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The indigenous people of Costa Rica are the descendants of the Mayans and the Indians from the Amazonian forests. In the reserves, Indians live as they have for centuries, in isolated little groups, hunting and working on their land, making handicrafts using gold, clay or jade. In 2000, National polls identified for the first time the count of 63.876 indigenous people living in Costa Rica, 1,7% of the country's population.

Due to their isolation in the Costa Rican jungle, quite hard to penetrate, most indigenous have kept their authenticity. In the region of Talamanca, on the caraebean coast next to the Panama border, some Bribri and Cabecars tribes still live far away from civilization, in the deep forest.

The indigenous Bribri tribes generally occupy the lower territories of the cordillera of Talamanca, on the Caribbean coast, whereas the Cabecars tribes prefer the isolated places of the mountains. Many researchers have considered the Bribri and the Cabecars to belong to the same ethnic group. The Cabecars, however, isolated in the jungle, are less influenced by progress than their Bribri allies, and maintain a complicated clan system.

These two tribes have the particularity to be among the rare indigenous in Central America to have kept intact their religious myths, transmitted from one generation to another through the elders' tales. The cultural and social changes which turned Costa Rica into the richest country of Central America didn't influence at all their belief in their supreme God and creator of the universe, Sibo.

Their Universe is located in Sibo's house. The roof is pierced by millions of little holes, through which the light goes and forms constellations. The traditional houses of the indigenous people of Talamanca are built on the image of Sibo's house, round and high. When dawn comes, the sun falls off the earth to turn around and come behind the roof, giving light to the stars. This mystical vision, elaborated long before Copernicus, is one of the rare evocating a system of planetary rotation.

 

Despite the recent steps forward of the integration of the indigenous communities in the country, the Indians of Costa Rica still have a long road ahead before being recognized and respected in their land, inhabited by their ancestors long before the arrival of the Spaniards. Timoteo Jackson Tita, during a representation of the theatre group "Metamorphosis," called for a unification of the Indian tribes in their fight: "It is time for us, indigenous, to put our hands on our hearts and show the society that we speak one language, the one which says: stop hurting the indigenous people. Stop hurting our forest and our land."