women are the moral reserves and muscle memory in this struggle—revitalizing the life-giving powers of our essential role in the regeneration of all of life and standing firm against reproductive genocide.

Men who recognize and honor matrilineality and shared power also become moral reserves, aiding the collective effort to dismantle the broken global system and transition toward new ways of relating within the planetary family that nurtures all life.

A feminist tidalectic perspective helps us overcome fragmentation, polarization, commodification, and Western dichotomies—drawing from our lived experiences and moving beyond the fragmented, isolated mindset of predatory systems. It also recognizes that dialectics alone are not enough. They fall short because the dynamics at play are not merely about “contraries” coming together in synthesis. 

Sometimes forcefully, and other times subtly, tidal waves bring and take, take and bring—like all life forces—never the same but always in constant motion.

Today’s efforts to break free from dichotomies and polarization must acknowledge the spiral-wave dynamics of the sea—where women’s power to regenerate, nurture, and remain connected to the full web of life continually resurfaces in memory, history, and movement. This energy endures until—and only if—balance is restored in humanity’s holistic presence on the planet.

Recognizing our species’ amphibian nature, both in our lived experiences and our dreams—always returning to the sea, its waters, its mythologies and stories—allows us to reclaim wholeness by reconnecting to our deepest roots: an oceanic planet where all life first emerged from living waters. Paradoxically, within women’s bodies, humankind evolved an ocean in harmony with the planet.

How, then, do we guide Caribbean coastal children to this understanding?

The coast is neither land nor sea; it embodies the planet’s tides—cyclical and symbiotic.

Tona Ina’s memory is shared with children through artistic, lived experiences, because art is humanity’s primal form of expression. As Priscila Rashad reminds us: “Before a child talks, they sing; before they walk; they dance; before they write, they paint ….” Rashad might not have remembered that before we saw the light of day or developed our own bodies, we swam. We swam!

I take this a step further, drawing from the teachings of Maria Montessori: We do not have to teach children what they already know. We create enabling environments so that their knowledge manifests when the time is ripe. We do not teach them to walk or talk or paint or sing … they come knowing, but it manifests itself when and if the self-organized body is ready and enabling conditions are present. We know how to swim for our life—to grow into full-grown fetuses and become human beings—but we forget these skills because we are separated from deep waters and are taught to fear the unknown.

We do not teach children to talk … they come equipped with the universal language of emotions: crying to signal need or pain; laughing for joy, affection, and satisfaction when needs are met. What we do teach them is the language of the particular culture they are born into—the “mother tongue,” as we call it. But do you know what truly sets it apart from the thousands of other languages? It is the language we learn from the “motherer”—the language learned through emotions and feelings.

Tona Ina is the great mother of light’s energy in water—telling stories, singing, dancing, swimming, and diving from the very belly of the planet. She embodies the deepest roots of “beingness” in the human experience, drawn from the vitality of the planet’s most transparent waters.

She invites us to rethink strategies for including art in our lives, nurturing self-organized intelligence, and reconnecting with water and its vital imaginaries of original peoples—for whom the water deities are equated with female energy.

Our roots lie in the sea—and in the Caribbean—biologically, historically, culturally, sociologically, economically, and mythologically. Children learn that the Southern Caribbean is a place where everything—people (from Africa), food (from fisherfolk), life itself and its many blessings (from motherers), marine livelihoods and mythologies (like Yemaya, Mulurtimi, and Tona Ina)—arrived by way of the sea.

The coastal area and its communities is not merely a location, but a convergence of cyclical, oceanic rhythms as well as a reminder that all life is amphibian—that without water we cannot live.

So, with children and youths, we turn the sea into a classroom—a place to express dreams through song, art, storytelling, and uncovering untold narratives—to approach wholeness together.

The secret:
Do these things together
under a leadership that fosters shared lived experience,
where memory, skills, and imagination
flow forward like water.

Cultivate peaceful, creative, safe, sharing
environments that promote equal opportunity.

Monitor and celebrate our interactions with
each other and with the rest of the living world.

Involve families and communities in the process.

Engage in collectively building alternatives.

Understand that children come into this world with an innate sense of how to seek the fulfillment of their needs—they understand equality, justice, sharing, struggle, and wholeness—but they grow up in the midst of powerful historical forces: tidal waves that work to deconstruct and dismantle these natural understandings through destructive systems and ways of being.

Some societal tidal waves under patriarchy that tend to cause women to relinquish power:

• In childhood, we learn how our needs are—or are not—met. At this stage, girls and boys face less fragmented expectations from themselves and others.
• During adolescence, the patriarchal system clamps down heavily, pressuring girls into “girly” roles and boys to exert power over girls.
• Within marriage or any family partnership, women often give up significant power, sacrificing parts of ourselves to make the system work for everyone else.
• In sociocultural, political, and economic structures—and in efforts to change these—women tend to participate within existing systems, much like in marriage, until we rediscover our all-regenerative powers and assert our leadership and new paradigms as part of transformation.
• Other tidal waves also contribute to this dynamic.

—————————————————

*“Lived experience” (erlebnis in German) refers to the knowledge and understanding a person gains through their own personal experiences. In the context of policymaking or research, it denotes the perspective of those who have directly encountered a specific issue or policy in their lives. (Social Sciences and Medicine, 2021, Nandini Karunamuni.) 

Cambridge dictionary describes it as: “the things that someone has experienced themselves, especially when these give the person a knowledge or understanding that people who have only heard about such experiences do not have.”

The concept is attributed to Wilhelm Dilthey and the emergence of hermeneutics: historical subjects made relevant in the present day.

**The notion of “patterns that connect” originally appeared in the work of Gregory Bateson (1979), husband of Margaret Mead, as “cybernetics.” Bateson sought a unifying link between mind and nature based on the idea that all change and phenomena occur through cognitive—that is, self-organized—processes.

Author’s note: The mind is part of our nature and is thus nature expressed as a process of adaptation in the living world. Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana considers “self-organization” to be a fundamental category for every organism.

In A Vision for the World: The Life and Work of Marija Gimbutas, Joan Marler, quotes anthropologist Ashley Montagu as saying: “Marija Gimbutas has provided us with a veritable Rosetta Stone of great heuristic value for future work in the hermeneutics of archaeology and anthropology.”

What did she contribute? As Marler explains, Gimbutas’s Lithuanian childhood was immersed in a family and social context where education was embraced as essential to cultural and political liberation. She also shares how Marija described it:

“Although Lithuanian is one of the most conservative Indo-European languages, related to Sanskrit, the folklore and mythological imagery I absorbed as a child reflected not only the Indo-European pantheon of sky gods but also a much earlier bond with the Earth and her mysterious cycles, still alive in the Lithuanian countryside. The rivers were sacred, the forest and trees were sacred, the hills were sacred. The earth was kissed and prayers were said every morning and every evening ...

“The balance of male and female powers expressed in the folk material had its correspondence in people’s daily lives: Officially, the patriarchal system is clearly dominating, but in reality, there is an inheritance from Old Europe in which the woman is the center. In some areas, the matrilineal system really exists, such as in my family. I don’t see that the sons were more important.” (https://www.academia.edu/67574301/)

*** “Tidalectics” is a term coined by Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite. It refers to a way of understanding the world that emphasizes the cyclical and rhythmic movements of water, particularly tides. This framework is used to analyze history, culture, and identity, especially within the Caribbean context. It challenges linear, land-based perspectives by highlighting the interconnectedness of land and sea, diaspora and indigeneity, and the fluid, dynamic nature of cultural exchange. It offers an alternative way of understanding time and history beyond conventional linear and land-centered models and paradigms.

Moreover, tidalectics carries a strong anticolonial stance, challenging the dominance of Western, land-based viewpoints and celebrating the agency, resilience, and creativity of Caribbean peoples.