Semillas: Indigenous Women are Seed Women
- Bella Wang
- 32 minutes ago
- 3 min read
“The project is like a pig,” Lourdes described how the Boruca Indigenous Women Artisans Association So Cagru operates, “To participate, you have to feed it. If you want to take something from it, like a pig’s leg or head, then the pig would die.”
This vivid analogy, shared on the first day of our Anthropology trip at the Boruca Indigenous Reserve, captured the community’s essence of collective care. Nestled in the South Pacific region of Costa Rica, the Boruca are known for their craftwork, especially weaving and mask making.
Lourdes’ aim of leading So Cagru is to uplift women who are victims of domestic violence by providing job opportunities. As she pointed out, even though So Cagru was initially founded as a refuge from male violence, the community has come to view men as equals instead of enemies, revealing the Indigenous Boruca women’s nuanced perspectives on dismantling patriarchal structures, instead of simply reversing them.
Except for artisans, the project also invites women to work in agriculture and hospitality, weaving together creative artistic expression, local knowledge of nature, and connections with visitors into a holistic system of female labor. So Cagru remains open to all Indigenous Boruca women regardless of their specific skills, underlining that the foundation for the project to sustain itself is united empowerment. As we spent our time in Boruca surrounded by these Indigenous women who call themselves Seed Women, we developed a much stronger grasp of the significance of women’s collaborative labor to the feminist reimagining of the community’s economy.
The culture of seed is both literal and metaphorical. The Boruca people plant seeds in greenhouses and gardens, and we participated in improving the local seed nursery. Over the years, seed-planting has been a main pathway for Boruca women who are not specialized in the arts to also contribute to the project. Lourdes shared their four categories of seeds: agricultural, natural, cultural, and spiritual; Indigenous women found their reciprocal responsibilities in the seeds: to cultivate, to sustain, to preserve, and to find the fire-like feminine passion that heals the soul. I believe that defining women as Seed Women is deeply rooted in Boruca’s cosmology that subverts traditional frameworks gender.
“All natural beings started as female. Over time, some developed more masculine traits, becoming male. We all embody both femininity and masculinity.” Lourdes told us about how the community employs the binary gender system in their classification of the world.
Her words struck me as it was my first time in a society that views women as the default gender. I remember in one of my first Anthropology classes, we were told to draw the everyman from our country, and almost every student sketched a male figure. This introduced us to the anthropological concept of The Other, where groups that historically possess less power in cultural and political hegemonies, such as women in most societies, are characterized as fundamentally different from dominant groups who are perceived as the norm; these dominant groups reproduce their marginalization of other groups through “the othering”. In contrast, females in Boruca are not a derivative of males, but the origin in the community’s worldview, invalidating the universally prevalent male-centered power system.
Lourdes is a Seed Woman in every sense. Her maternal grandmother is a healer. When she was little, she had boys coming to her, telling her that her grandmother was a witch.
“I told him that I am so proud that my grandmother is a witch, that all of the women in my family know magic, and I will turn him into a frog.”
While colonial and patriarchal systems have demonized Indigenous women’s spiritual and medical knowledge as witchcraft, Lourdes knew how to defy the stereotype of The Other from a young age.
In Lourdes’ other stories, we understood that her strong feminist awareness is fostered in Boruca, as it had existed as a female-centered space where women actively support each other. She shared a memory of her telling a woman teacher that she couldn’t afford bras when she was noticed not wearing one during a rainstorm, and the teacher brought two bras for her the next day. Seeing Lourdes shed a few tears, my eyes watered a bit too, deeply touched by this heartening gesture and the culture of female solidarity it reveals.
Understanding women as seeds is understanding them as the source of life. From there, everything grows.