May 9, 2025 • 44 mins
In Tides of Transformation, we explore St. Eustatius from 1950 to 2000, a period of quiet but profound change. As men migrated for work, women led households, nurtured communities, and anchored culture. We reflect on intergenerational silence surrounding slavery, the resilience passed down through women, and the economic shift brought by Statia Oil Terminals.
Through stories from elders, nurses, activists, and Governor Alida Francis, we witness the strength of matriarchal leadership. These aren’t tales from textbooks—they’re lived memories, told in the flicker of oil lamps and the rhythm of daily care.
—
Produced by Simpler Media
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Episode Transcript
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>>
The women were actually in charge. They were left
behind, took care of the children, but they also had to
work. The women were always in my
time that I'm on this earth in Stacia, uh, were always
in leading positions.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (00:18):
Welcome to Whispers of the Past. I'm your host,
Fitavit. And in this episode,
Tides of Transformation. We step into the
heartbeat of synthesias between
1950 and the 2000s.
This chapter isn't shaped by headlines, but by
hands. Hands that lit lanterns before
(00:38):
electricity, lapped grass before
lawnmowers, and passed down memory in the
quiet language of care.
From the flicker of the oil lamp to the rise of
oil terminals, we follow the steady
current of change. How
migration reshaped family life,
how women stepped into spaces left behind,
(01:00):
and how silence around slavery gave way
slowly, tenderly, to storytelling
and truth. We witnessed
the hush of intergenerational trauma
and the quiet courage of those who broke
it. We revisit
the blue bead, one's currency, then
(01:21):
toy, now symbol, and
ask what happens when a community
forgets not through apathy, but through
survival. Through these
voices, we navigate a Caribbean
crossroads, a place
where women led without title, where heritage
lived outside museum walls, and where
(01:43):
transformation whispers long before it was
named.
Electricity didn't arrive on stacia until
late 1950s. Before that,
lanterns hung on poles to light the streets,
and darkness was something you felt in your bones.
For many, like Mrs. Rivers, a
(02:04):
respected elder and lifelong nurse devoted to Karen's
service, this wasn't just an inconvenience.
It was a memory, etched not just in time,
but but in feeling.
>>
Growing up, we didn't have electricity. Not
at that time. I think it came
lately, after late in the 50s, going
to the 60s, I think. Then we
got electricity. Um, I'm not quite sure.
I think it's around those years, yeah.
>> Speaker C (02:38):
Cause in those years back, we
had lanterns we used to hang out on.
>>
Stretching on the poles to see
in the night. Because the show is so dark and I don't like
it. I'm getting used to it, but I.
>> Speaker C (02:51):
Still don't like it.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (02:59):
In the glow of lanterns, before electricity
reached every home station, women kept the
island moving, raising children by
memory, guiding communities by touch, and
lighting the way with more than fire.
These were the women who built daily life out of
scarcity. But behind that steady strength,
lived histories, rarely spoken out, uh, loud.
(03:22):
As we turn to Mrs. M. Bennet, also a respected
elder who dedicated her life to nursing, she
reflects, Even in the 1950s and
1960s, the legacy of slavery
remained largely unspoken in
families. Silence Wrapped around the past like
a second skin. This is what some
scholars now describe as intergenerational
(03:45):
silence, when trauma is passed
down not through story, but through the absence of
it. What Mrs. Bennet eventually
uncovered through songs, community
practice and her own curiosity
wasn't just a personal discovery. It was
part of what researchers call transgenerational
trauma in the quiet inheritance of
(04:07):
pain, strength and
survival, Mechanisms that shaped by
slavery and colonialism.
And yet the inheritance wasn't
just only a wound. It was also
resilience through care networks, the kind
that forms when formal institutions
falls short and people,
(04:30):
especially women, take it upon themselves
to teach, protect and
remember.
There's also a term for gender
memory work,
when women often unconsciously become
the keepers of communal past through
recipes, rituals, and the
(04:52):
refusal to forget. So when,
uh, Mrs. Bennet speaks of learning about slavery through a
song circle in her 30s, she's not just
recalling a moment. She's embodying the
truth that many station women lived. That
healing too can be inherent.
Not all trauma screams. Some of it
(05:13):
whispers from generation to
generation. And sometimes
the act of remembering is its own quiet
form of resistance.
>> Speaker C (05:28):
Maybe um, they talk about it.
Maybe there wasn't in that time
got to be. They never say whether the father,
uh, or mother was a slave. You know,
all I used to hear my stepmother saying about
um. She had family from the Congo,
something from Africa. But you
(05:48):
never say who rather than how they was treated.
And my father Bennett, he said from
here. But his father,
Karen Bennett understood his father.
His father father was a German
from Germany. And my
mother, mother was from St. Kitts.
(06:09):
My mother father. He had family
in Sabah. But I don't know
the title. He have have the same
title in um. Sink it to
Cranstone. I never talked
about
(06:30):
the time I come a part of this history
was I was
singing in a group with Shanna Mercera.
They used to keep a singing group. And
every July she will
perform. We had to put on like
African weather skirt or
so. And um, then I
(06:52):
realized about this slavery
business. I think I was um,
in my 30s somewhere
around there. I was working, nursing.
Sometimes they used to come on the radio, hear them
speaking and how they did buy slave
and did them very bad. You know.
(07:15):
I heard my grandmother came here to work in
the grown planting. But I never
heard whether by a slave master
never heard.
She was married to my grandfather, but she had
to get to make ends meet.
Whether maybe he didn't like it or not. She had to
(07:36):
find work somewhere. When I. I don't know when
I Know myself. I went to Aruba
when I was, um. I went
back Aruba for school when I was 15. I heard
she passed away. When? In her 30s or her
40s. I think she reached 40.
She had a bad. Catch a bad cold. I think she used
(07:56):
to burn cold bed, you know,
cold in the ground. She catch a
cold? She had bronchitis and
she passed away.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (08:12):
What does it mean when a community forgets?
Not by choice, but by necessity.
As Mrs. Bennet reflects, the
past was never openly spoken of.
Slavery was not a story told in her
household, but a shadow, unmentioned
yet ever present. A
(08:33):
stepmother who mentioned Congo but gave no
history. A grandmother
remembering through fragments. It wasn't
that the past was lost. It was
sealed. This is what scholars
now describe as intergenerational silence, A
form of cultural amnesia born from pain
too heavy to name. In the wake
(08:55):
of forced migration, family
separation and. And dehumanization,
many Caribbean families adopted silence
as a form of protection.
Post enslavement syndrome. A, uh, framework used
to understand the legacy, helps us see how
trauma can be inherent not only through
(09:16):
blood, but through behavior, through gaps in
memory, through stories left
untold.
Sometimes this silence was survival.
Sometimes it became generational erasure,
where remembering was too dangerous
and forgetting became a kind of
(09:37):
care. But not all memory
vanishes. On, um,
synthesis. The past still breathes
through gardens, through landmarks, through the
efforts of those who will listen. A few
have listened. And now we turn to Mr.
Burkle, a respected elder and local
historian who has spent decades preserving
(09:58):
stacia, folklore, family legacies, and
untold truths. His father never spoke
of, uh, slavery. But what he didn't say,
Mr. Burkle has sought to understand.
Now we turn to his voice.
>> Speaker C (10:17):
To be honest with you, my father never
talk. His ancestors
came out of slavery. His
grandmother, you know, and he
never talk about slavery with us. He
never talk about it. My father, you know, after he
became a Seventh day Adventist, he
(10:37):
tried to avoid, you
know, like, creating
malice and feelings. So whatever
happened there, uh, he never
explained. He would say it
was a rough time, what people went
through and things like that. But to go
(10:58):
into depth, he never did
that. And we never hang around the bears
and stuff like that. So in places
where web the men and the women
in assembly and talk about it.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (11:16):
What'S remembered and what's withheld
tells us just as much as what was said.
Mr. Burkle's father, like many elders across
the Caribbean, avoided the raw details of
slavery, not because they weren't known,
but because they carried emotional weight.
Religious restraint and generational
(11:37):
pain.
That silence became part of the legacy
itself. Scholars call it
adaptive forgetting, a way to move
forward without reopening wounds too deep to
heal in public.
But while certain histories remained
unspoken, others were passed down through
(11:58):
ritual, role models and rhythm.
If slavery was a trauma never fully
named, then girlhood was often where
community stepped in with rules,
guidance, and quiet codes of
protection. In the absence
of formal sex education and emotional
(12:19):
language, young girls learned through
examples, warnings, and whispered
advices. It
wasn't always clear, but it was consistent.
And so we move from silence to
guidance, from a raised past to the
small rituals of becoming a woman.
(12:41):
Mrs. Bennet picks up the thread not through
history books, but through lived memory
in church basements and neighborhood
circles. She recalls a different kind of
education, one that came stitched in
cloth, spoken in caution, and held
in the hands of women who knew how to care
even when they couldn't explain why.
>> Speaker C (13:06):
In 1965, I had a cousin
used to work in Puerto Rican the post
office. Her name was Louise
Walpatin. And, um,
she was living around there. They got a rotunda
circle there by the guest house,
living there on the right side, not far from the
library. Well, they was in the Methodist
(13:28):
church, she and the lady that took care
of her, huh, Ms. El Ree Leslie.
They had a sculpt
like, uh, they call it girls brigade. And so,
um, every week we will go there by the Methodist
church. What they call it, Elma
was a wooden building. They sing
(13:49):
about God. And so.
And they gave a little handicraft
and little teaching about.
Invite the doctor to teach the
girls about the period. And so
I think, I don't know if it was so all the time, but the
lady, this Ms. Warm Putin, had invited the
(14:10):
education, the teacher,
how it go, uh, how it comes every
month. There is so much time in a
month will come.
Well, um, my stepmother
had. When I told I could get it when I was
13 years and I didn't know she had
everything prepared. We had the ready made, um,
(14:32):
napkin. Otherwise, I think before time the women
used to use like old cloth
but diaper. And so the cloth
diaper. But how I know because when I went
to Aruba, 19, um,
70, I saw my mother with these
things on the line. Then I said, oh, maybe,
um, using them for a period.
(14:54):
And some girls wouldn't talk because at that time everything
used to be secretly. The parents maybe tell them,
well, don't say so. So. So but when I got
there the first time, and my stepmother dressed
me up with this thing she had an elastic
belt. And then she turned and she said, don't play
with boys. Just like that.
(15:15):
I get bigger now. I said, she should have explained
me. Well, don't go in a bed with a boy or
something. Nothing like that. All she said, don't play
with boys. One time a guy
next door neighbor had a
nephew there. And one morning he
was, uh, three years older than me. And one
(15:36):
morning I was going down to school
and, um, he came with a bicycle
riding next to me. And he said.
He said, good morning. And I said, go from
here. My stepmother told me I must not play
with boys. Maybe the poor boy feel
so embarrassed.
(15:57):
My father and they were very shrek. I couldn't get
out because I.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (16:08):
As M the 1960s unfolded,
Synthastacia stood on the threshold of quiet
transformation. In homes like Mrs.
Bennet's, traditions were still whispered more than
spoken, where advice came dressed in
silence, and puberty was managed with
dignity, not detail. It was
a time when girls learned about womanhood from what was folded
(16:29):
in drawers, hung on clothesline, and passed down
in glances, not words.
Across the island, the wind of change were blowing
gently but persistently. The late 60s
and early 70s brought electricity to
more neighborhoods, slowly glimmering the
glow of lanterns of the community poles.
(16:50):
Regional developments picked up pace as well,
with other islands like Aruba and
Curacao drawing away more men for oil and
construction work and women, as
always, holding the center of daily life
back home.
These years also marked a period of
environmental vulnerability across the
(17:12):
Caribbean. While Sint Eustachius
was spared the brunt of major hurricanes
like Ines in 1966 and
Edith in 1971, their
near misses were a reminder of the island's
exposure of lives shaped by
weather as much as by memory.
(17:32):
And amid this shifting landscape, new
voices began to rise. Women who had come
of age in quiet households began to lead
in churches, clinics and schools,
planting the seeds for the generation to
follow. It is in this
setting that we meet the young Governor Francis.
(17:53):
The year is 1965. And in the streets of
Oranjestad, another story of girlhood is
beginning to unfold.
>>
I was born and raised on St. Eustatius in
1965. Actually,
I was born on Fort Oranye street that is
bordering on the south side of Oranistad. I always divide
Oranistad in the north part and. And the
south. I, uh, learned late in life that I was born
at home. And my sister told me
that, um, she awoke one morning and I
(18:27):
was screaming, making a whole lot of noise
and at seven years old, we relocated to
Paramiraweh. So
most of my recollection of growing up is in
Paramira Weh. I
remember being, uh, called a tomboy because
I played with the boys. And the
location that we know now as the sunny Cranston,
(18:49):
um, born, that was my playground.
There was a gentleman there by the name of Pepi, and
he had a large, um,
field of yams, tanyas and sweet
potatoes. And as children we would go into the
ground and we would, of course, take some of his sweet
potatoes and we would roast them on the
fire. The main part I remember is playing in the
(19:11):
streets with my friends on Paramira
Wech. One of the main roads that we played on
was the road that would joined, uh, my house and
Duggins supermarket. Of course, in
those days, Duggins supermarket was not there at the
time, but there was a Duggins store where the
hardware is now. And we played on that road.
We climbed trees, we picked fruits
(19:33):
from the neighbors, welcomed and unwelcomed.
But in the streets, the games that we played were mainly games that were
called jola. And also
what we did on the streets, we played marbles and
chestnuts. Most people talk about marbles. You will
create a ring, and the marbles would be in the
ring. They were small marbles, big marbles, but they were
(19:54):
also cashew nuts. You know, the
cashew trees grew a lot on the island back then.
The cashew nuts were part of the game,
and you would pitch and the nut had a lower value,
for instance, than the smaller marbles. And
then you had the giant sized marbles. So it
usually was a boys game, but there was
(20:15):
a leader playing, um with the
boys. Yes,
it was a wonderful time growing up in Stacia.
Yes.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (20:30):
What echoes in Governor France's memories is not
just the innocence of games, but the
texture of place in the rustling of
trees of Parmi revech, in the roasted
sweet potatoes, in the thump of cashew
nuts against the streets on Stacia.
And yet, some of the most cherished objects of the
(20:51):
island's past were never taught to her in school or passed
down with meaning. Like the blue
bead. What was once used
as currency, once worn as
adornment, once bound to the legacy of
trade, survival and enslavement.
By the time Governor Frances and her friends
(21:11):
were drawing circles in the road, that history
had grown quiet.
Because by then, the blue bead was another
marble. And in that silence, we
begin to understand how memory can
fade. Not from forgetfulness,
but from the way stories are swallowed by
time. Now we
(21:33):
Turn again to Mr. Burko, who remembers
when the blue bead was simply a
bead.
>> Speaker C (21:44):
I don't know much about this blue
beads in our day,
the blue bead.
>>
We used to pitch marbles with the blue
bead.
>> Speaker C (21:54):
No one explained nothing about the bead. The
blue bead had no value in those days. Where
I'm concerned for you
find them and it's just
a bead.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (22:12):
What is value? Sometimes
it's placed in the things. Beads,
bones, coins. But more often
it lives in the stories we wrap around them.
For Mr. Burkle's generation, the blue bead
was just another marble, scattered,
pitched, pocketed. Not sacred, not
(22:32):
symbolic. It was just glass.
But time has a way of polishing the past,
turning the ordinary into relic.
What was once tossed in play became a symbol
of survival, A, uh, trace of trade,
a whisper of the enslaved.
By the time Governor Francis was growing up, the
(22:53):
beat speeding was already fading. Its
worth was unspoken in classrooms. Its
past was unmentioned in homes. And she
remembers hearing about it, but not really holding the weight of
it.
And so we're reminded heritage is
fragile. Its value not in the object, but
in the care we give to it. And
(23:16):
if we don't pass the story, we risk losing the
meaning.
>>
I personally did not, uh, play marbles
with blue beads, but in my younger years, my brothers
were part of the young people who
would go to Crookes Castle. And they did indeed have
skillets of beads and the round ones. I
was told I never personally played with it, but I know of the story.
Indeed, we did not know the value of the blue
(23:45):
bead back then. Unfortunately.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (23:51):
In the quiet whisper held by the bluebead, there
are things we forget to see.
We forget that in the Caribbean, the most powerful
inheritance were not written in wills, but passed through
hands, through labor, through lineage,
through women. Governor Frances
reflects on this not as a theory, but as a
(24:11):
memory. Her childhood shaped not by kings
or captains, but by single mothers who held
families together while
fathers were pulled away to different islands
like Aruba and Curacao,
to the oil fields of Lago and Shell.
This was not a coincidence. It was part of
(24:33):
a larger pattern scholars now recognize as the
gender legacy of colonial labor systems.
Post emancipation, economies pulled men
outwards and upwards, while women remained
behind, anchoring homes, community and
care. What
emerged was a familiar pattern across the
Caribbean. Women not only surviving, but
(24:55):
leading. And in Stacia, there were
shopkeepers, land workers,
nurses and night shift caretakers.
They shared jobs so they all could eat.
They raised children while lapping Grass and
stacking provisions. They organized
on church steps and in parade
(25:16):
grounds and inside wooden holes that smelled
of starch and stories.
This too is a facet of post enslavement
syndrome, the structural afterlife of
a system that fractured families and
redistributed agency
station. Women, like those across the region,
(25:37):
responded not with passivity, but with. But with
presence. They filled in the absence
left by migration and memory. And in
doing so, they built something more than survival.
They built continuality.
Governor France's reflections reminds us
matriarchal strength is not a romantic
(25:58):
ideal. It's the historical reality,
one forged in hardship, adapted through
necessity, and carried forward in everyday
acts of leadership. From the
beat to the breadline, from the
market to the Carnival stage, this is where
Caribbean womanhood has always
lived.
>>
I grew up in an area where there were a lot of, um,
mothers who were single mothers. My
mother was a single mother because she was
married at one time, and then she got divorced and
she raised her six children on her own. But when I
look within my neighborhood, there was a similar story
of women, all women who were not married
(26:41):
but had children. And sometimes they had a partner.
But in our history, we also
know the situation that still exists today,
where there were men who had multiple
families. Um, what I do remember
is that in the 60s and 70s,
most of the men migrated to Aruba and
Curacao to work in the oil
(27:04):
industry, Lago and Shell. And so
when I try to reflect back on those days,
the women were actually in charge. They were left
behind, took care of the children, but they also had to
work. I interviewed Angelica
Ridan. She told me about,
um, working at the airport.
Back then, employment was so
(27:26):
low on the island and what the government did
back then, instead of giving one person a full
eight hours, they were divided up and everybody
could eat. So you would work four hours, and I would work four
hours. And when it came to the airport, she told
me the story of lapping grass. We now have
land mowers. Back then, they had to
(27:47):
lap the land, the grass with,
um, cutlass.
And so those were the women herself,
Hilda Lenz. She spoke about Valerie Timber.
They were women actually doing manual work just
to be able to support their families along
with what their spouses would send back from
(28:07):
Aruba or Curacao to support the family.
And also in those days, women played a prominent role in
agriculture. I remember then we had the Dutch
farmers that would come to St. Eustatius
and the road that we know now as Concordia, uh,
road on which the Carnival,
um, um village is Located.
(28:28):
If you would look at all those homes, they were generally the same
types of homes. Those were the homes that were built
by the farmers. That is why the
property over which Wayne and
all other aircrafts land here on St.
Eustatius, that area is called the farm because it
was the, uh, farm ground of the
farmers. There's still partially a structure
(28:49):
there. And that used to be the farmer's shop.
Yeah, that is where, um, they sold the
crops that they harvested.
But also on the cottage road, there was also a
building called, um, the farmer's stor.
Women always played as far back as I
know myself, I'm 59 years old now. In my
(29:10):
growing up years, women played a very
prominent role. They were the shopkeepers.
Rose Warner, Ms. Duggins,
uh, Ms. M. Emmy, Mrs. Uh, M.
Henricus, um, Ms. Dunkerque. We
are Esperanza stories now. Ms. Laura Rouse,
Ms. King. The women were always
in my time that I'm on this earth. Instead
(29:32):
were always in leading positions. And I
associated with the men, uh,
migrating to seek a better income for their
families elsewhere within the Netherlands. And.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (29:47):
By the 1960s and 70s, as
men left to chase wages across the sea, it
was the women of Sint Eustatia who stayed behind,
anchoring the island not only in memory, but in
motion. They kept the economy breathing
through shared labor. They raised children in clusters
of care. And they held the rhythms of daily lives
(30:07):
in the hands already worn from generation of
tending. But even as
women stepped forward into visible leadership, something
else was unfolding quietly across
thresholds and dinner tables. The island was
becoming a tapestry of arrivals.
For centuries, into Statius has been at a
(30:28):
crossroad, a place where people from many
nations passed through or stayed behind.
But from 1950 onwards, it began to
attract a different kind of visitor. Not just
traders or transient, but seekers.
Artists, archaeologists, environmentalists and
dreamers, many of them from the west,
drawn not by wealth, but by
(30:49):
wondering. In those years, the
community opened its door without suspicion.
Newcomers were folded into potlucks and
politics into carnival troops and committee
meetings. People didn't just live on the island,
they belonged to it. And it's
from within this spirit of integration and kinship we now
(31:09):
hear from Mrs. Tsutakao, a long term resident
and one of the founders of Syntastatia Archaeological and
Historical center, whose arrival in
1978 marked not just a chapter in her
life, but a new era for the island itself.
>> Ms. Sutekau (31:28):
When I arrived here in 78, women were already
involved in politics on the island.
They were holding positions of authority.
Back then, the major
political person
on the island was Vincent Astor Lopes, but
other people were involved in it. We
(31:48):
were, um, in
78 state terminals was being
built, and it was being
built after Claude
Wattie and other people had involvement of running
the property where station terminals is
located, to the group that formed statue
terminal, which was a private group that
(32:09):
consisted of the Chicago ridge and iron people
and other, um,
men by the name of Mr. M. Baralova and other
people. They contracted, uh, to get the
property here and start station terminals.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (32:28):
To understand the rise of Stacia terminals
in the late 1970s is to witness
history rhyming with itself.
Nearly two centuries after Sintostatius
earned the nickname the golden rock as the bustling note
of trade, its geography once
again called ships to shore,
(32:49):
not with sugar or with the enslaved, but
with oil, reviving the island's role as a
strategic port. This
industrial arrival didn't just transform its
economy. It stirred something deeper, a
quiet return of its people.
>> Ms. Sutekau (33:11):
But station terminals had not opened at that point
of time when, during that
process, many stations
who had lived, um, off Griffin for
most of their lives came back home to be involved in that
building. By the time station terminals
opened, many of the workers that had been at
Lago and Aruba started coming
(33:34):
back home to work at space terminal.
And the population began to grow.
I can't remember what the population was if I
knew what it was in 1978, because I
was only here for one day. By
1985, when I came here and bought the
property, the population was around 8 or
(33:54):
900. That had grown
by the time I moved here in
1989, 1990
to around 12,
1400. And it continued to grow
as statia terminals grew
in the 1978, when I came here,
(34:15):
there were only one or two grocery stores. You
could still go in and buy a piece of chicken that they
would cut off and give it to you. Power
was on only during the
days it was cut off at night.
But stacia was actually
in better shape than many islands around
(34:35):
it because there was
enough industry and commerce going on to
protect itself. We were still dependent
on boats bringing in supplies from St.
Martin. And also, I believe we
were even getting some of our supplies from St. Kitt. I'm not sure
about that, but I know that we were not training with
(34:55):
St. Kitt like we would later on when
station really got to be booming. During the
station terminal era.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (35:07):
This period of transformation was more than
economic. It carried the imprint of women
who had long anchored station life,
not just in kitchens or care work, but
in council Chambers and cultural
revival. Caribbean feminist
scholars described as a subaltern
agency where women shaped society not
(35:29):
in spite of patriarchy, but in the spaces
left behind by it. The same migration
that emptied the island of men empowered
women to lead without asking
permission. In the Wider region.
The 1980s were marked by cultural awakening and
political flux. From the independence of Antigua
and Barbuda, uh, in 1981, to
(35:51):
hurricanes like Hugo in
1989. Testing both resilience
and leadership, Stacia stood firm,
quietly, steadily held
together by the same hands that have always
carried it.
>> Ms. Sutekau (36:11):
When I actually moved here in
1985,
there were women in government, they were
commissioners and they were island council
members. And, um, their voices were
well received and well heard. There were
also women on station who did
phenomenal, such as
(36:33):
Inez Daw, who took the
government to task in Hilly's
for the fact that women were making
different salaries than the men. And she
brought this forward and she pushed that
agenda. There were women such as Miriam
Schmidt, involved in the historical foundation,
(36:53):
involved in the national park, who were
really pushing very hard for
stations that began to recognize their own heritage,
their own culture. She was one of the main
driving forces in seeing that
Emancipation Day was a national holiday.
And one of the things I regret most is that she
(37:13):
didn't live long enough to see that accompli.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (37:21):
The women on Stacia are not just footnotes
in civic records. They are the architects
of modern Stacia cultural consciousness.
From pushing pay equality to making
emancipation more than a memory, these women
embodied a vision of justice rooted in
remembrance. Their activism was
(37:42):
not reactive, it was reparative.
>> Ms. Sutekau (37:49):
There were also many other
women. Unfortunately, I didn't get to know
a lot of those. They died about the
time that I came here that were like
Christine Flanders, who were so
instrumental in the cultural heritage of Stacia and
in the auxiliary and the treatment of
(38:09):
our older people. Stacia's
women were who I remember
as being the leaders of the
community, and they're
activists. They were the activists
for the community.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (38:28):
Across the Caribbean, migration has
never been just about movement. It's
about meaning. When those raised by island
winds and community hands
leave to study, to work,
to dream, it's not just a simple
departure. It's an echo of something
(38:49):
way older. The fracture of colonial
legacy, the search for opportunity
where opportunity rarely roots.
Scholars call it brain drain, a global
phenomenon. But in small islands, it
feels personal. It is a teacher
who never returned. It's a nurse
(39:10):
who stayed abroad, the child
who left and became a stranger to their
own shoreline. And
yet the ties of cultural
identity, of memory,
language and ancestry do not
break so easily. For many,
the longing to serve home from afar becomes
(39:32):
a quiet promise, a belief that
even if they leave, they carry the island within
them. That one day return may not just be
a choice, but a restoration.
Because to leave is not always to abandon.
And to come back is not just to return.
It is to reroute, to reclaim,
(39:53):
to rebuild. Governor
Francis continues.
>>
But also throughout my growing up. I left the
island at 13 years old. Back then we
could not continue your education on the island, pass
elementary in the sixth grade, you had to,
um, travel abroad, whether to St. Martin, Curacao,
Aruba, and you would stay with family
members that you have never met or with
(40:23):
complete strangers so that you could pursue
secondary education. So,
um, returning to Stacia each
year during the summer, of course, as a
young, um, girl teenager,
you get involved in Carnaval. So that's how my
involvement in Carnival began, with Student Night. Now
it's known as Youth Night. Megadee would keep it and
(40:45):
now we see that Shahida Fleming is organizing it.
But back then it started with the students returning
home. We would be the models, we would be the singers, we
would do everything on stage and it would be a fabulous night. But
that is how my involvement started,
um, in um, Kusaki
in life of volunteering on stage. And it
(41:06):
became natural. And um,
it created the platform for me to
get to know my island better, get to use my
talents, my skills and my knowledge.
And um, when I completed my studies in the
Netherlands, there was no opportunity on Station back
then. You can imagine my
disappointments not being able to come home and work
(41:28):
here and serve. I had a
bachelor's in communications, was not
able to work here, and so I had no choice but
to live and work on St. Martin. I am
also very grateful for that opportunity because it prepared
me for everything that came afterwards
and coming back home in
92. So in short, no,
(41:51):
never had the ambition to be
Island Governor. But I do recall
some years ago I was approached
by one of the former senators about, uh,
the possibility of my name being nominated
for Island Governor. That was in the period of the former Netherlands
and Thilly. So it was quite different than it is now
(42:12):
and different people on the island saying to me,
you would make a very good candidate.
But it was not an ambition of my own. Um,
whether I would become the governor or not.
My contributions to Stacia would be the same
as they are right now.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (42:34):
In this episode, we've heard how Station women
carried history. Not only through archives and
activism, but through kitchens, council
chambers and carnival stages,
we followed stories passed in silence,
resilience formed in absence and a blue
bead, once forgotten, now reclaimed.
(42:55):
And as we leave the 20th century, standing at the
threshold of what comes next, we have to
what does it mean to remember?
To return? To root
oneself in a place shaped by loss but still carrying
the echoes of legacy?
Stacia, like many Caribbean islands, have
(43:17):
weathered centuries of leaving and returning,
silence and speaking, shadow
and light. And through it all, its
people, especially women, have not
only carried the past but carved the future from
it. Before we close, we leave you
with questions to carry what
(43:37):
part of your past lives in
silence? What stories
have you inherited, not in words,
but in gesture?
And what would it mean to return not just
to a place, but to the truth?
In our next and final episode, we
(43:58):
travel full circle into the 21st
century. From 2000 to
2025, we explore how
Stacia continues to evolve, reckon
and rise. And what does modern
identity look like on an island with such deep
roots? And how does the past still whisper
into the present? Until
(44:19):
then, keep listening.
The women were actually in charge. They were left
behind, took care of the children, but they also had to
work. The women were always in my
time that I'm on this earth in Stacia, uh, were always
in leading positions.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (00:18):
Welcome to Whispers of the Past. I'm your host,
Fitavit. And in this episode,
Tides of Transformation. We step into the
heartbeat of synthesias between
1950 and the 2000s.
This chapter isn't shaped by headlines, but by
hands. Hands that lit lanterns before
(00:38):
electricity, lapped grass before
lawnmowers, and passed down memory in the
quiet language of care.
From the flicker of the oil lamp to the rise of
oil terminals, we follow the steady
current of change. How
migration reshaped family life,
how women stepped into spaces left behind,
(01:00):
and how silence around slavery gave way
slowly, tenderly, to storytelling
and truth. We witnessed
the hush of intergenerational trauma
and the quiet courage of those who broke
it. We revisit
the blue bead, one's currency, then
(01:21):
toy, now symbol, and
ask what happens when a community
forgets not through apathy, but through
survival. Through these
voices, we navigate a Caribbean
crossroads, a place
where women led without title, where heritage
lived outside museum walls, and where
(01:43):
transformation whispers long before it was
named.
Electricity didn't arrive on stacia until
late 1950s. Before that,
lanterns hung on poles to light the streets,
and darkness was something you felt in your bones.
For many, like Mrs. Rivers, a
(02:04):
respected elder and lifelong nurse devoted to Karen's
service, this wasn't just an inconvenience.
It was a memory, etched not just in time,
but but in feeling.
>>
Growing up, we didn't have electricity. Not
at that time. I think it came
lately, after late in the 50s, going
to the 60s, I think. Then we
got electricity. Um, I'm not quite sure.
I think it's around those years, yeah.
>> Speaker C (02:38):
Cause in those years back, we
had lanterns we used to hang out on.
>>
Stretching on the poles to see
in the night. Because the show is so dark and I don't like
it. I'm getting used to it, but I.
>> Speaker C (02:51):
Still don't like it.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (02:59):
In the glow of lanterns, before electricity
reached every home station, women kept the
island moving, raising children by
memory, guiding communities by touch, and
lighting the way with more than fire.
These were the women who built daily life out of
scarcity. But behind that steady strength,
lived histories, rarely spoken out, uh, loud.
(03:22):
As we turn to Mrs. M. Bennet, also a respected
elder who dedicated her life to nursing, she
reflects, Even in the 1950s and
1960s, the legacy of slavery
remained largely unspoken in
families. Silence Wrapped around the past like
a second skin. This is what some
scholars now describe as intergenerational
(03:45):
silence, when trauma is passed
down not through story, but through the absence of
it. What Mrs. Bennet eventually
uncovered through songs, community
practice and her own curiosity
wasn't just a personal discovery. It was
part of what researchers call transgenerational
trauma in the quiet inheritance of
(04:07):
pain, strength and
survival, Mechanisms that shaped by
slavery and colonialism.
And yet the inheritance wasn't
just only a wound. It was also
resilience through care networks, the kind
that forms when formal institutions
falls short and people,
(04:30):
especially women, take it upon themselves
to teach, protect and
remember.
There's also a term for gender
memory work,
when women often unconsciously become
the keepers of communal past through
recipes, rituals, and the
(04:52):
refusal to forget. So when,
uh, Mrs. Bennet speaks of learning about slavery through a
song circle in her 30s, she's not just
recalling a moment. She's embodying the
truth that many station women lived. That
healing too can be inherent.
Not all trauma screams. Some of it
(05:13):
whispers from generation to
generation. And sometimes
the act of remembering is its own quiet
form of resistance.
>> Speaker C (05:28):
Maybe um, they talk about it.
Maybe there wasn't in that time
got to be. They never say whether the father,
uh, or mother was a slave. You know,
all I used to hear my stepmother saying about
um. She had family from the Congo,
something from Africa. But you
(05:48):
never say who rather than how they was treated.
And my father Bennett, he said from
here. But his father,
Karen Bennett understood his father.
His father father was a German
from Germany. And my
mother, mother was from St. Kitts.
(06:09):
My mother father. He had family
in Sabah. But I don't know
the title. He have have the same
title in um. Sink it to
Cranstone. I never talked
about
(06:30):
the time I come a part of this history
was I was
singing in a group with Shanna Mercera.
They used to keep a singing group. And
every July she will
perform. We had to put on like
African weather skirt or
so. And um, then I
(06:52):
realized about this slavery
business. I think I was um,
in my 30s somewhere
around there. I was working, nursing.
Sometimes they used to come on the radio, hear them
speaking and how they did buy slave
and did them very bad. You know.
(07:15):
I heard my grandmother came here to work in
the grown planting. But I never
heard whether by a slave master
never heard.
She was married to my grandfather, but she had
to get to make ends meet.
Whether maybe he didn't like it or not. She had to
(07:36):
find work somewhere. When I. I don't know when
I Know myself. I went to Aruba
when I was, um. I went
back Aruba for school when I was 15. I heard
she passed away. When? In her 30s or her
40s. I think she reached 40.
She had a bad. Catch a bad cold. I think she used
(07:56):
to burn cold bed, you know,
cold in the ground. She catch a
cold? She had bronchitis and
she passed away.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (08:12):
What does it mean when a community forgets?
Not by choice, but by necessity.
As Mrs. Bennet reflects, the
past was never openly spoken of.
Slavery was not a story told in her
household, but a shadow, unmentioned
yet ever present. A
(08:33):
stepmother who mentioned Congo but gave no
history. A grandmother
remembering through fragments. It wasn't
that the past was lost. It was
sealed. This is what scholars
now describe as intergenerational silence, A
form of cultural amnesia born from pain
too heavy to name. In the wake
(08:55):
of forced migration, family
separation and. And dehumanization,
many Caribbean families adopted silence
as a form of protection.
Post enslavement syndrome. A, uh, framework used
to understand the legacy, helps us see how
trauma can be inherent not only through
(09:16):
blood, but through behavior, through gaps in
memory, through stories left
untold.
Sometimes this silence was survival.
Sometimes it became generational erasure,
where remembering was too dangerous
and forgetting became a kind of
(09:37):
care. But not all memory
vanishes. On, um,
synthesis. The past still breathes
through gardens, through landmarks, through the
efforts of those who will listen. A few
have listened. And now we turn to Mr.
Burkle, a respected elder and local
historian who has spent decades preserving
(09:58):
stacia, folklore, family legacies, and
untold truths. His father never spoke
of, uh, slavery. But what he didn't say,
Mr. Burkle has sought to understand.
Now we turn to his voice.
>> Speaker C (10:17):
To be honest with you, my father never
talk. His ancestors
came out of slavery. His
grandmother, you know, and he
never talk about slavery with us. He
never talk about it. My father, you know, after he
became a Seventh day Adventist, he
(10:37):
tried to avoid, you
know, like, creating
malice and feelings. So whatever
happened there, uh, he never
explained. He would say it
was a rough time, what people went
through and things like that. But to go
(10:58):
into depth, he never did
that. And we never hang around the bears
and stuff like that. So in places
where web the men and the women
in assembly and talk about it.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (11:16):
What'S remembered and what's withheld
tells us just as much as what was said.
Mr. Burkle's father, like many elders across
the Caribbean, avoided the raw details of
slavery, not because they weren't known,
but because they carried emotional weight.
Religious restraint and generational
(11:37):
pain.
That silence became part of the legacy
itself. Scholars call it
adaptive forgetting, a way to move
forward without reopening wounds too deep to
heal in public.
But while certain histories remained
unspoken, others were passed down through
(11:58):
ritual, role models and rhythm.
If slavery was a trauma never fully
named, then girlhood was often where
community stepped in with rules,
guidance, and quiet codes of
protection. In the absence
of formal sex education and emotional
(12:19):
language, young girls learned through
examples, warnings, and whispered
advices. It
wasn't always clear, but it was consistent.
And so we move from silence to
guidance, from a raised past to the
small rituals of becoming a woman.
(12:41):
Mrs. Bennet picks up the thread not through
history books, but through lived memory
in church basements and neighborhood
circles. She recalls a different kind of
education, one that came stitched in
cloth, spoken in caution, and held
in the hands of women who knew how to care
even when they couldn't explain why.
>> Speaker C (13:06):
In 1965, I had a cousin
used to work in Puerto Rican the post
office. Her name was Louise
Walpatin. And, um,
she was living around there. They got a rotunda
circle there by the guest house,
living there on the right side, not far from the
library. Well, they was in the Methodist
(13:28):
church, she and the lady that took care
of her, huh, Ms. El Ree Leslie.
They had a sculpt
like, uh, they call it girls brigade. And so,
um, every week we will go there by the Methodist
church. What they call it, Elma
was a wooden building. They sing
(13:49):
about God. And so.
And they gave a little handicraft
and little teaching about.
Invite the doctor to teach the
girls about the period. And so
I think, I don't know if it was so all the time, but the
lady, this Ms. Warm Putin, had invited the
(14:10):
education, the teacher,
how it go, uh, how it comes every
month. There is so much time in a
month will come.
Well, um, my stepmother
had. When I told I could get it when I was
13 years and I didn't know she had
everything prepared. We had the ready made, um,
(14:32):
napkin. Otherwise, I think before time the women
used to use like old cloth
but diaper. And so the cloth
diaper. But how I know because when I went
to Aruba, 19, um,
70, I saw my mother with these
things on the line. Then I said, oh, maybe,
um, using them for a period.
(14:54):
And some girls wouldn't talk because at that time everything
used to be secretly. The parents maybe tell them,
well, don't say so. So. So but when I got
there the first time, and my stepmother dressed
me up with this thing she had an elastic
belt. And then she turned and she said, don't play
with boys. Just like that.
(15:15):
I get bigger now. I said, she should have explained
me. Well, don't go in a bed with a boy or
something. Nothing like that. All she said, don't play
with boys. One time a guy
next door neighbor had a
nephew there. And one morning he
was, uh, three years older than me. And one
(15:36):
morning I was going down to school
and, um, he came with a bicycle
riding next to me. And he said.
He said, good morning. And I said, go from
here. My stepmother told me I must not play
with boys. Maybe the poor boy feel
so embarrassed.
(15:57):
My father and they were very shrek. I couldn't get
out because I.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (16:08):
As M the 1960s unfolded,
Synthastacia stood on the threshold of quiet
transformation. In homes like Mrs.
Bennet's, traditions were still whispered more than
spoken, where advice came dressed in
silence, and puberty was managed with
dignity, not detail. It was
a time when girls learned about womanhood from what was folded
(16:29):
in drawers, hung on clothesline, and passed down
in glances, not words.
Across the island, the wind of change were blowing
gently but persistently. The late 60s
and early 70s brought electricity to
more neighborhoods, slowly glimmering the
glow of lanterns of the community poles.
(16:50):
Regional developments picked up pace as well,
with other islands like Aruba and
Curacao drawing away more men for oil and
construction work and women, as
always, holding the center of daily life
back home.
These years also marked a period of
environmental vulnerability across the
(17:12):
Caribbean. While Sint Eustachius
was spared the brunt of major hurricanes
like Ines in 1966 and
Edith in 1971, their
near misses were a reminder of the island's
exposure of lives shaped by
weather as much as by memory.
(17:32):
And amid this shifting landscape, new
voices began to rise. Women who had come
of age in quiet households began to lead
in churches, clinics and schools,
planting the seeds for the generation to
follow. It is in this
setting that we meet the young Governor Francis.
(17:53):
The year is 1965. And in the streets of
Oranjestad, another story of girlhood is
beginning to unfold.
>>
I was born and raised on St. Eustatius in
1965. Actually,
I was born on Fort Oranye street that is
bordering on the south side of Oranistad. I always divide
Oranistad in the north part and. And the
south. I, uh, learned late in life that I was born
at home. And my sister told me
that, um, she awoke one morning and I
(18:27):
was screaming, making a whole lot of noise
and at seven years old, we relocated to
Paramiraweh. So
most of my recollection of growing up is in
Paramira Weh. I
remember being, uh, called a tomboy because
I played with the boys. And the
location that we know now as the sunny Cranston,
(18:49):
um, born, that was my playground.
There was a gentleman there by the name of Pepi, and
he had a large, um,
field of yams, tanyas and sweet
potatoes. And as children we would go into the
ground and we would, of course, take some of his sweet
potatoes and we would roast them on the
fire. The main part I remember is playing in the
(19:11):
streets with my friends on Paramira
Wech. One of the main roads that we played on
was the road that would joined, uh, my house and
Duggins supermarket. Of course, in
those days, Duggins supermarket was not there at the
time, but there was a Duggins store where the
hardware is now. And we played on that road.
We climbed trees, we picked fruits
(19:33):
from the neighbors, welcomed and unwelcomed.
But in the streets, the games that we played were mainly games that were
called jola. And also
what we did on the streets, we played marbles and
chestnuts. Most people talk about marbles. You will
create a ring, and the marbles would be in the
ring. They were small marbles, big marbles, but they were
(19:54):
also cashew nuts. You know, the
cashew trees grew a lot on the island back then.
The cashew nuts were part of the game,
and you would pitch and the nut had a lower value,
for instance, than the smaller marbles. And
then you had the giant sized marbles. So it
usually was a boys game, but there was
(20:15):
a leader playing, um with the
boys. Yes,
it was a wonderful time growing up in Stacia.
Yes.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (20:30):
What echoes in Governor France's memories is not
just the innocence of games, but the
texture of place in the rustling of
trees of Parmi revech, in the roasted
sweet potatoes, in the thump of cashew
nuts against the streets on Stacia.
And yet, some of the most cherished objects of the
(20:51):
island's past were never taught to her in school or passed
down with meaning. Like the blue
bead. What was once used
as currency, once worn as
adornment, once bound to the legacy of
trade, survival and enslavement.
By the time Governor Frances and her friends
(21:11):
were drawing circles in the road, that history
had grown quiet.
Because by then, the blue bead was another
marble. And in that silence, we
begin to understand how memory can
fade. Not from forgetfulness,
but from the way stories are swallowed by
time. Now we
(21:33):
Turn again to Mr. Burko, who remembers
when the blue bead was simply a
bead.
>> Speaker C (21:44):
I don't know much about this blue
beads in our day,
the blue bead.
>>
We used to pitch marbles with the blue
bead.
>> Speaker C (21:54):
No one explained nothing about the bead. The
blue bead had no value in those days. Where
I'm concerned for you
find them and it's just
a bead.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (22:12):
What is value? Sometimes
it's placed in the things. Beads,
bones, coins. But more often
it lives in the stories we wrap around them.
For Mr. Burkle's generation, the blue bead
was just another marble, scattered,
pitched, pocketed. Not sacred, not
(22:32):
symbolic. It was just glass.
But time has a way of polishing the past,
turning the ordinary into relic.
What was once tossed in play became a symbol
of survival, A, uh, trace of trade,
a whisper of the enslaved.
By the time Governor Francis was growing up, the
(22:53):
beat speeding was already fading. Its
worth was unspoken in classrooms. Its
past was unmentioned in homes. And she
remembers hearing about it, but not really holding the weight of
it.
And so we're reminded heritage is
fragile. Its value not in the object, but
in the care we give to it. And
(23:16):
if we don't pass the story, we risk losing the
meaning.
>>
I personally did not, uh, play marbles
with blue beads, but in my younger years, my brothers
were part of the young people who
would go to Crookes Castle. And they did indeed have
skillets of beads and the round ones. I
was told I never personally played with it, but I know of the story.
Indeed, we did not know the value of the blue
(23:45):
bead back then. Unfortunately.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (23:51):
In the quiet whisper held by the bluebead, there
are things we forget to see.
We forget that in the Caribbean, the most powerful
inheritance were not written in wills, but passed through
hands, through labor, through lineage,
through women. Governor Frances
reflects on this not as a theory, but as a
(24:11):
memory. Her childhood shaped not by kings
or captains, but by single mothers who held
families together while
fathers were pulled away to different islands
like Aruba and Curacao,
to the oil fields of Lago and Shell.
This was not a coincidence. It was part of
(24:33):
a larger pattern scholars now recognize as the
gender legacy of colonial labor systems.
Post emancipation, economies pulled men
outwards and upwards, while women remained
behind, anchoring homes, community and
care. What
emerged was a familiar pattern across the
Caribbean. Women not only surviving, but
(24:55):
leading. And in Stacia, there were
shopkeepers, land workers,
nurses and night shift caretakers.
They shared jobs so they all could eat.
They raised children while lapping Grass and
stacking provisions. They organized
on church steps and in parade
(25:16):
grounds and inside wooden holes that smelled
of starch and stories.
This too is a facet of post enslavement
syndrome, the structural afterlife of
a system that fractured families and
redistributed agency
station. Women, like those across the region,
(25:37):
responded not with passivity, but with. But with
presence. They filled in the absence
left by migration and memory. And in
doing so, they built something more than survival.
They built continuality.
Governor France's reflections reminds us
matriarchal strength is not a romantic
(25:58):
ideal. It's the historical reality,
one forged in hardship, adapted through
necessity, and carried forward in everyday
acts of leadership. From the
beat to the breadline, from the
market to the Carnival stage, this is where
Caribbean womanhood has always
lived.
>>
I grew up in an area where there were a lot of, um,
mothers who were single mothers. My
mother was a single mother because she was
married at one time, and then she got divorced and
she raised her six children on her own. But when I
look within my neighborhood, there was a similar story
of women, all women who were not married
(26:41):
but had children. And sometimes they had a partner.
But in our history, we also
know the situation that still exists today,
where there were men who had multiple
families. Um, what I do remember
is that in the 60s and 70s,
most of the men migrated to Aruba and
Curacao to work in the oil
(27:04):
industry, Lago and Shell. And so
when I try to reflect back on those days,
the women were actually in charge. They were left
behind, took care of the children, but they also had to
work. I interviewed Angelica
Ridan. She told me about,
um, working at the airport.
Back then, employment was so
(27:26):
low on the island and what the government did
back then, instead of giving one person a full
eight hours, they were divided up and everybody
could eat. So you would work four hours, and I would work four
hours. And when it came to the airport, she told
me the story of lapping grass. We now have
land mowers. Back then, they had to
(27:47):
lap the land, the grass with,
um, cutlass.
And so those were the women herself,
Hilda Lenz. She spoke about Valerie Timber.
They were women actually doing manual work just
to be able to support their families along
with what their spouses would send back from
(28:07):
Aruba or Curacao to support the family.
And also in those days, women played a prominent role in
agriculture. I remember then we had the Dutch
farmers that would come to St. Eustatius
and the road that we know now as Concordia, uh,
road on which the Carnival,
um, um village is Located.
(28:28):
If you would look at all those homes, they were generally the same
types of homes. Those were the homes that were built
by the farmers. That is why the
property over which Wayne and
all other aircrafts land here on St.
Eustatius, that area is called the farm because it
was the, uh, farm ground of the
farmers. There's still partially a structure
(28:49):
there. And that used to be the farmer's shop.
Yeah, that is where, um, they sold the
crops that they harvested.
But also on the cottage road, there was also a
building called, um, the farmer's stor.
Women always played as far back as I
know myself, I'm 59 years old now. In my
(29:10):
growing up years, women played a very
prominent role. They were the shopkeepers.
Rose Warner, Ms. Duggins,
uh, Ms. M. Emmy, Mrs. Uh, M.
Henricus, um, Ms. Dunkerque. We
are Esperanza stories now. Ms. Laura Rouse,
Ms. King. The women were always
in my time that I'm on this earth. Instead
(29:32):
were always in leading positions. And I
associated with the men, uh,
migrating to seek a better income for their
families elsewhere within the Netherlands. And.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (29:47):
By the 1960s and 70s, as
men left to chase wages across the sea, it
was the women of Sint Eustatia who stayed behind,
anchoring the island not only in memory, but in
motion. They kept the economy breathing
through shared labor. They raised children in clusters
of care. And they held the rhythms of daily lives
(30:07):
in the hands already worn from generation of
tending. But even as
women stepped forward into visible leadership, something
else was unfolding quietly across
thresholds and dinner tables. The island was
becoming a tapestry of arrivals.
For centuries, into Statius has been at a
(30:28):
crossroad, a place where people from many
nations passed through or stayed behind.
But from 1950 onwards, it began to
attract a different kind of visitor. Not just
traders or transient, but seekers.
Artists, archaeologists, environmentalists and
dreamers, many of them from the west,
drawn not by wealth, but by
(30:49):
wondering. In those years, the
community opened its door without suspicion.
Newcomers were folded into potlucks and
politics into carnival troops and committee
meetings. People didn't just live on the island,
they belonged to it. And it's
from within this spirit of integration and kinship we now
(31:09):
hear from Mrs. Tsutakao, a long term resident
and one of the founders of Syntastatia Archaeological and
Historical center, whose arrival in
1978 marked not just a chapter in her
life, but a new era for the island itself.
>> Ms. Sutekau (31:28):
When I arrived here in 78, women were already
involved in politics on the island.
They were holding positions of authority.
Back then, the major
political person
on the island was Vincent Astor Lopes, but
other people were involved in it. We
(31:48):
were, um, in
78 state terminals was being
built, and it was being
built after Claude
Wattie and other people had involvement of running
the property where station terminals is
located, to the group that formed statue
terminal, which was a private group that
(32:09):
consisted of the Chicago ridge and iron people
and other, um,
men by the name of Mr. M. Baralova and other
people. They contracted, uh, to get the
property here and start station terminals.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (32:28):
To understand the rise of Stacia terminals
in the late 1970s is to witness
history rhyming with itself.
Nearly two centuries after Sintostatius
earned the nickname the golden rock as the bustling note
of trade, its geography once
again called ships to shore,
(32:49):
not with sugar or with the enslaved, but
with oil, reviving the island's role as a
strategic port. This
industrial arrival didn't just transform its
economy. It stirred something deeper, a
quiet return of its people.
>> Ms. Sutekau (33:11):
But station terminals had not opened at that point
of time when, during that
process, many stations
who had lived, um, off Griffin for
most of their lives came back home to be involved in that
building. By the time station terminals
opened, many of the workers that had been at
Lago and Aruba started coming
(33:34):
back home to work at space terminal.
And the population began to grow.
I can't remember what the population was if I
knew what it was in 1978, because I
was only here for one day. By
1985, when I came here and bought the
property, the population was around 8 or
(33:54):
900. That had grown
by the time I moved here in
1989, 1990
to around 12,
1400. And it continued to grow
as statia terminals grew
in the 1978, when I came here,
(34:15):
there were only one or two grocery stores. You
could still go in and buy a piece of chicken that they
would cut off and give it to you. Power
was on only during the
days it was cut off at night.
But stacia was actually
in better shape than many islands around
(34:35):
it because there was
enough industry and commerce going on to
protect itself. We were still dependent
on boats bringing in supplies from St.
Martin. And also, I believe we
were even getting some of our supplies from St. Kitt. I'm not sure
about that, but I know that we were not training with
(34:55):
St. Kitt like we would later on when
station really got to be booming. During the
station terminal era.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (35:07):
This period of transformation was more than
economic. It carried the imprint of women
who had long anchored station life,
not just in kitchens or care work, but
in council Chambers and cultural
revival. Caribbean feminist
scholars described as a subaltern
agency where women shaped society not
(35:29):
in spite of patriarchy, but in the spaces
left behind by it. The same migration
that emptied the island of men empowered
women to lead without asking
permission. In the Wider region.
The 1980s were marked by cultural awakening and
political flux. From the independence of Antigua
and Barbuda, uh, in 1981, to
(35:51):
hurricanes like Hugo in
1989. Testing both resilience
and leadership, Stacia stood firm,
quietly, steadily held
together by the same hands that have always
carried it.
>> Ms. Sutekau (36:11):
When I actually moved here in
1985,
there were women in government, they were
commissioners and they were island council
members. And, um, their voices were
well received and well heard. There were
also women on station who did
phenomenal, such as
(36:33):
Inez Daw, who took the
government to task in Hilly's
for the fact that women were making
different salaries than the men. And she
brought this forward and she pushed that
agenda. There were women such as Miriam
Schmidt, involved in the historical foundation,
(36:53):
involved in the national park, who were
really pushing very hard for
stations that began to recognize their own heritage,
their own culture. She was one of the main
driving forces in seeing that
Emancipation Day was a national holiday.
And one of the things I regret most is that she
(37:13):
didn't live long enough to see that accompli.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (37:21):
The women on Stacia are not just footnotes
in civic records. They are the architects
of modern Stacia cultural consciousness.
From pushing pay equality to making
emancipation more than a memory, these women
embodied a vision of justice rooted in
remembrance. Their activism was
(37:42):
not reactive, it was reparative.
>> Ms. Sutekau (37:49):
There were also many other
women. Unfortunately, I didn't get to know
a lot of those. They died about the
time that I came here that were like
Christine Flanders, who were so
instrumental in the cultural heritage of Stacia and
in the auxiliary and the treatment of
(38:09):
our older people. Stacia's
women were who I remember
as being the leaders of the
community, and they're
activists. They were the activists
for the community.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (38:28):
Across the Caribbean, migration has
never been just about movement. It's
about meaning. When those raised by island
winds and community hands
leave to study, to work,
to dream, it's not just a simple
departure. It's an echo of something
(38:49):
way older. The fracture of colonial
legacy, the search for opportunity
where opportunity rarely roots.
Scholars call it brain drain, a global
phenomenon. But in small islands, it
feels personal. It is a teacher
who never returned. It's a nurse
(39:10):
who stayed abroad, the child
who left and became a stranger to their
own shoreline. And
yet the ties of cultural
identity, of memory,
language and ancestry do not
break so easily. For many,
the longing to serve home from afar becomes
(39:32):
a quiet promise, a belief that
even if they leave, they carry the island within
them. That one day return may not just be
a choice, but a restoration.
Because to leave is not always to abandon.
And to come back is not just to return.
It is to reroute, to reclaim,
(39:53):
to rebuild. Governor
Francis continues.
>>
But also throughout my growing up. I left the
island at 13 years old. Back then we
could not continue your education on the island, pass
elementary in the sixth grade, you had to,
um, travel abroad, whether to St. Martin, Curacao,
Aruba, and you would stay with family
members that you have never met or with
(40:23):
complete strangers so that you could pursue
secondary education. So,
um, returning to Stacia each
year during the summer, of course, as a
young, um, girl teenager,
you get involved in Carnaval. So that's how my
involvement in Carnival began, with Student Night. Now
it's known as Youth Night. Megadee would keep it and
(40:45):
now we see that Shahida Fleming is organizing it.
But back then it started with the students returning
home. We would be the models, we would be the singers, we
would do everything on stage and it would be a fabulous night. But
that is how my involvement started,
um, in um, Kusaki
in life of volunteering on stage. And it
(41:06):
became natural. And um,
it created the platform for me to
get to know my island better, get to use my
talents, my skills and my knowledge.
And um, when I completed my studies in the
Netherlands, there was no opportunity on Station back
then. You can imagine my
disappointments not being able to come home and work
(41:28):
here and serve. I had a
bachelor's in communications, was not
able to work here, and so I had no choice but
to live and work on St. Martin. I am
also very grateful for that opportunity because it prepared
me for everything that came afterwards
and coming back home in
92. So in short, no,
(41:51):
never had the ambition to be
Island Governor. But I do recall
some years ago I was approached
by one of the former senators about, uh,
the possibility of my name being nominated
for Island Governor. That was in the period of the former Netherlands
and Thilly. So it was quite different than it is now
(42:12):
and different people on the island saying to me,
you would make a very good candidate.
But it was not an ambition of my own. Um,
whether I would become the governor or not.
My contributions to Stacia would be the same
as they are right now.
>> Unidentified (Podcast Host) (42:34):
In this episode, we've heard how Station women
carried history. Not only through archives and
activism, but through kitchens, council
chambers and carnival stages,
we followed stories passed in silence,
resilience formed in absence and a blue
bead, once forgotten, now reclaimed.
(42:55):
And as we leave the 20th century, standing at the
threshold of what comes next, we have to
what does it mean to remember?
To return? To root
oneself in a place shaped by loss but still carrying
the echoes of legacy?
Stacia, like many Caribbean islands, have
(43:17):
weathered centuries of leaving and returning,
silence and speaking, shadow
and light. And through it all, its
people, especially women, have not
only carried the past but carved the future from
it. Before we close, we leave you
with questions to carry what
(43:37):
part of your past lives in
silence? What stories
have you inherited, not in words,
but in gesture?
And what would it mean to return not just
to a place, but to the truth?
In our next and final episode, we
(43:58):
travel full circle into the 21st
century. From 2000 to
2025, we explore how
Stacia continues to evolve, reckon
and rise. And what does modern
identity look like on an island with such deep
roots? And how does the past still whisper
into the present? Until
(44:19):
then, keep listening.
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