On “Filipinos” and the Question of the “Indigenous”
(A response to the “Op-Ed: How Indigenous Filipinos are Erased from FAHM and Why You Need to Do Better” by Margaret Palaghicon Von Rotz published on One Down)
I write as one of those who’ve attempted to engage IKAT on the call outs they’ve been issuing on social media but have been blocked each time — at least twice, both times by Joseph Ruanto-Ramirez (Jojo). Others in our community have likewise been blocked, and invitations to dialogue face-to-face (at least on zoom) have not been responded to or welcomed.
So, I find it auspicious that with Margaret Palaghicon Von Rotz’s op-ed piece published on One Down, we could finally hold what I hope is a more reasoned public exchange without threat of erasure, blocking, or cancellation (for a while, when comments started coming, I had the impulse to copy each one and paste, afraid they’d be erased one more time as had happened in previous instances, until I realized this was a different platform that would probably not do or allow such to happen).
So, thank you to One Down for providing this platform and opportunity.
First off, let me say that I’m heartened to see so many IKAT folks embracing proudly and so passionately their Indigenous roots. When I was writing my dissertation (on the indigenization movements in the Philippine and in the US academy, now a book publication [Mendoza, 2002/2006) in the late 1990s, the discourse on “indigenization” among Filipino Americans then largely took the form of the nationalist framework of Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP) or Filipino “Liberation” Psychology (Sikolohiyang Mapagpalaya) as pioneered and introduced by the late Dr. Virgilio Enriquez during his Visiting Faculty stint at UC Berkeley.
Don’t get me wrong — there was a lot of fine progressive, feminist, militant/activist, FilAm scholarship during this time, but much of it tended to be in a deconstructive vein, i.e. against empire, largely exposing the cultural logics of domination in US-Philippine historic relations, critiquing the politics of representation of Filipinos (e.g., in the World Trade Fairs) and the feminization of labor and the positioning of Filipino women in the global economy, among others (cf. Oscar Campomanes, Vince Rafael, E. San Juan, Neferti Tadiar, Dylan Rodriguez, Nerissa Balce, Benito Vergara, Jodi Blanco, etc.). But with the ascendancy of deconstructive theorizing in the academy during this time (i.e., postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism), anything purporting to construct or constitute “Filipino” “identity” through a set of defining characteristics tended to be construed as “trafficking in naïve essentialist/nativist politics,” not to mention harkening back to an “illusory mythic past” — a norm Sikolohiyang Pilipino shamelessly violated in every way — to salutary effects.
The rise of Sikolohiyang Pilipino in the US brought tremendous empowerment to the FilAm community, providing practitioners, particularly those in the helping professions (such as mental health and social work) for the first time with a values-affirming framework that served as a counter to the “cultural deficit” model that for so long had defined “dysfunctionality” or mental or social “problems” within the Filipino community as inherent in the culture itself. Instead, within the framework of SP, colonial oppression, epistemic violence, internalized racism, and loss of traditional support systems began to be understood as key factors in a lot of the presenting problems within the community.
During this time, the term “Indigenous” tended to be equated unproblematically with “Filipino” in the singular — nationalism deemed a fitting move away from the formerly assimilationist model of coping and survival in the US that formerly earned Filipinos the moniker “the invisible minority.” Leny Mendoza-Strobel would describe the transformative impact of SP in the FilAm community thus:
Sikolohiyang Pilipino not only historicized and problematized the values that have come to be identified as Filipino: (hiya [shame], utang na loob [inordinate sense of indebtedness], amor propio [pride], pakikisama [smooth interpersonal relationship]) through previously Western-imposed psychological models; [it] also offered an alternative conceptual framework that came to be known as “Filipino core values” (kapwa [shared being], pakikiramdam [empathy], paninindigan [conviction], dangal [honor]).
Throngs of Filipino American college students would call this their ‘born again’ Filipino experience… (in Mendoza, 2002/2006, p. 42)
I would now personally understand the equating of “indigeneity” with the singular nationalist “Filipino” term as a function of two things: 1) the homogenizing effect of the requisite discursive context and 2) the identified SP “national” values as actually remnants of much older cultural formations that are the true wellspring of those values.
In regard to the first factor: for as long as the historic relations between the US and the Philippines served as the primary context of engagement, the framing discursive context tended to unwittingly homogenize FilAms into a singular group, regardless of their diverse ethnic backgrounds. But this is in much the same way that the terms “Native” and “Black” have come to produce quite culturally-diverse populations as one, not because they are essentially one people, but because they share common histories of genocide, dispossession, enslavement, etc. So vis-à-vis the US empire, all of us coming from lineages from what have come to be called the “Philippine” islands are positioned by the anti/colonial discourse as one subject people, not because we are one in essence but because we happen to share a common experience of historic colonization, racialization, and continuing marginalization within the US society.
In other words, “identity” is always constructed in difference; it is relational, not fixed or essential and must be read as such. Scholars in the Philippines have a similar theorization of the influence of the discursive context on the shape and content of the ensuing discourse: e.g., in the delineation of the speaking contexts of the exclusive “we-speaking-with an outside interlocutor (or kami in Tagalog”) vs. the inclusive “we-speaking among ourselves” (or tayo). Face to face with a common enemy (i.e., the US empire) we tend to constitute ourselves as one, “Filipinos” or “FilAms.” But close up the circuit of communication to only involve “us” Filipinos, and we inevitably come face-to-face with our internal diversity and ethnolinguistic differences, histories, political positionings, etc. In this regard, “strategic essentialism” has been used as a term to designate the deliberate deployment of homogenizing discourse for political purposes (in contrast to “naïve essentialism” that presumes a given, ontological unity).
I would say that the first-time assertion and valorization of formerly minoritized identities always begins with the phenomenon of that one “great refusal,” that decisive overturning of the imperial/colonial calculus — from “primitive, backward, inferior” to “Proud Pinoy” or, for that matter, “Proud Igorot” (or in the case of the African experience, “Black is beautiful”). This is what Sikolohiyang Pilipino, in effect, made possible in its irruption into the heavily deconstructive-dominated discourse in the US academy; it filled a gaping lacuna crying out for some kind a positive representation of Filipino subjectivity within the US mainstream discourse. That first moment of overturning as facilitated by the nationalist discourse of SP served as a gateway toward psychic liberation in the colonial aftermath of having had a people’s brain “empt[ied] of all form and content” and its past “distort[ed], disfigure[d] and destroy[ed]” (Fanon, 1963, p. 210).
But also, I would understand the identified constitutive markers of Filipino sensibility (e.g., kapwa, loob, dangal, pakikiramdam, etc.) as actually remnants of much older cultural formations that are shared, not just by Indigenous communities in the Philippines, but by all land-based, land-taught peoples across the planet, albeit codified in a dizzying array of specific and unique cultural forms and ecologically-inflected cosmologies and practices.
Speaking of the context we’re all embedded in today, I suggest that Modernity as well, with its values of individualism, rationalism, belief in private ownership and aggressive pursuit of material wealth, is its own cultural formation — taught, not by land or natural ecology, but by a heavily technologized, human-built environment made possible by a defining ethic of extractivism, human supremacy, and normative disconnection (from nature, other beings, spirits, ancestors, dreams, mythic stories, community, etc.). And the task of all of us modernized peoples, regardless of lineages and ethnic backgrounds, as far as I’m concerned, is to seek restoration of all those connections that alone make us constructive members of the larger Community of Life.
This, to me, is what it means to recover a sense of indigeneity — to return to a way of living that has been our inheritance as a 2–3 million-year-old species (depending on how a “human being is defined). Whether nationalist or ethnonationalist, I regard identity reclamation projects as worthwhile only to the extent that they help us move toward that vision of returning to a way of living that is earth-honoring, full of beauty, albeit not exempt from struggle and suffering. Such a vision is exemplified in this passage from Indigenous writer, Martin Prechtel (1999/2004):
The Tzutujil were not trying to build a nonsuffering world. The world they were part of was not run by humans, and it had only live things residing in it. There were no dead things. Instead of eradicating all the misery of the world, the Tzutujil were trying to suffer together creatively in a beautiful way to keep their world of delicately balanced live things more vital by feeding it the grief of their human failures and stupidity. These failures were made beautiful by the ornate and graceful way the people dedicated their suffering to the earth and to that which made life live, in a proven ritual attitude of great antiquity. (Emphasis mine, p. 198)
This process of “Indigenous reclamation” is neither straightforward nor without its own dangerous pitfalls. Fundamentalism is one of them. The search for purity and untainted ground is another. I can understand that a certain kind of narcissism and self-obsession often accompanies the search for anti-colonial liberation. I went through it myself. The Manichean dualism (us vs. them) that one goes through in the first moment of awakening is part of the process (e.g., in the beginning of my former Christian born-again experience, I was all about defining who’s Christian, who’s not, who got it right and who got it wrong, etc.). For as long as one feels imperiled by a threat from the outside, one’s nerves are always taut and on alert, one’s defenses requiring vigilance, building a fortress to protect the newly-formed (or newly-found) “identity.”
But then, one falls in love. Like I did, in a class in the Humanities at the University of the Philippines, titled, “The Image of the Filipino in the Arts,” taught by ethnomusicologist Prof. Felipe de Leon, Jr. who brought into the classroom samples of the arts of our Indigenous peoples, those least penetrated by Christian missionization and modern schooling — their intricate weaving designs, their basketry, their architecture, their dances, their chants, their songs, their musical instruments, etc. and what they expressed in terms of a different way of being in the world. Walking out of every class, I found myself bawling my heart out, not knowing what it was that hit me from all the innocent descriptions of our peoples’ Indigenous works of art. Prior to that moment, I had already made a nationalist turn, been engaged in anti-Marcos protests and anti-US imperialist denunciations in the streets. It was the lead-up to the People Power Movement in the Philippines and I had been a passionate activist full of outrage and righteous indignation.
But that moment in Prof. Jun’s class (as we fondly called him) was a different kind of awakening, a breaking open of the heart in a new and tender and hopeful way. There was something spiritual about that first-time encounter with indigenously-authored beauty. In later writings, I would talk about it as being “saved by beauty,” “surprised by joy,” and “hailed by a different kind of spirit.” The tears, however, weren’t only tears of joy, but also of grief — of deep grief borne of recognition of something I had always intuited I had in my bones but had somehow lost, something for which I had neither the words nor the conceptual tools with which to make sense of at that time, but that my body seems to have recognized in a kind of uncanny intuitive knowing.
I have since witnessed countless similar heart awakenings to the “Indigenous” not only among the FilAms I’ve had opportunity to engage with in our community, but with my own students in the classroom — whether white or of color, given that all my teaching and scholarship is now grounded in this different way of being in the world — the way of life of our species for 95% of our time on the planet (if we count only our time as homo sapiens sapiens) or for 99% (if we include in our tenure that of our older homo erectus, homo habilis, etc. ancestors). And it is a way of life that is not only past, but kept alive by an estimated 370 million Indigenous peoples still remaining, albeit in ever-shrinking territorial constraints in the wake of the unrelenting advance of a now globalized rapacious economy.
The questions raised by Margaret and others at IKAT and many others before them (including us within our own community long before IKAT ever came along with its scathing denunciations) in regard to the harm done by mindless cultural appropriation, no doubt, are important to grapple with. But the critique offered by Margaret doesn’t go far enough.
In what follows, I propose the importance of opening the lens of history wider beyond merely the last 500 years of modernity (and beyond the confines of “Filipino” nationalist and ethnonationalist histories) if we are to keep ourselves from leaping at each other’s throats in defense of our own favorite brand of identity politics. This is not a contest. As others have already intimated in their comments to Margaret’s original article, we — all of us, and the entire world, for that matter — are in an existential crisis. The question of what is sustainable calls on all of us living modern lives, reliant on the industrial machine and on the violent structure of the city-state system, regardless of blood lineage, to learn to become Indigenous again — not in an identity-obsessed way — but in the spirit of relearning one more time, in the words of Sy Montgomery (2018), “how to be a good creature” (from the book title).
In trying to advocate for such, in what follows, I offer a rough sketch of my own understanding of the task before us, as a people seeking to keep the seeds of indigeneity alive.
What Is the Situation?
1. I understand Indigenous life as first and foremost about being in a right relationship with the Earth — the condition for human and planetary thriving. Nature is the primary relationship, the particular local ecology that nurtures us like a womb and that births a culture fit to keep that primary relationship nourished and thriving.
2. The purpose of Indigenous life is for people to live in such a way that life may continue, potentially, in perpetuity. It is what gives rise to the particular shape, unique teachings, knowledges, and practices of any given tribe (e.g., the bear ceremonies of the Ainu peoples, the bean and corn dances of the Tzutujil Mayans, the elaborate ritual food offerings among devotees of Voudun in Haiti, the binanog/eagle dance among the Panay Bukidnon in the Philippines, etc.).
3. So what we call “cultures” are unique ways of living evolved through generations of dwelling in place — so you know what the beings in that place require, what that particular river needs, what the soil wants, what the mountain demands, what the trees, plant beings, etc. in that particular place need in order to keep fulfilling their appointed role in keeping life alive. In other words, we — all of us — are called upon to participate in this majestic symphony called Life by playing our unique part as human Earth-keepers. Earth is kept alive by all creatures living according to their nature, and that includes us humans.
4. To be “Indigenous” then is to have these relational ties to place and the community of beings in that place, to know the songs, stories, ritual practices, knowledges belonging to that place. It is to live according to the wisdom taught by that particular place.
5. There was a time when all human communities lived in this Indigenous way, yes, including folks of European descent. This is the case when we lived as hunter-gatherers which is for at least 95% of our time on the planet. But even when we began to domesticate plants and animals roughly 10,000 years ago, there was a long stretch of time when we still remembered the “Original Agreement with the Wild” (of not taking without giving something back in return, taking only what you need, always asking for permission, etc.) and made sure we abided by the ethic of reciprocity and honoring that kept life alive and this is what put a limit on human greed or excess. This meant producing mostly for subsistence, not surplus, and doing all things ritually and beautifully as part of our response to Earth’s generosity and in acknowledgment of our indebtedness to Her for keeping us alive.
6. The firebreak in our history globally is the shift from intact reciprocity with watershed/places to surplus production and accumulation structures serving elites at the expense of labor and the ecology beginning roughly 5,000 years ago with the turn to settled monocrop agriculture and city-state building. This we don’t fully understand why it happened, but we’re all now living in the wake of this huge traumatic shift and its catastrophic consequences on the biosphere and all of life. According to scientists, what we are now going through is the Sixth Great Mass Extinction, with a rate of species extinction 1,000 times the normal, the consequence of the introduction of a linear logic of “progress” and “advancement” as now enshrined in our modern economy in contrast to the circular logic of a gift economy observed when most of our species lived Indigenously.
7. Surplus production, besides giving rise to a heavy indebtedness to the Wild, led to human population explosion, and with population explosion, the emergence of what I would call “the domination dynamic” — in relation to the natural world, yes, but also, in relation to other people groups.
8. Such a domination dynamic began with city-state and civilization building, which requires, among others, large population concentrations, massive wealth accumulation, class and social hierarchies, slave labor, taxation, organized religion, standing armies, and state monopoly of violence. This project of civilization-building ultimately issued in the more recent phenomenon of native genocide, slavery, global capitalism, corporate coup, etc.
9. The result is the mess we’re in today: the destruction of the natural world through abandonment of the Original Agreement and its replacement with an extractivist and human supremacist logic, the massive displacement of Indigenous peoples, coerced assimilation of surviving IPs causing loss of Indigenous traditions and practices, the fracturing of communities, the cycle of endless wars fought mostly over resources, etc.
10. We cannot approach this state of affairs from a purely academic understanding. Critical discourses and theories, removed from concrete contexts and relational accountability only breed arrogance (theoretical hubris), sweeping generalizations, and self-righteous fundamentalisms (I know — been there, done that).
11. It is hard enough for surviving IPs still living on their lands to resist the dynamic of forgetting foisted on them by the death-dealing culture of modernity; it becomes doubly challenging for us, no-longer living Indigenously in the diaspora to recover remnants of the wisdom that could help us make a home with justice and integrity in the diaspora.
What is the task then?
How do we become a people who will once more recover a way of being in the world that I describe in #1–5?
1. It means being taught by those who still remember the old ways wherever we could find them, to seek tutelage in humble and honoring ways.
2. Seeking tutelage through our lineages is good work, but sometimes the universe also brings other teachers to us who are not from our own lineages. This is all good in my book. For as long as those mentoring relationships are carried on with integrity, respect, mutuality, proper acknowledgment, and honoring, they serve as rich opportunities for mutual gifting between elders and willing students, blood descendants or not (my husband and I have been most fortunate to study with a mixed blood native teacher par excellence whose lineage is Irish/Indo-European and Anishinaabe/Huron/Cree).
3. In the case of Filipinos in the North American diaspora, I also recognize that, as settlers on stolen land, we need to learn the history(ies) underneath our feet, which entails learning about the original peoples in the places where we live, building relationships with them, and in many cases, engaging the layered histories of dispossession of African Americans and other people of color on top of native genocide and dispossession (e.g., through racist acts and policies of gentrification). This, too, is part of learning Indigenous ways of being in our context today — the unlearning of settler privilege and sense of entitlement so as not to perpetuate destructive non-Indigenous ways of being in the world.
4. In all this learning and tutelage, we are enjoined not only to “know” lessons cognitively but to embody what we learn, i.e., to become a different body, to learn other ways of being human, to develop different habituations, to learn ritual practices, songs, dances, mythic stories, healing medicines that we’re given permission to learn in the context of the relationships built in this process of learning, as well as to innovate our own earth-honoring practices as inspired by the beings on the land right where we live.
5. In the Center for Babaylan Studies where I serve as one of the elders, PAMATI (a gathering with Indigenous elders in the homeland hosted by our Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners on the ground there) has been a schoolhouse in this regard — an artificially-created structure invented to create such opportunities for mutual exchange and learning, certainly not unproblematic, but a schoolhouse nonetheless.
6. Among native groups in North America (and possibly in the Philippine homeland as well), there are differing attitudes toward teaching outsiders their native traditions. Those feeling more beleaguered from having been exploited and disrespected by outsiders tend to be protective of what little is left of their cultures (and rightly so, given the violence of theft and appropriation). Others, on the other hand, believe that we now live in extraordinary times, and as such, are concerned to teach those of us who no longer remember how to live in a good way and return to the original teachings, if the Earth’s destruction is to be halted.
7. Permission and relationship-building are key in any such transactions and, from experience, most of the IPs we’ve had relationships with over the years, whether in the homeland or in the diaspora, have felt honored in seeing us take delight in learning what they have to teach us regardless of whether or not we belong or have ties to their lineage. Such a response, far from creating a sense of entitlement on our part, imbues us instead with a deep sense of gratitude, debt of the heart, and accountability in regard to the trust gifted us.
8. It is important to note that the task of seeking Indigenous tutelage is not primarily about gaining a platform to claim an identity (i.e., identity politics). It is not merely for self- or community-empowerment, or a means to gain recognition in order to get “our slice of the pie” (of privilege). Rather, it is about learning to become a community of Earth-honoring human beings once again by being taught by those who still remember the teachings of the Wild.
9. And because such learning is something that has to be done in such fractured settings as what we’re dealing with today, in most cases, those of us diasporic no-longer-Indigenous Filipinos find ourselves needing to submit to a multi-pronged vocation of a) learning as much as we can about our respective Indigenous lineages (no matter how far back or remote or how fractured); b) learning the settler histories of our more immediate ancestors vis-a-vis the Indigenous peoples of the lands our lineages are from; c) learning about the current places we inhabit including the buried Indigenous histories underneath, the interdependent particularities of their local watersheds and ecologies, and their often layered colonial histories of industrial ecocide, native displacement, and, in the case of those of us in North America, African oppression as well as what was there before the devastation — the incredible old growth forests, marshlands, wetlands, wild animals, etc..
10. Tracing the remnants of Indigenous memory in all these places of connection is what energizes and inspires. The motivation is love, a deep love for the Holy in Nature in all these places.
11. The community I imagine us building then as a diverse diasporic people brought together under the name “Filipino” (through the shared fate of colonization and exile) is one composed of Kapwa with renewed capacity and skill to hear the land and the animals and plants and rocks and mountains and rivers speaking again, one whose energy is not so much consumed by identity politics as by love for Her that calls us back to the warm embrace of her bosom. The goal is not “to help” or “to save” Indigenous peoples but rather to help the likes of us, we, modernized Filipinos (regardless of extant Indigenous lineages) who have benefited and continue to benefit from the exploitation of the Earth and the killing of her children (both human and non-human). And it is we who need to shift our desire so that we might together work for a different vision of the good life, one rooted in reciprocity with all beings, and in the sacredness of all our relations.
As Arundhati Roy (2012) enjoins us:
The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination — an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. (P. 214)
Finally, a warning.
There is a way that we can reinscribe the ways of Empire even as we critique it. As Nietzche (2014) counsels, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee” (p. 97).
In our struggle to re-learn the ways of good living of our Indigenous ancestors, may we be motivated first and foremost by love, humility, and trust in one another. What may seem like “new” discoveries for us may not really be.
In regard to IKAT and your followers, know that others before you have already asked and continue to ask the complex questions you’re only now raising in your own journeying. Many before you have gone to great lengths to self-reflect, to self-interrogate and to learn honorable ways of engaging with Kapwa, Indigenous or not. Quit the temptation to claim to reinvent the wheel or to be the final arbiters of what’s right and true when it comes to the questions you’re raising.
Take the time to reach out to community before making pronouncements meant to indict or invalidate what others are doing. In the end, critiques not based in relational integrity kill. They snuff out whatever potential there is to give life, to enlarge the space of sharing and generosity. Indigenous Elders still intact in their wisdom-keeping will weep to witness the destruction caused by your self-righteous posturing and tonality.
Learn to listen. Give up the mantle of authority. You are not the first, nor the last, to wrestle with questions of cultural appropriation and what justice looks like in regard to relationships with IPs in the Philippines or on Turtle Island.
Let us, together, share what we know with one another in a spirit of mutual honoring. The field is wide, and the Spirit is strong. There’s room for all of us.
References Cited
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press, Inc.
Mendoza, S. L. (2002/2006). Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities. (Routledge Series on Asian Americans: Reconceptualizing Culture, History and Politics). NY & London: Routledge. Revised Philippine edition, University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.
Montgomery, S. (2018). How to be a good creature. New York, NY: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing.
Nietzsche, F. (2014). Beyond Good and Evil. South Kingston, RI: Millennium Publications.
Prechtel, M. (1999/2004). Long life, honey in the heart: A story of initiation and eloquence from the shores of a Mayan Lake. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Roy, A. (2012). Walking with the comrades. London: Penguin Books.
