Decolonizing the Deep: Why Ocean Conservation Needs Indigenous Knowledge in the Caribbean
"The ocean has always been more than water to us. It is memory, medicine, and map."
For many Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous communities, the sea is sacred. It is where grandmothers fished before dawn, where ancestors sailed and survived, where stories were passed on beneath stars. Yet when we speak of ocean conservation in the Caribbean today, those voices are too often missing. Why?
The answer, like many injustices in our region, is rooted in colonialism.
A Personal Reflection: Saltwater in My Blood
I still remember the first time my great-grandmother taught me to listen to the sea. We were on a family trip to Tobago, riding in a glass-bottom boat over Buccoo Reef. She leaned close, her voice soft but certain, and said, "You see how the fish scatter when the shadow passes? They know more than we think. You have to learn to watch and wait."
That day, I learned that the ocean wasn’t just water — it was language. It spoke in tides and temperatures, in patience and pulse. I was too young to understand it fully then, but something about the reverence in her voice rooted deep inside me.
Years later, as I study marine conservation at university, I often reflect on that moment. In lectures about satellite monitoring or fish stock assessments, I hear echoes of her wisdom. She didn’t have a degree, but she knew how to read the reef. Her knowledge, passed down through generations, is the kind of Indigenous wisdom that’s too often overlooked in conservation policy.
That memory drives me to ask: Who gets to be called an expert? And why have we, the children of the Caribbean Sea, been silenced in the name of saving it?
Colonial Conservation: Who Was Protected, and From What?
When European powers colonized the Caribbean, they treated land and sea as commodities. Forests were cleared for plantations; marine life was harvested or destroyed to fuel distant economies. Entire ecosystems were transformed to serve empire. Conservation, when it eventually emerged, was rarely about protecting nature for its own sake. It was about preserving resources for colonial use.
Take the creation of protected marine areas (MPAs). Many were drawn without consulting local fishers or acknowledging traditional use. In some cases, areas that had been stewarded by coastal communities for generations were suddenly off-limits, patrolled by authorities, with permits and penalties that excluded the very people who had kept those ecosystems alive. These MPAs mirrored the plantation model: enclosure, control, and extraction.
Moreover, colonial systems imposed a Western idea that humans and nature are separate. Caribbean Indigenous and African-descended cosmologies, which see the sea as a living relative, were dismissed as superstition or folklore. Fishing traditions, spiritual practices, and oral histories were not seen as valuable conservation tools—they were erased or criminalized.
Rediscovering Our Ocean Guardians
Despite centuries of oppression, Caribbean communities have held on to knowledge passed down like coral seed—quietly, persistently, beautifully.
In Dominica, the Kalinago people still practice sustainable harvesting of sea moss and fish, guided by lunar cycles and ancestral wisdom. In Belize and Honduras, the Garifuna people manage coastal mangroves and reefs using principles of balance and respect embedded in their language and song. Across Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Trinidad, elders recall when "taboo" periods—times when fishing certain species was forbidden—kept stocks healthy without needing government laws.
These are not relics. They are living, breathing models of what conservation can be.
The Way Forward: Indigenous-Led, Community-Centered
Decolonizing ocean conservation in the Caribbean means more than adding a local liaison to a marine project. It means centering Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean leadership in marine governance. It means giving legal and financial support to community-based fisheries, honoring customary marine tenure systems, and integrating spiritual and ecological knowledge into national policy.
Some steps are already being taken:
The Eastern Caribbean Marine Managed Areas Network (ECMMAN) has supported co-management of MPAs.
In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, fisherfolk associations are piloting community reef restoration.
The University of the West Indies has launched projects documenting Indigenous marine knowledge and integrating it into climate resilience programs.
Still, much work remains. Colonial frameworks linger in who controls funding, who sets policy, and whose knowledge is considered "expert."
A Sea of Possibility
The Caribbean Sea has been a site of trauma—middle passage, exploitation, exile—but it has also always been a site of resilience. Our ancestors navigated by stars, read the swells like scripture, and spoke to the sea with reverence. We carry that memory in our blood.
If we are to truly protect the ocean, we must protect and elevate the people who know it best—not just as scientists, but as storytellers, stewards, and survivors.
Let us decolonize the deep—
not only for biodiversity,
but for justice, for culture,
and for the generations to come.
Because the systems that once erased our knowledge
did more than silence our stories—
they restructured our economies.
And today, it’s small-scale fishers who continue to bear the brunt of that injustice.