A LOVE LETTER TO LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON: A Filipina’s Indigenous Resurgence: A Practice of One

35 min readJun 6, 2023

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, University of Minnesota Press 2021

Dear Leanne Betasamosake Simpson,

As We Have Always Done. You did not write this book for me. You wrote it for your Nishnaabeg people. Yet there is something here that stirs me deeply. I’ve been needing this book: its language, stories, voice, theories, call outs and call ins, and challenges. So thank you so much!

I am a 40-year settler on Wappo, Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok lands. I am Kapampangan from the Philippines and came to live on these lands 40 years ago; I was 30 years old when I came to settle here. I have not always called myself a settler; I called myself an immigrant. When I started to read about settler colonialism a decade or so ago, it made me realize that the concept of immigration, too, must reckon with the assimilative imperative of the settler state. This awakening experience is what makes me write this love letter to you.

I’m an academic walk-out who taught Ethnic Studies for over two decades at a public state university in California. I’ve been educated and socially conditioned within the settler colonial system on Turtle Island and before that in my homeland’s neocolonial educational system in the Philippines. This neocolonial system is what shaped my early consciousness — this identification with the U.S. and the desire to be whitened. Although I eventually learned how to refuse assimilation; learned how to deconstruct imperial and colonial narratives as a postcolonial subject; learned how to develop decolonizing and decolonial practices — I acknowledge that this is all still within the purview, control, and surveillance of the settler institution of higher education.

Still, I took pride in my academic focus on the decolonization process for Filipino/a/x/s in the diaspora using Paulo Freire’s framework in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed along with other postcolonial and postmodern discourses. But there also came a time when I no longer felt that these discourses were satisfactory to me. I felt they didn’t somatically resonate within me in spite of the power of abstraction and cognitive brilliance; they didn’t speak my language.

After two decades of decolonization, my body stirred and began to talk: “Where is your body? Why do you not know the story of the land where your feet walk? Why haven’t you introduced yourself to the creek, the redwoods, the birds that greet you everyday? Why doesn’t your heart flutter when you behold the beauty of this Land — this mountain where Coyote and the Pomo, Wappo, Miwok peoples lived next to one another for thousands of years? This Land has held you, grounded you, given you Home; what have you given in return?”

These questions moved me towards the direction of indigenous voices — the poems, stories, and novels of writers like Linda Hogan, Gerald Vizenor, Vine DeLoria, Martin Prechtel, Greg Sarris, Scott Momaday, Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Thomas King, and many others… and specially to your work, Leanne.

With this inspiration I leaned in towards finding an inroad to the treasure trove of indigenous myths and stories from my homeland, the Philippines. All I found were fragments. Fragments about pre-colonial and indigenous times; about land bridges that connected our archipelago with the rest of Southeast Asia; fragments of creation stories and more. With these mere fragments, I taught myself to live with our mythic stories until the Heart of the Story spoke to me; until the stories entered my body…until my mythic imagination remembered that once upon a time we were not split subjects of empire. To Alicia Magos, Albert Alejo, Ver Enriquez, Felipe de Leon, Jr., Katrin de Guia, Kanakan Balintagos, Kidlat Tahimik, Marian Pastor Roces, Jenita Eko, Datu Vic, Waway Saway and other indigenous voices from the homeland — I am grateful.

I had also begun to research, write, and publish about the Babaylan tradition — the healer/medicine person in indigenous communities in the Philippines. I got academic tenure and I became part of a movement, a resurgence in minor key — spurred on by young Filipino Americans who are interested in decolonization and revival of indigenous practices in the diaspora. This movement sometimes appears to be romanticizing, appropriative, commodifying, and nostalgic — but most of it is heartfelt; there is a longing for a rooted connection in search of expression, and in need of tutorial in deepening the lessons to be learned. In search of a Place to Dwell with.

The word “dwell” rolls in my mouth with a taste of sweetness, a feeling of being grounded, rooted. It took decades of living in this one place before I began to feel that I am no longer an immigrant, no longer someone whose home is elsewhere. It took decades before I claimed and owned this feeling of dwelling with a Place. But then it took another decade before I had to learn and confront what I, as a settler, needed to know about the indigenous resistance against native genocide. More on this later.

Reading Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso initiated me into questioning my relationship to Place and later to knowing in my body that “decolonization is not a metaphor”¹. Then I read How a Mountain Was Made by Greg Sarris about the Pomo people, which also brought me closer to the creation stories of the Place where I now live.²

In my untutored searching, I began to ask/pray to the Land to speak to me. I re-read Pomo medicine woman Mabel McKay’s story in Dreamweaver by Greg Sarris as I’ve been thinking a lot about her. One Sunday while sitting on my meditation cushion she appeared to me in a vision that made me cry in a way I’ve never done before. In the vision, she welcomed me into her homeland and reassured me that I am welcome here as long as I learn to fall in love with this Place. This was new to me and I felt embarrassed and shy to tell anybody afterwards. When I did tell her nephew, Clint McKay, while we were on a walk on Wappo land at Pepperwood Preserve, he said: She’s a good one to talk to. It was a gracious response. Later on, I wondered if he thought I was just another settler appropriating his culture.

This is how your book , As We Have Always Done, came to me — my search for ways to language and frame this practice of becoming indigenous to Place as a settler. What can a settler like me learn from Nishnaabeg indigenous resurgence and indigenous nationhood?

The Politics of Refusal

When you write about the politics of refusal or refusing the politics of recognition of the settler colonial state, I realize I’ve been practicing this as well in the best way I know how: disidentifying with the U.S. empire; disidentifying with the myth of exceptionalism, of being the only superpower in the world. At the university, my colleagues used to comment that I am not a player; that I am not political; that everything I do seems to be motivated by an inner compass rather than the politics of the ivory tower. And this is largely true. I refused to play the politics of recognition at the university where I taught. I described my practice as operating just below the surface and hiding from the surveilling imperial authoritarian gaze so I could do the work that was calling me. I was a small fish in the ocean of academia, invisible and under the radar of gatekeepers.

Somehow I survived and even thrived and I am now called a professor emerita. Yet it feels like a double-edged existence because this all happened in the cracks of this global economic system that is hell-bent on the dispossession of indigenous peoples in order to have access to the resources underneath their feet. Is it enough to be cognitively-informed and aware of how everything is connected? I can connect the dots. Is that enough?

I live in the cracks quietly building a refuge and sanctuary for the future fugitives in my community. This idea of fugitivity is from another writer, Bayo Akomolafe³; he writes that as more and more people refuse modernity, they will become fugitives in search of places of sanctuary. Where is this refuge and sanctuary? How does the idea of refuge and fugitivity get interpellated by the idea of indigenous nationhood and sovereignty?

So many questions. I keep writing.

I write about my elegant disintegration, about becoming a good ancestor, about the concept of wholeness known as Ginhawa among my people. I am surprised that there seems to be a new generation of readers of my books published a decade ago and newer writings online — young second and third generation children of the Filipino diaspora searching for rootedness and belonging.

So I am wondering how to power this movement that is multi-directional and multi- layered. We are settlers/immigrants still so deeply invested in the settler colonial system as part of a colonial legacy and the neoliberal values that the older generation embraced as they were forced to assimilate for their survival in a land that pretends that it wasn’t stolen from its first peoples. We are settlers/immigrants who want to root ourselves in a homeland elsewhere — in a 7000 island archipelago — that many haven’t even stepped on but carry deep cultural memories in their genes. We are multi-generations of settlers/immigrants who still feel non-belonging and alienation within the structures and institutions of the settler colonial state. We are settlers/immigrants who find relevance, meaning, and purpose when we learn about Filipino indigenous values and learn from other non-Filipino indigenous traditions and then have to wrestle with how to locate and live these burgeoning practices on indigenous homelands on Turtle Island.

There is a cultural resurgence afoot in the Filipino diasporic community that is more and more indigenously-informed and inspired. Yet some of us are still debating what it means to be indigenous. We are still arguing about defining our identities as Filipino/a/x, diasporic, immigrant, dual citizens, etc. We get trapped in the limiting discourse of identity politics which is always contentious and, of course, the settler state prefers it that way. These days we are seeing the resurgence of white nationalism in a country that is threatened by the growing non-white demographic within its borders. Unwilling to connect the dots between economic globalization, resource extraction, and imperial and colonial projects to the movement of laborers and migrants around the world, we teeter on the edge of global destruction. But this, too, is anthropocentric thinking, isn’t it?

Cultural and ethnic diversity is still encouraged as long as it is not subversive. As long as it is palatable to white supremacy. Like a side dish or condiment but not the main entree. As long as it doesn’t question and place the issue of native genocide and land theft at the center.

How to mobilize this cultural resurgence so that it can begin to subvert the settler state and imperial/neoliberal gaze?

In your book you write about the importance of learning the Original Instructions from indigenous elders. For so many of us, colonial historical trauma kept us from learning from indigenous elders. Yet whatever remnants or fragments that we could re-member and learn from the archival memories and bring to life again has kept on feeding our movement. For this, I am grateful to the ancestors and the spirit realm for hearing our pleas…these ancestral voices that whispered to my tired soul: Leny, you may not know our names, but we know you.

In remembering and reclaiming our core value of Kapwa (the Self is in the Other), these words in your book resonate so deeply:

Our responsibility is to work alongside our Ancestors and those not yet born to continually give birth to an Indigenous present that generates Indigenous freedom and this means creating generations that are in love with, attached to, and committed to their land.⁴

As a diasporic Filipina reading about Kwe as a resurgent method I feel encouraged and somewhat validated in the ways I have animated some of our indigenous knowledge and practices in my daily life. I say somewhat because it may be presumptuous on my part to even say so. But as you say — “wear your theories”. Kwe as a refusal method — a refusal to be tamed by whiteness and to embody indigenous alternatives — remains a constant learning path in my life. Thank you for the encouragement to remember the ways of the ancestors and their relationship to the Land. On the repeated short immersive trips to indigenous communities to my homeland I witnessed their kinship with their ancestral domains, with the Land. I also witnessed their struggles in resisting and navigating the encroachment of industrial agriculture and corporate mining on their lands. In one of my visits a few years ago, there were indigenous communities receiving education funds from an Australian mining company — obviously an attempt to soften resistance to extractive projects. This was heartbreaking to witness and my own sense of helplessness made me wonder about my relationship to Place.

Shortly after these sojourns to Mindanao/Southern Philippines, I resolved to root myself on Wappo, Pomo and Coast Miwok lands where my body has lived for four decades. Away from the homeland, I turned my attention to the Land where I have settled; to the creation stories of the Southern Pomo, Wappo, and Coast Miwok people. I learned the history of California genocide; I began to notice and introduced myself to the creek, the redwoods, the hills that surround the valley where “my” suburban tract home is located. I was silently growing my sense of indigenous resurgence marked by a resolve to live local and small and slow.

I have begun to build relationships with indigenous peoples where I live while also holding my memories of the homeland indigenous struggles alive.

Colonialism creates a world where I am never safe

You write: “Colonialism creates a world where I am never safe”.⁵ I know this in my bones. No matter how much ‘self-care’ I practice, I know that there is no safe place; any insistence on having a safe place or a consistent self-care practice can also be a form of spiritual bypassing. You say the antidote to this is “less engagement with the state and more presence within indigenous realities”.⁶ If the state is omnipresent in our daily lives, I wonder how or where we can create sanctuaries of refuge where we are beyond surveillance. Or at least be small and local enough to be undetectable.

Yes, cultural resurgence is not enough. Political resurgence is not enough. Only radical resurgence is. To develop this, you emphasize the importance of indigenous intelligence and revitalizing intellectual practices and relationship to the Land.⁷ You write that we must learn to recognize cognitive imperialism within the self; must learn that capitalism drives dispossession. Oh, how I struggle to undo cognitive imperialism within myself! I notice it when I put pressure and/or encourage young people to excel in school even when I know that the educational system is colonial at its core. Although I am paying attention to the ‘unschooling’ movement, there is still the cognitive part of myself that is unable to let go of the narrative about the importance of an education. This concept of education is now also globalized and spreads the tentacles of neoliberal ideology. I still waver and quiver.

A long time ago, I remember reading Vine DeLoria and his words about indigenous peoples who are getting educated in white institutions. I paraphrase: Go ahead and get an education. Become an engineer, lawyer, accountant, etc…but remember that these are the institutions that tried to destroy our people and our cultures. How will you use your education to prevent that from happening?

You say: “We must first have to escape enough before we can mobilize”.⁸ Maybe I haven’t escaped enough? Although I see some mobilization towards decolonization and decolonial practices in the diasporic Filipino communities, I know that we are a small minority. So many of us are still invested in the settler state and its neoliberal promises. So many of us still want to accumulate wealth and prestige. And in the process, we sacrifice our own version of Kwe, our Kapwa — this web of supportive, reciprocal, generative relationships existing outside of hierarchy and heteropatriarchy. Yes, we are still deeply spiritual and deeply religious. Yet sometimes this religiosity trumps spirituality as we forget that spirituality is both immanent and transcendent; that spirituality always takes place, as you say, in the context of family and community.⁹ In the U.S., the religious fervor among my people also gets conscripted into secular neoconservative values that cause a bifurcated sense of spirituality that then disables its potential for deep and radical transformation.

When you write about theory as embodied practice that is spiritual, relational, intimate, and a personal emotional presence, you are naming my experience. I decided early on in my academic life that the Sacred will always be part of my pedagogy and presence in the classroom. My pedagogy always included dialogue, ceremony, movement, critical thinking, and attention to the imaginal realms. Consequently, my academic work has also been ignored and regarded as not being intellectually rigorous enough, not scholarly enough. And yet my work now lives in different communities where folks are committed to decolonization and decolonial practices. As you describe Nishnaabeg intelligence and resurgence, it is in community where the context becomes the curriculum.

As you emphasize that education comes through the Land and that it requires “long term stable balanced warm relationships within the family, extended family, community and all living aspects of creation¹⁰ — I feel the grief of Loss on many levels. As a diasporic people displaced from our homelands, dispossessed of the Land by centuries of colonialism, and disconnection as the mark of modernity itself — we are grasping for roots and belonging. In my own life, this process has been very slow — peeling off the layers of colonialism in the psyche, in the soul, in the mind — feels never ending. But being drawn to indigenous voices and practices, I am finding my refuge and creating sanctuaries for place-based communities of belonging. My “island of sanity” — a term coined by Stu Schlegel, an anthropologist who spent time with the Teduray people in Mindanao and in those years of interaction, he came to know and own up to the toxicity of his culture in the U.S. while growing up white, male, and Christian in the U.S. midwest. He wrote that the Teduray people showed him the “island of sanity” in their sense of restorative justice, their cosmology and beliefs which served as a mirror to his own toxic culture and its impoverished soul.

Islands of sanity. We cultivate these islands of sanity through Ceremony and Ritual.¹¹ Individually and collectively. The Center for Babaylan Studies that I co-founded has created a platform and facilitates a network of relationships between the homeland and diaspora where we are able to feed each other and support our struggles against further dispossessions. We, too, dream of future generations who will be land-based, community-based intellectuals and cultural producers.¹²

This is what your book inspires me to ask:

What is the equivalent of building a politics of refusal among decolonizing settlers that is generative? How can the recovery of indigenous mind among settlers create networks that challenge extractivism of all kinds?

How to grow our indigeneity when diasporic Filipino settlers are not yet able to mirror indigenous intelligence to each other? How to grow the connection to a homeland and to the places we have settled on Turtle Island so that we grow our emotional and cultural capital and our capacity for critical thinking?¹³

Constellations of Co-resistance

Your story of Nanabush’s internationalism¹⁴ is a beautiful rendering of grounded normativity¹⁵; grounded normativity as flight paths or fugitive escapes from the violence of settler colonialism. Yes, I am finding what you call “decolonial pockets of thinking around the world” and reading about the potential “constellations of co-resistance” but I have yet to find this co-resistance in my own place-based engagements. During the pandemic, I initiated three small local cohorts that would be interested and invested in envisioning healing and repair of trauma caused by native genocide in California. This is inspired and guided by Basil Brave Heart, Lakota-elder, who was approached by the descendants of U.S. soldiers who massacred his people at Wounded Knee in 1890 and had asked for forgiveness. As more and more descendants of settlers expressed their apologies, ceremonies of apology and forgiveness were also held. I was invited to participate in this ceremony in 2019. I wrote my letter of apology and forgiveness and made my prayer bundle and sent it to the Sun Dance Ceremony in New Mexico where it was received with hundreds of other participants/letter writers. After this ceremony, Basil Brave Heart asked the participants to continue this ceremony in their local communities. This is how I found myself co-facilitating small groups. Following indigenous protocol of asking permission to do this ceremony from local indigenous elders seeking their guidance, and as word spread, soon there were three cohorts of fifteen people each.

During the pandemic we met online every six weeks. We began by asking each person to do their ancestral research guided by these questions: What does being a settler mean to you? How and when did your ancestors settle on Turtle Island? What is the impact of native genocide on your sense of self and belonging to this Place?

Doing this work in a mixed group of white, indigenous, and people of color — it soon became apparent to me the challenge of interrupting whiteness. I had too many assumptions: I thought that this would be a group that, because they were interested in indigenous issues of healing and reparations, that they were ready to confront how whiteness and ancestral stories are connected to indigenous genocide. After we shared our ancestral stories, it was still difficult for most to connect the dots between their settler stories and native genocide. But at least one white woman said that she realizes that although her ancestors didn’t directly participate in native genocide and the enslavement of Black people, she acknowledges that her ancestors permitted these to happen. Reading the well-circulated piece by Tuck and Yang “Decolonization is not a Metaphor”¹⁶ was a challenging read for most of the white folks especially the part about “moves to innocence”. Some of the white folks feel that doing relational work as our emphasis (alongside doing reparation projects), is not as productive and they prefer to focus on problems to be solved or do-able projects of repair.

A more recently published book by a friend, Inherited Silence, by Louise Dunlap (whose ancestral lands are on Wappo land) also brought to our attention the issue of rematriating the land and the long and arduous work of making repair. In this work, Louise chronicles the many years of doing ancestral work and seeing the harm done to the indigenous peoples by her ancestors and how she was moved to begin to think about how to make repair work by rematriating the land or finding a way or other opportunities when direct rematriation didn’t quite work, to benefit the Wappo indigenous peoples. This is just one of many examples of ‘repair and reparations’ being made by settlers locally. This book tells the story of many decades of inner work meditating about one’s love for the land that her family has inherited and how it came to their possession via settler colonialism. This is just one example of how we can make repair.

We also found ourselves discussing what indigenous peoples mean when they say “make relatives.” In these groups, I feel that I am not yet able to navigate these waters of “making relatives” because there are wide gaps and differences in our understanding of history and the role of one’s ancestral stories. I am not able to do this well in these cohorts as we have yet to learn to dive deep into understanding modernity/coloniality¹⁷ and the role of white supremacy. We have yet to look at capitalism and “development narratives’’ as dispossession of the Land and the complicity of one’s (forgotten) ancestors in the project of modernity. We have yet to move away from the romance of the “indigenous” as an escape from modernity’s suffocating hold or what Tuck and Yang call “moves to innocence”. For white folks so far removed from their own indigenous roots and yet are drawn to indigenous ways of being and knowing — how can these engagements be ethical, non extractive, non-utilitarian, non idealizing, non-romanticizing? I ask myself these same questions.

I, too, am wondering now if I have “escaped enough” and if I have nurtured my personal indigenous resurgence practice enough to be able to facilitate these cohorts of settlers wanting to do healing and repair work with indigenous communities. I want to feel the support of a strong container from elders and others doing the same work. I also get sad that there is still so much white fragility that I find challenging and unequipped to hold a container for. I find myself questioning my spiritual grounding as I find myself weary of doing a lot of emotional labor for white folks. I understand that everything takes time. “Making relatives” takes time and requires an ease around slowness, an ease around this sense of lostness or uncertainty.

Sometimes in these cohorts I wish to ask ourselves what it means to use an anti-capitalist lens but I do not see the readiness yet to move in that direction. What would healing and repair look like through an anti-capitalist lens? You write: “Our ancestors didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust. Excess material wealth doesn’t make sense. Not to “develop” is grounded normativity.”¹⁸ As I live with lands where indigenous-owned casinos are numerous, I wonder how I should position myself when thinking about these projects. Does a settler’s position and opinion even matter in this case? I know that casinos fund indigenous resurgence and strengthen indigenous nationhood. Indigenous-led organizations are thriving and becoming more visible and sought-after resources when climate solutions are sought or on the table, e.g. the renewal of cultural burning practices that is now informing forest and land management to mitigate the fire damage that California has suffered the last few years due to severe drought and intensifying climate weather. “Beyond land acknowledgement” projects, rematriation and land back, land justice — are all getting more attention and movement as part of reparations and healing between settlers and indigenous communities. Maybe accepting the paradox that casinos are able to fund indigenous resurgence is the way out of the polarizing tendency. It is also short-term versus long term. Greg Sarris, tribal chair of Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (FIGR), has always maintained that casinos are not permanent; they are a means to achieve tribal economic empowerment, elevate educational aspirations, maintain cultural and indigenous practices…while co-existing with non-indigenous political, economic, and cultural institutions and systems.

In indigenous-led ceremonies attended by settlers (mostly white) I find myself wondering how the prayers, chants, ceremonies of the indigenous elders that speak of “we are all relatives here” are heard. In indigenous projects and workshops where settlers are invited to volunteer, I wonder about “settler moves to innocence” (in Tuck and Yang’s essay). In the cohorts that I facilitate, the white settlers are more comfortable contributing their time and energy to projects that have a specific outcome, e.g., attending a protest, building a canoe, writing letters of support, etc. They struggle with the relationship-building aspect with the Black, Indigenous, People Of Color (BIPOC) members of the group and there is resistance to looking at white normativity (colonizer mind) as a dynamic above and below the surface of relationship building, of making relatives. I, too, become aware of both my colonizer and colonized mind in these contexts and I am constantly watching my stress levels to make sure that I am taking care of myself. I try to be aware of my own projections.

Leanne, you pose a challenge to white bodies, especially to women, to divest themselves of being white and “learn to struggle and understand that their country is a death dance for indigenous peoples. They must stop plundering the land and using indigenous bodies to fuel their economy and find a way of living that is not based in violence and exploitation”.¹⁹

As a woman of color who identifies as a settler and who is presently engaging other settlers (mostly white) in the work of healing and repair locally, I find myself equivocating a lot as I deal with the impact of white numbness and white habits of being on myself and it makes it challenging to create this unity of purpose within the group. Sometimes I wonder if I am the problem — the one who is not well-resourced and lacking the skill to deal with these situations. Perhaps I have not escaped long enough from my modern mind but at least I’m aware that this is so and everyday I take a small step to move towards the direction of my own indigenous resurgence.

Indigequeer Normativity

Confession: I am trying to have a better grasp of gender and sexuality discourse nowadays. I am trying to understand what “queer” means as I see it being used in different contexts. I understand that queerness refers to an umbrella term for LGBTQIA+ communities; in other words, anyone not heterosexual/straight/cisgender. I also hear folks talk about “queering everything” — as a decolonial move of disrupting heteronormativity. In one conversation with an older white lesbian friend, I asked if I, as a straight woman of color, who identifies with this disruptive decolonial move can call myself queer; she didn’t know the answer. I’ve also asked other older lesbian friends who confirm this generational gap. We think the gap is more apparent in the (lack of access to) current academic discourse as well. An indigenous elder/friend who identifies as Two-Spirit doesn’t use the term “queer’ and she says she also doesn’t understand the need to state her pronouns and is comfortable with being labeled she/he/they when younger folks say so. In the Filipino language, there is only one gender pronoun: Siya. So in my catch-up mode, my bilingual tongue often mixes genders all the time and I find myself apologizing to the young ones for mis-gendering them.

“Queer bodies as a threat to settler sovereignty” — I understand that by saying this you are emphasizing the fact that “white heteropatriarchy destroy, control, manipulate differences into hierarchies’’²⁰. Queer indigeneity, on the other hand, is a “web of supportive, reciprocal, a generative relationship existing outside of hierarchy and heteropatriarchy.”²¹ As I develop a decolonial awareness through the lens of queer indigeneity, I find that I’m always looking for a stable anchor in indigenous knowledge and traditions where Elders are respected and listened to. Yet as an elder I also experience the demands of the young ones for non-hierarchical relationships which get translated into a resistance against the offer of Elder guidance that lands on them as a demand or obligation or correction. I wonder if you experience these tensions as well. So when it comes to the use of “queer” in non-hierarchical and non-heterosexual contexts, the issue of intergenerational differences may come up. The older generation may not have access to the latest popular and academic discourse around gender and sexuality. They may also hold on to positions that may be considered non-queer, e.g., the traditional roles of men and women. I witness these differences in many Filipino/a/x American inter-generational families where “traditional family values’’ in Catholic families trump progressive gender/queer identities and values of the U.S.-born generation.

I surmise that this is the reason why you emphasize that relationships are more important than protocols. “The purpose of Nishnaabeg spiritual practices is to demonstrate respect to the spirit, to engage in rituals that infuse ceremony with meaning, to create a unity of purpose within the group, engage the indigenous world”²² — this a tall order indeed for settler folks who are in the process of recovering their indigenous mind and yet have not escaped enough from their modern/colonial conditioning to have a sustained engagement with these qualities of indigenous and queer practice.

Land as Pedagogy

My personal practice of connecting with Place/Land began about a decade ago with small steps. From reading books, to walking the land and introducing myself to the trees, hills, plants, creek and other beings. From singing and humming as I walk around the garden and smelling the roses, daphne, sampaguita, lavender, thyme, rosemary, oregano, etc., I am mindful that perhaps I am merely anthropomorphising this relationship, still I give myself permission to cultivate a practice that is alien to my modern mind but that feels enlivening to my heart.

I am also always apologizing for this lack of consistency. It is so humbling. It is painful to look back at my life and admit that this is such a belated awakening…and yet I know it is also not my fault. I am an accident of history.

The Land where I am a settler and her stories about the Southern Pomo, Mishewal Onasta Tis/Wappo, Coast Miwok — I will never know much and even admitting or writing things down feels as if I’m virtue signaling. I think the reason is because my embodiment practice is still evolving and the connection with the Land I long for is almost here. Not almost. It is here and I feel it when my heart and spirit is quiet and my mind is content. But how come my mind tends to still be more focused on cognitive framing and seeing? I am developing a practice of letting my mind be quiet so that my heart can speak louder.

A shaman once gave me the homework of making a pilgrimage to Sonoma Mountain and bringing offerings of alcohol and popcorn to the Spirit of the Dragon on the mountain. As I drove up this mountain to search for a place to lay down my body and offer the gifts, I realized that there was nowhere to park because the mountain has been parceled into private property of mostly white upper middle class folks. My unexpected anger was like a dragon that reared its head and breathed fire. When the shaman told me to lay my body on the mountain and wait for the fire-breathing dragon to appear, I realized that this was the dragon waking me up from my modern/colonial mindset. The Land isn’t real estate property no matter how fenced off it is.

This experience drew me into a closer relationship with the Place I live in. I started to understand the concept of dwelling. I learned about the history of genocide in this corner of California as well as the history of resistance of indigenous peoples. I will always remember that one tribe — the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria — descended from fourteen grandmothers who, at the end of the genocide era in California in 1873, had become either concubines or domestic slaves of ranchers. By the 1920s, some Filipino migrant workers called Manongs intermarried with local indigenous women giving rise to a generation of Filipino Pomo/Wappo/ Coast Miwok descendants.

The local history of genocide and my growing desire to sink deeper roots in this place has become a daily learning practice. At the university where I was the department chair and program chair of Native American Studies, I began to get to know local indigenous leaders and build relationships with them. Additionally, portals to relationships with other settler folks who are seeking healing and repair of relationships between indigenous peoples and settlers appeared on the horizon.

And so finally in 2022 and after being with a cohort for two years of studying and reflecting, the ceremony of apology and forgiveness that Lakota elder Basil Brave Heart encouraged us to initiate in our communities culminated during Indigenous Peoples Day program on October 10 at Santa Rosa Junior College, about thirty of us signed a Settlers’ Apology Proclamation which was read in public. It reads:

SETTLERS’ APOLOGY PROCLAMATION To the Southern Pomo, Wappo, Mishewal OnastaTis, and Coast Miwok Peoples

With the guidance and permission of local Indigenous elders, we, as settlers on your lands, began in 2020 to reckon with our ignorance of the historical trauma of Native genocide and displacement in California.

We acknowledge the responsibility that we and our colonizing and settler ancestors hold today for this genocide, and for the historical and ongoing harm to Indigenous communities.

Through study, self-reflection, storytelling, and ceremony we aspire to understand the impact of genocide, colonialism, and settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples, and how we can grow towards right relationship with the lands where we live, and with you, the living descendants of the Indigenous peoples who have been and are stewards of this land since time immemorial.

Today, on Indigenous People’s Day, October 10, 2022, we apologize for the actions of our ancestors and ourselves. We commit to you — the Southern Pomo, Coast Miwok, Mishewal OnastaTis, Wappo and other indigenous communities and peoples — to continue seeking paths towards healing and reparations.

***

Embodied resurgent practice and coded disruption

Now the work begins. What would practice in daily life look like? How do we recreate indigenous political practices in the home and every day?²³

Your mention of Nishnaabeg intelligence as an intervention to linear thinking — I am learning this. “If you do not know what it means to be intelligent within Nishnaabeg realities, then you can’t see the epistemology, pedagogy, conceptual meaning, metaphor present in the oral tradition”.²⁴ And this is the only way one cultivates the rebellion against the permanence of settler colonial reality. I think the key word is “cultivate”; If I can, I’d like to imagine us sharing the history of modernity/coloniality even though the Philippine American war is not named as a genocide. As I read about how you apprenticed yourself to your Elders for years to recover your indigenous ways of being, I became aware that I have very few Filipino elders that I have apprenticed myself to. It is in the imaginal realm of dreaming and phenomenological meditation where I experience tutoring and cultivation of indigenous practices. From the act of offering libations to the land and to my ancestors, setting up altars in my home, making sage bundles from the white sage in the garden, to the reverence of approach to everything I do and say… I am practicing. Cultivating. I was blessed to have been mentored by the father of Indigenous Filipino Psychology, Virgilio Enriquez and to have been in relationship with other Filipino culture bearers/scholars — NVM Gonzalez, Albert Alejo, Lily Mendoza, Katrin de Guia and others — they inform the discourse on Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices. I have amplified these voices through my publications — both in print and online.

You ask: How will your ancestors and future generations recognize you as indigenous? Sometimes I wonder how different my life would have been if I’d had a culture-based and indigenous-informed upbringing and education. It is a rhetorical question, I know. But I am having conversations now with my son and grandson about this decolonizing and indigenizing work I’m doing. I know they are listening and paying attention. My grandson requested a tribal tattoo for his high school graduation present and he wanted it to represent his Filipino and Pacific Islander roots. I found artists in the community — culture-bearers who gifted him with a design after they interviewed him. We held a ceremony of gratitude and commitment to the responsibility of bearing the symbols of his ancestry on his skin. He understands and acknowledges the safety and protection from his ancestors.

You write: “Center our lives around renewal; align self and life in the present with a vision of an indigenous future instead of responding to neoliberal politics”.²⁵ — this is what is emergent for me in my personal practice. To envision an indigenous future means to look for other collaborators –poets, artists, scholars –who are doing the same. So I support Tongva elder, LFrank Manriquez, as s/he re-builds traditional canoes of California Indians — the Tongva ti’aat, the Coast Miwok and Pomo tule canoes, etc.

The local Filipino diasporic community built a Bangka/canoe that was gifted by LFrank via the Cultural Conservancy. This bangka was hand-carved by the community over a period of five years which culminated in its public appearance at the Sonoma County Museum Pacific Islands exhibit and at the Bioneers conference. It is still waiting to be returned to the Ocean.

And yet there are times when I become aware of the world outside of this local, slow, and small life I am living. When I pay attention to the news, I get overwhelmed because I feel the slow unraveling of capitalist institutions and the rise of violence of racial hate. I see the big picture and I take refuge in the knowledge of spaces where I know communities that are shaping an indigenous future are thriving. I take refuge in the work of young people who are leading movements, who are living in intentional communities, who are eschewing the American Dream. At Shelterwood Collective, Heron Shadow, Landwell, Monans Rill, Canticle Farm…these are all local places that I am aware of that are doing various forms of rematriation, of indigenous stewardship, of indigenous resurgence.

Sometimes this makes me smile because I am reminded of the 1950s in my hometown in the Philippines — growing up local, small, village-centered, and shared lives. Before we were seduced by modernity imposed by the American colonial enterprise and the idea of ‘improvement’ and ‘development’. By the 1970s and after college graduation, I got swept up by IMF-funded projects for my employment working for the Norwegian and Danish consultants building the first expressway from Manila to the north of the largest island in the Philippines, Luzon.

In 2000 I was teaching a course on Globalization and by then understood how “third world” countries became impoverished not of their own making and dependent on a global economy. My homeland still is reeling from the World Bank loans and IMF funded projects and the structural adjustments that were imposed later on for default payments on those loans. In response, Overseas Filipino Workers were “exported” as domestic assets who would send remittances to the homeland. A major portion of those remittances went to the interest payments on those World Bank loans. This is from my research twenty years ago and I would be surprised if this phenomenon has not gotten worse. Today, annual remittance from Overseas Filipino Workers is about $30B a year.

— — -

Embodiment Practices

You asked: How are you rejecting state affirmation, recognition performativity, rights-based discourses?²⁶

Everyday embodiment as a mechanism for ancient beginnings; engagement unlocks theoretical potentialities and generates intelligence — I underscore this to cite the steps I’ve taken in the last decade of my life to move towards daily practices of embodiment and engagement which moves me towards rejecting state affirmation, recognition performativity, and rights-based discourses. Most of these have been in the form of writing and webinars where I talk about my journey/work. Some of these stories have appeared in magazines and online publications like Jewish Currents, Advaya, Green Dreamer, Emerge Magazine, Rooted Village²⁷ and in Filipino online conferences like Bantula Conference; a global conference on Decolonizing Christianity organized by a Filipino theologian based in Australia. In a year-long book study group on the Babaylan tradition (based on the book that I edited),²⁸ we have developed relationships that “unlock theoretical potentialities and generated intelligence”²⁹ but these are at the early stages and have not been codified yet. During this year-long study, we wrestled with the issue of language that limits us when we are trying to translate indigenous Filipino concepts into English, for example. Or we wrestle with the use of the language of “trauma” in popular discourse and how we need to properly contextualize this term.

“Untie your canoes”.³⁰ Act with indigenous presence. Be attentive to land and place. Learn language, songs, dances, ceremonies. Revitalized systems of politics, governing, education, parenting, death rituals. This is a vision that is being born and one that I can point to only what I see on social media — the flourishing of decolonizing and indigenizing efforts that young people are doing. Kapwa is a ubiquitous term now. Look at the work of Sobey Wing in British Columbia on rights of passage; Kirby Araullo’s webcast on precolonial History; Laon Canabe, Lane Wilcken, and Tribal Korner reviving tattooing traditions, and many other young social entrepreneurs who have been doing research, making films, gathering and making community herbal medicine, reviving weaving traditions and more. Scholars, writers and poets are posing new questions that connect the dots between climate change, decolonial moves, capitalism, and gender issues. The Center for Babaylan Studies has been a container and cultivator of practice through its grief rituals, decolonization school, ethnoautobiography workshops, Kultivating Kapwa podcasts.³¹ And there are many more indigenously-informed mental health practitioners, social workers, and community organizations — which many of them didn’t exist twenty years ago.

Some of us are beginning to refuse settler spacialities³² and learning that all land is indigenous — urban, rez, wild. I have been learning from all the local movements such as the Sogorea Te Land Trust³³ and forms of land back movement such as: Shelterwood³⁴, Heron Shadow,³⁵ Shuumi Land Tax.³⁶ We are creating tiny islands of indigeneity; creating refuge, re-mapping. Renouncing dominance, tragedy, victimry.³⁷ I have been slowly getting to know some of these organizations and providing support when they have work days, e.g. when they make tule canoes, when they have work days at the Heron Shadow farm, or when they have canoe-making and language workshops, or when some events are planned that require administrative support like the forthcoming Canoe Festival in 2024 in San Francisco.

Thank you for giving me this language: “We see that the flight path out of settler identity is in indigenous mobility within grounded normativity as a response to colonialism. Mobility as deliberate, strategic resurgence. Create indigenous diaspora. Indigenous fugitivity”.³⁸ Within the small organization, the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), we have been slowly growing our capacity to teach, share, build community, build rituals that we can embody as decolonizing and decolonial moves. We are beginning to identify emerging leaders who can carry the medicine of the Babaylan into the future. Many are revitalizing tradition and re-learning the language, honoring the places where these traditions are being kept alive in the homeland.

Right now I am thinking of a young Filipina woman whom I’ve watched and witnessed for the last twenty years grow into her decolonial and indigenizing journey — connecting with her homeland roots, building relationships with healers/babaylans, seeking indigenous mentors in Toronto where she lives, learning different healing modalities, deepening her ancestral and spiritual connections. And to see her build this practice with humility and outside of the glare of social media is something that bears the mark of grounded normativity, of indigenous fugitivity, and creativity in the diaspora.

Social Media and technologies

Social media is supposed to amplify, organize, build the movement; create networks or maps of kinship that already exist.³⁹ In contrast, movement building is relationship building; it connects bodies to Land and bodies to Ancestors. The Internet is more often a simulation of settler colonialism; it is as digital dispossession when removed from grounded normativity. Grounded normativity does not exist in the virtual world because it is predicated in deep spiritual, emotional, reciprocal, real world relationships between living beings.⁴⁰ This is also true. I am trying to wean myself from using social media and to focus more on grounded normativity and how to do this in a diasporic community rather than a place-based community is a challenge.

I can see the tensions, conflicts, and contradictions of these technologies. How to limit or to self-monitor the use of these tools requires discipline. There’s a need to balance their use with time away from the machines and to be in communion with other living beings. For example, I found your work online and I am grateful to have done so.

As I ponder the above questions, I also took note of the questions you are posing and the assertions you are making based on your Nishnaabeg experience:

How are we generating theory as practice on the internet ?⁴¹

How would my Ancestors feel about me being so fully integrated into a system of settler colonial surveillance and control? that renders the inability to structurally intervene?

Can we operate from a place of grounded normativity on Facebook when the algorithms attacks its foundations?

Crux of resurgence — recreate and regenerate political systems, educational systems within our own intelligence.

No room for white people in resurgence⁴²; refusal to center whiteness

Nishnaabeg fugitivity — flight inward toward the essence of being Nishnaabeg⁴³ Nishnaabeg doesn’t need settlers.

These are questions that will keep me pondering long after I send this love letter to you.

Creative Combat

“Collectivized acts of resistance; art making; refusing forms of visibility within settler colonial realities that render the indigenous vulnerable to commodification and control; coded articulation and affirmative refusal.”⁴⁴ I think this is what I see emerging in the Filipina/x/o diasporic communities that are finding ways to deepen their decolonization journeys. The young ones are seeing the value of Kapwa, Bayanihan/mutual support — these indigenously-informed values that they affirm in their relationships to one another. I see them supporting each other’s projects, without the need to take each other down in order to make room for their own projects. This is our emerging grounded normativity. “It is not individuals that will change things. It is movements and formations.”⁴⁵ I hope that this has been my practice. I have loved seeing how individuals who come forward with their story of decolonization contribute to the formation of our collective narratives that then get to be shared in our gatherings. And these individuals are then empowered to reach out and invite others to do the same. So we see these acts of what you call layering, re-enactment, presencing⁴⁶ and it is beautiful when there are no egos vying for individual attention. We see this “diversity of excellence to continue to produce an abundance of supportive relationships.”⁴⁷

What needs to develop or emerge is a more coherent context and these practices for this curriculum to come through the Land.⁴⁸ How can we develop our own epistemology, pedagogy, conceptual meaning, metaphor that represent the oral tradition that is also an intervention to linear thinking and a rebellion against the permanent of settler colonial reality?⁴⁹ We are not used to theorizing about our embodied practice — the spiritual, relational, personal, emotional presence — because we just take these for granted. In my case, my academic journey of decolonization started with the psycho/spiritual/emotional work that I needed to do first before I could come to terms with my relationship with the Land. For many years I have felt my attention divided between the homeland and diaspora and feeling like I needed to decide where to put my loyalty. This, too, is a product of my dualistic and oppositional thinking and education that I eventually have to work myself out of. Shifting from a decolonization to a decolonial framework helped but it is really the recovery of my indigenous mind that helped me think through these issues more clearly. Two-eyed seeing as my elders tell me.

In a recent talk I gave to educators in the Philippines about the need for a culture-based education I did talk about building a curriculum that is based on love for the Land — the land of our homeland and the land of the indigenous peoples where we have settled on Turtle Island. The plight of the indigenous peoples in both places are connected. And this is the essence of Kapwa — to see our layers of connection that connect us — the Land that holds us and loves us. How then do we return this Love?

This is why your book has been so important to me, Leanne. You helped me think through what indigenous resurgence can look like. I call it a practice of One but the truth is that I am carried by my ancestors and those that have walked this path with me for over 40 years of being a settler. I didn’t know when I began this journey that this would bring me back full circle to the place of Beginnings…to the Land that birthed me, to the Land that nurtured me, to the Ocean that bridges my two homelands and watered my Soul and kept me enlivened through the years. So I thank you deeply.

Footnotes:

¹ Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”; https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf

² How a Mountain Was Made, https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/how-a-mountain-was-made-stories/

³ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-10-28/when-the-bones-of-our-ancestors-speak-to-us-a-fugitive-conversation-with-bayo-akomolafe/ Retrieved June 25, 2022

⁴ p 25

⁵ p 45

⁶ p 49

⁷ p 64–65

⁸ p118

⁹ p121

¹⁰ p155

¹¹ p157

¹² p159

¹³ p185

¹⁴ p52
¹⁵ Grounded normativity as a system of ethics that is generated by relationship to place, Land, through indigenous processes and knowledges that make up indigenous life (Glen Coulthard in Indigenous Resurgence and Co-Resistance) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0019

¹⁶ https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is% 20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf

¹⁷ Walter Mignolo, https://www.dukeupress.edu/on-decoloniality

¹⁸ p77

¹⁹ p101

²⁰ p129

²¹ p134

²² p141

²³ p191

²⁴ p151

²⁵ p191–193

²⁶ p 192

²⁷ Jewish Currents: https://jewishcurrents.org/office-hours-leny-strobe
Advaya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFB3r-DJGgc
Green Dreamer: https://greendreamer.com/podcast/dr-leny-strobel-center-for-babaylan-studies; Rooted Village: https://www.rootedglobalvillage.com/authors/leny-strobel All other writings can be found here: https://lenystrobel.medium.com/