“Tona Ina, the Yoruba ‘sea light’: Community Arcaeomythology in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean

with Dr. María Suárez Toro

Thursday,  July 27, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time 

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TONA INA (“Sea Light” in Yoruba), is a contemporary African, matriarchal, archetype, created in 2015, in order to tell stories about connections between the waters of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast and “the deepest roots of identity, ancestral knowledge, and interactive symbiosis of our species as nature.” As the ancestral storyteller, she brings forth hidden historical facts about slavery and predatory patriarchal practices. Tona Ina also speaks for the women, giving voice to their tenacity as the “vital reserves” of our species; it is the women whose holistic thinking supports alternative paradigms such as the maternal gift economy.

African descendants and Bribri/Cabécar native pobladoras claim to see a light in the darkest nights in Punta Cahuita in the Cahuita National Park. In the sea waters near that Point, Afro-descendant and native scuba diving youth are researching two shipwrecks that may have been slave ships. This underwater archaeology project is recovering the history of the place and its people, as well as encouraging divers researching their own identities. By adding the perspective of archaeomythology, we can reclaim myths that are born through the interaction between ancient knowledge and memory, and also highlight present day responses from community members.

Author Dr. María Suárez Toro is member of Centro Comunitario de Buceo Ambassadors of the Sea, director of Escribana feminist media, member of the Maternal Gift Economy Network, Diverse Women for Diversity, the Association of Women Writers in Costa Rica and now of the Association of Women and Mythology.  Maria is the author of many books, the latest two being “Tona Ina: La Misteriosa Cueva de un Pez León en Cahuita” and “Tona Ina: La Luz en el Mar Caribe”, both published by the University of Costa Rica in 2017 and 2021. 

Maria’s discussion will include remarks from  MSc Aaniyah Martin from South Africa and Dr. Joan Marley from the United States to explore the significance of creating a present day ancestral storyteller.

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Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:

Salon 57 : September 7, 2023, 6 PM Eastern Time

“A PaGaian Cosmology: Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis”                  with Dr. Glenys Livingstone

Upcoming Salons are on September 21, October 5 & 19, November 2 & 16.

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

“A Filmmaker’s Journey: ‘Give Light–Stories from Indigenous Midwives’ ”

with Steph Smith

Thursday,  July 13, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time 

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Traditional midwives have assisted in births throughout human history. Yet the deep knowledge of these women is discounted, and they may even face persecuted by modern medical institutions. Steph Smith’s remarkable documentary “GIVE LIGHT: Stories from Indigenous Midwives“ links their stories across continents and in widely varied communities. In penetrating interviews, nine indigenous midwives from five continents discuss the benefits and challenges to their profession.  GIVE LIGHT examines traditional midwifery, juxtaposed with modern obstetrics, to bridge the gap between traditional wisdom and modern technology. In this Salon Steph reflects on the journey of meeting and listening to these inspiring practitioners, and of creating and funding this courageous film to honor their work.

Steph Smith, filmmaker based in New Orleans, works as an independent director, cinematographer, and editor.   In October 2020, Steph was accepted into the Sundance Co//ab with the emphasis on GIVE LIGHT.  Her work has been invited to screen in Spain, France, Greece, Mexico, Sweden, England, Greece, South Africa, Nigeria, Mozambique, Portugal, Philippines, and USA.

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Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:

July 27 2023 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time

Tona Ina, the Yoruba “sea light”: Community Archaeomythology in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean                                                                                                                      with Maria Suarez Toro

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

“Water Worlds: Mermaids, The Drowning World, and Climate Change”

with Brenda Peterson

Thursday,  June 29, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time 

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Author Brenda Peterson asks, “Is our future amphibious?” In 2012 she posed the question in one of the first cli-fi (climate-fiction) novels, The Drowning World, and again in the sequel Tattoo Master. This Aquantis series is set in a future of tsunamis, Flood Lands, and characters who are half-dolphin, half-human. Brenda says, “The Drowning World is not a dystopian book; it is about learning to adapt to our own drastically changing water world. The young mermaid, Marina, who beaches on a flooded Siesta Key, Florida in 2040, must learn to shift into land legs and pass as human—to save both our world and hers.”

Brenda is currently writing a series of blog posts about mermaids. In the most recent one, she  poses this question about vampires: “Why would a woman want her life’s blood drained away to spend eternity with a dead man? Not my idea of romance. Mermaids offer more hope.”   Here’s the link to that essay.

Through her work as a novelist and award-winning nature writer, Brenda Peterson’s curiosity about and respect for nature radiates through her many books. Her children’s book Leopard and Silkie was a winner of the National Science Teachers 2013 Award for “Outstanding Science Books for K-12.” Wolf Nation was chosen by Forbes as a Best Book of he Year and is out in audiobook from Audible.com.  The Drowning World, the first of Brenda’s series of novels for young adults, has been called “amazing and haunting in its themes and imaginative reach.” Brenda lives in Seattle on the Salish Sea. She is the founder of the Seattle-based grassroots conservation group Seal Sitters, which focuses on safety for seal pups on the beach. Her newest novel, Stiletto, a “cinematic psychological thriller,” has just been published on June 1.

Brenda Peterson is a fellow of Black Earth Institute (BEI). Founded by ASWM co-creator, the late Patricia Monaghan, with Michael McDermott, BEI is a community of artist-fellows and scholar-advisers creating a more ethical world. BEI seeks to help create a more just and deeply interconnected world and promote the health of the planet. To do so, artists are appointed as Fellows for a term and Scholars join as advisors. BEI then encourages and supports its present and past Fellows and Scholars to address social justice, environmental issues and the spiritual dimensions of the human condition in their art and work. The beautiful About Place Journal has featured the work of hundreds of artists and writers. Michael is a longtime member of ASWM’s Advisory Board, as BEI cooperates with ASWM to expand our reach to scholars and to develop special programs.

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Save this date for an upcoming ASWM Salon:

July 27 2023 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time

Tona Ina, the Yoruba “sea light”: Community Archaeomythology in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean with Maria Suarez Toro

 

 

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

“The Woman who Married the Bear and Original Instructions”

with Kaarina Kailo

Thursday,  March 23, 2023 at NOON Eastern Time 

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The Spring festivals with, among others, bear goddess Brigit at the forefront celebrated gifting, food and collective merry-making as life returned. The Bear gave a woman the original instructions. Gifting ensured people did not overuse their resources of the commons. It is by comparing variants of the story of the Woman Who Married a Bear that we can see most clearly how the attitude towards mother and bear worship has changed in the shift from pre-christian to Christian and patriarchal cultures. The current threats to an ecosocially sustainable future require that we re-introduce ecomyths and rituals that reflect an understanding of humans’ interdependence with the community of sentient beings and Inter-relational ecosystems. I describe how the original instructions of matricultures in northern Finno-Ugric cultures have been appropriated and changed to serve patriarchal values.

Watch for the forthcoming (June 2023), The Woman Who Married the Bear. The Spirituality of the Ancient Foremothers by Barbara Alice Mann and Kaarina Kailo (Oxford UP; see Mann-Kailo book).  This book surveys Indigenous traditions across the global North, including North America and Eurasia, with matriarchal traditions of Women marrying the Bear in both, sporting caves as wombs, water as earth’s amniotic fluid, and birth-renewal as the point of thanksgiving. In North America, traditions stretch back to the Bölling−Allerød warming, 15,000 BP and come forward into historical times. In Eurasia, starting with the earliest “Venus” figurines of bear-headed women, 35,000 BP, traditions connect fire, water, earth, forest, and “Bear-Women” spirits to matriarchy. In both instances, women and bears originally collaborate through time-keeping star configurations and winter cave-dwelling, as symbolized by the spring awakening from hibernation followed by the birth of “cubs.” 

Dr. Kaarina Kailo has worked as prof. or senior scholar of Women’s Studies in Finland and Canada. Her expertise includes Northern indigenous studies, ecomythology and bear spirituality. Her hundreds of publications, books, articles, edited or co-edited volumes include Wo/men & Bears— Nature, Culture, Gender; Finnish Goddess Mythology and the Golden Woman; Mothering, Gift and Revolution and studies on sauna spirituality.

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Scholar Salons will resume later in the year following our International Conference “Waters of Life,” May 5-6 2023 in Syracuse NY.

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

“Philippine Shamans and Voice and Gender and Place”

with Grace Nono

Thursday,  March 9, 2023 at NOON Eastern Time 

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Babaylan Sing Back is Grace Nono’s most recent work, which depicts the embodied voices of Native Philippine ritual specialists popularly known as babaylan. These ritual specialists are widely believed to have perished during colonial times, or to survive on the margins in the present-day. They are either persecuted as witches and purveyors of superstition, or valorized as symbols of gender equality and anticolonial resistance. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and in the Philippine diaspora, Grace’s deep engagement with the song and speech of a number of living ritual specialists demonstrates Native historical agency in the 500th year anniversary of the contact between the people of the Philippine Islands and the European colonizers.

Grace Nono, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist and scholar of Philippine shamanism. She is also a music-performing artist, and founding president of the Tao Foundation for Culture and Arts, a non-profit organization that contributes to cultural revitalization in the Philippines. Among Grace’s books are Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender and Place (Ateneo University Press, 2023, and Cornell University Press–Southeast Asia Program, 2021); Song of the Babaylan: Living Voices, Medicines, Spiritualities of Philippine Ritualist-Oralist-Healers (Institute of Spirituality in Asia, 2013); and The Shared Voice: Chanted and Spoken Narratives from the Philippines (ANVIL and Fundacion Santiago, 2008). For further information about Grace Nono, see  www.gracenono.com.

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Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:

March 23, 2023 “The Woman Who Married a Bear and Original Instructions” with Kaarina Kailo

NOTE: We will resume our Salon series later in the year, after our May 5-6 Conference!

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.