Towards an Ecology of Remembering: Decolonizing the Body, Memory, and Desire
(Keynote address at the October 21, 2022 Bantula Conference of the Philippine Culture-Based Education Program of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts: “Re-Thinking and Re-Imagining Philippine Culture-based Education: Critical Engagement, Affective Investment, Decolonial Practice”).
Magandang araw po sa inyong lahat. Mayap a aldo pu kekayu ngan!
Aku pu i Elenita Fe Luna Mendoza Strobel, anak ng Horacio Mendoza at Esperanza Luna. Kapampangan ku pu, pero ating samut a Ilokano on my Luna side. (My name is Elenita Fe Luna Mendoza Strobel, daughter of Horacio Mendoza and Esperanza Luna. I am Kapampangan. I also have a bit of Ilocano in me).
Family stories passed down to me say that our great grandfather, Joaquin Luna, is the brother of Juan and Antonio Luna. None of their personal stories were passed on down because my grandfather refused to talk about his family as we were growing up. This Silence — which is familial, historical, and cultural — has been trying to speak to me. One day, as I was on a shamanic journey at a retreat, the brothers appeared to me; They held out their hands to me saying: Take our hearts with you. Our public lives were not perfect but we did our best for our motherland. Your mother has this heart, too. It is also yours.
I am grateful for my ancestors and your ancestors who have brought us together in this virtual space to gather and remember the stories that have been buried under the lahar of colonizations . May all that is remembered heal our memories, enliven our bodies, and embolden our desires to imagine a future that restores our indigenous and cultural Beauty and brilliance.
I left my Kapampangan homeland and the Philippines in 1983. I am currently a settler on Wappo, Coast Miwok, and Southern Pomo lands (aka as Sonoma County in California). These lands have fed and nurtured me for the last four decades. I am grateful for the ways I’ve been called to remember and learn how to dwell in a Place. To dwell…as in learning to fall in love … with the land and her hills, the redwoods, the creek, the birds that surround this home where I am raising family and community. To dwell in Place…as in honoring and remembering the indigenous history of this Place and the aftermath of native genocide and the repair and healing work that I am engaged with presently. To dwell…in this Place that connects me to the Pacific Ocean beyond which the archipelago of my birth beckons to my spirit and whispers her Call and awaits my response.
I am humbled and honored by your invitation to speak with you today. Thank you, NCCA and the Philippine Cultural Education Program, for your vision of a “nation of culturally literate and empowered Filipinos by ensuring that culture is the core and foundation of education, governance, and sustainable development.”
I especially want to thank the former director of NCCA, Prof. Felipe de Leon, Jr, who I consider a mentor and an important influence in the work of the Center for Babaylan Studies which I co-founded in 2009. Maraming salamat po.
I also appreciate the title of this talk that you offered to me — “Towards an Ecology of Remembering: Decolonizing the Body, Memory, and Desire.”
Please note that I will speak of my experiences as a Filipina in the diaspora, as a culture bearer, as a scholar/activist with a decolonizing and decolonial practice. I hope that my stories will resonate with you and make a difference in our collective meditation about culture-based education in the Philippines.
I begin with stories of Re-membering on my path to decolonizing the body, memory and desire.
***
Please allow us to express our Beauty! — these are the words of an elderly Manobo woman who was part of a cultural exchange in 2006 between a group of K-12 teachers I brought from California through a Fulbright Hays Grant and representatives of several indigenous groups in Mindanao arranged by our host, Ateneo de Davao University and Fr. Albert Alejo.
Please allow us to express our Beauty! I was stunned by these words!!
The Manobo woman elder didn’t ask for access to education, freedom, justice, funding support, democracy, human rights — she asked for the freedom to express their Beauty!
In my many balikbayan returns to the homeland there were many moments like these. Moments of expressions of Beauty that transformed me: encounters with Bai Liza and Datu Vic of the Talaandig tribe and hosting Waway Saway in California; visiting with Bai Diwa Ofong and Mendung Sabal (who have since passed) Jenita Eko and Maria Todi and the Tiboli weaving communities and Schools of Living Tradition in Lake Sebu; the Panay Bukidnon elders and youth, Ati youth leaders, Cordillera youth and elders and other indigenous folks we met at Kapwa conferences organized by Katrin de Guia and Kidlat Tahimik in Iloilo and Baguio; the encounters with artists and culture bearers — Prof Jun de Leon, Grace Odal, Albert Alejo, Rosalie Zerrudo, Kanakan Balintagos, Grace Nono, Joey Ayala, babaylan Reyna Yolanda and many others — have all been my teachers in revealing the Beauty of Filipino indigenous cultures and Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices. I am also grateful to my Kapampangan mentor — the culture bearer, Mike Pangilinan.
I’ve spent the last 40 years of my life deepening and broadening this practice of expressing our Beauty as a people. I was born to a Methodist father and a Catholic mother in the modernizing era of the 1950s that was undergirded by a syncretic Catholic, animist, and shamanistic culture of Pampanga; I grew up in San Fernando, Pampanga and nearby Clark Air Base as well as around white missionaries and peace corp volunteers. I was raised with Protestant values and raised by an American- patterned educational system and so it was no surprise that I ended up marrying a white man and came to live in the U.S..
I have since realized that I had been educated to identify with the U.S. but the U.S. doesn’t really identify with me and people like me.
Trying to understand colonialism and imperialism and how I have internalized these narratives and how it shaped my identity and consciousness has been my journey since I arrived in the U.S. (which I now call Turtle Island as it is called by indigenous peoples). In 2001, when I published my book on the process of decolonization among post-1965 Filipino Americans, I realized that I had become part of a global decolonization movement towards undoing the epistemic and psychic violence of colonialism.
***
Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills writes in The Racial Contract that White supremacy is the ideological framework that created the modern world. Decolonial scholars like Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo assert that the modern world was built on the back of colonial and imperial projects that are racialized — native genocide, slavery, and wars of conquest and domination. There is no modernity without coloniality.
But this modern era is now full of cracks and is crumbling under the weight of its own flawed assumptions. When U.S. corporations were given the same rights as persons, they were able to deploy and weaponize capital around the world. As this capital is also tied to racial supremacist notions, a portfolio of strategies and schemes of ‘economic development’ were imposed on the “developing world.” The educational system has been the main vehicle of this ideology.
Carol Black, the filmmaker behind Schooling the World asks in another essay titled “Occupy Your Brain”:
…who gets to decide what the world’s children will learn? Who decides how and when and where they will learn it? Who controls what’s on the test, or when it will be given, or how its results will be used? And just as important, who decides what children will not learn? The hierarchies of educational authority are theoretically justified by the superior “expertise” of those at the top of the institutional pyramid, which qualifies them to dictate these things to the rest of us. But who gets to choose the experts? And crucially, who profits from it?
Anibal Quijano, Peruvian sociologist and known for his work about the “coloniality of power” writes that the colonial matrix is geographical, political, onto-epistemological; it is an extension of western domination through domains of economy, authority, gender/sexuality, and knowledge production. This control of knowledge and subjectivity is maintained through categories and institutions that are political, judicial, educational, ideological, religious and their actors. This modern era was founded on a world view that believed that the Earth is an inanimate resource to be exploited and developed and brought into submission to a white theology. James Perkinson, a theologian, writes that white supremacy is the child of a white theology
As the crumbling walls of modern civilization, sometimes called the end of the anthropocene era, are becoming more visible and palpable, decolonial scholars are now calling attention to learning how to hospice this dying modernity. Indigenous peoples say we are in the midst of the great sixth extinction period.
What is happening now around the world — the plight of climate refugees, endless wars, the immigration crisis on the border of the U.S. and Mexico, the displacement of island peoples in the Pacific (Vanuatu) due to global sea rise, severe weather catastrophes — all of these are connected directly and indirectly to an educational system gone global that promotes a modern world view that requires the extraction of natural resources; that requires the policing and disciplining of dependent economies of the global capitalist system. It requires that citizens buy into a belief system that says that natural resources can be exploited and extracted for profit, that individual self-interest is good, that competition and survival of the fittest is good.
I am reminded of Pankaj Mishra’s book, The Age of Anger, where he writes about the rise of global anger against the failed neoliberal promise of deliverance from poverty and oppression.
Tyson Yunkaporta, aboriginal scholar from the Apalech clan in Australia, quotes Anishinabeg scholar, Larry Gross, for the term Post Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome to describe the crisis of our time and calls for the need to begin creating cultures and societies of transition in order to lessen or mitigate the impact of this crisis. A global “Just Transition” movement is underway.
Many indigenous scholars assert that Colonialism is all about the Land. Dispossession of the Land led to the dispossession of our mind and bodies, our languages, our indigenous wisdom, knowledge and practices, and specially our indigenous spirituality. Decolonization movements began as a critical response and resistance to the narratives of the West and its imperial and colonial discourses. Today, indigenous and non-western scholars call for decolonial responses that decenter the West and insist on place-based, land-based responses.
I reference decolonial practices and discourses in my effort to participate in the creation of these cultures of transition.
Decoloniality asks us to reimagine and rearticulate power; how to change and produce knowledge through multiple epistemologies, ontologies, axiologies (what is of value). Oftentimes we seek a seat at the table of power and fail to ask where the other tables of power are or whether we can set up our own table. Or we ask for our share of the pie when we can make our own pie.
Decoloniality is achieved through the resurgence of indigenous consciousness that is in contention with colonialism. If White supremacy does not play well with others, how do we engage with colonial and settler institutions from within? So many books are now being written on how to decolonize the academe, how to decolonize museums, how to decolonize everything!…and this is good…
But what is missing?
Indigenous scholars of decolonization and decoloniality emphasize the importance of Land and materiality and not simply decolonizing the mind. If decolonization is not a metaphor (according to Tuck and Yang), how do we develop practices that move us from the rhetoric and metaphorical into the materiality of Land, Air, Water, Minerals, Plants…and other beings that we coexist with? How do we prepare ourselves to meet the emotional, mental, spiritual, and emotional stamina needed for our decolonial practice? Can we imagine life beyond colonialism, beyond capitalism? Can we visualize indigenous resurgence at the end of empire?
Indigeneity and the term “indigenous” is full of contestation and contradiction. I use it in this talk to refer to the values shared by indigenous peoples globally and expressed in different ways through languages and cultural traditions: the belief that the Earth is Alive and Sacred. That Land cannot be owned. That Spirit is imbued in all of creation. That humans are not the crowning glory of creation but the last species to be created and so must be taught by the older species. That the Spirit or Unseen realm must be fed by our offerings of love and beauty so that this world may remain in harmony and balance. That humans cannot take more than what they need without jeopardizing this balance.
Modernity, on the other hand, is an idea that needed to produce and legitimize systems of knowledge that portrayed indigenous cultures as sub-human, savage, barbaric, backward, uncivilized, and non-modern to produce epistemological hegemony. These systems of knowledge created our colonial wounds that were inscribed on our dark skin. Projections of “third world” “developing” “backward” “modernizing” — we must delink from these naturalized and universalized knowledge about who we are!
It is not surprising that this emerging body of knowledge around decoloniality relies on Indigenous models of governance and concepts of indigenous resurgence and indigenous sovereignty. These concepts are based on respect for land-based social and ecological knowledge systems that are sourced from thousands of years of indigenous science; nurtured by Ritual and Ceremonies; founded on Respect for the spirit realm and carried forward by wise elders and passed down through the generations. Today scholars like Lyla June Johnston, a Dine phd candidate on Indigenous Food Systems and Land Managements, are showing that for thousands of years, indigenous peoples on turtle island were architects of abundance, building and expanding habitats for people and other beings without relying on extractive techniques that scarred the earth.
In the last few decades I’ve aspired to be part of decolonial projects at the local level.
I now believe that all cultural education must begin with the Land.
What are our cultural stories about the Land, our homeland of over 7000 islands in the Pacific Ocean? This archipelago that used to be connected by land bridges to Southeast Asia?
And what does decolonization have to do with our cultural stories?
Decolonization or unlearning colonial mentality, according to NVM Gonzalez, our national artist in Literature, is taking off our colonial jackets that we have worn under the lahar of colonizations in our history.
Decolonization is Re-membering or putting together the parts of the self that were fragmented and confused by the violence of colonial and imperial narratives.
Decolonization is turning to counter-narratives. If you are not who the colonizers say you are, then who are you? This is the question that fueled my academic and professional life after I left the Philippines.
The neocolonial educational system I was taught in didn’t teach me/us to understand how colonialism works; how the modern paradigms of development and progress have tricked us into submission and we bought into the beliefs that the West, represented by the holy trinity of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) and World Trade Organization (WTO) would solve the problems of poverty, inequity and inequality, and injustice on the planet. Modernization programs via loans from the IMF and WB were poured to “developing” countries after WW2. By the 1980’s the structural adjustment programs that were imposed on “third world” countries resulted in loans that the local economies could not afford to repay, sinking them deeper into debt. In the Philippines, the Marcos government and succeeding leaders saw overseas Filipino workers as domestic assets that can be exported and their remittances would shore up the homeland economy and pay the interest on these loans. We became the “servants of globalization”, as sociologist Rhacel Parrenas would say. Karl Gaspar calls overseas Filipino workers “Mystic wanderers in the land of perpetual departures”.
Filipino theologian Melba Maggay said we were culturally circumcised. Other scholars said we developed a split self and as a society there is now a great cultural divide between the masses and the educated elites. Vicente Rafael writes of white love — of Filipinos falling in love with their colonizers. But these losses are not absolute; decolonization is the experience of knowing deep in our bones that we weren’t really converted and colonized. The seed of our wholeness is alive in our Loob, in our pakikipagkapwa, in our sense of Dangal and Paninindigan.
***
Although there were earlier scholars who wrote about Filipino national and cultural identity, it wasn’t until the 70s when a Filipino indigenous psychology was articulated by Virgilio Enriquez as a part of the movement of “indigenization from within” in the social sciences. Zeus Salazar, a contemporary of Ver Enriquez, also came up with his Pantayong Pananaw (for us and by us perspective) and historians came up with Filipinolohiya — all of these developments were part of an indigenization that emerged from the rubble of colonial constructions of the anthropologists, missionaries, linguists, and who defined the Filipino through their own colonizing lenses.
When I found the work of Virgilio Enriquez and Sikolohiyang Pilipino, I found my voice and my pride and faith in being Filipino (even though this Filipino name is still contentious and a bit unsettling). Kapwa, Loob, Pakikiramdam, Dangal, Paninindigan — all of these indigenously -informed values cognitively made sense to me because it is what I have always embodied but didn’t cognitively acknowledge. My body began to remember and honor these values.
Instead of buying into deficit theories about racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S., I began to advocate for Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices starting with the Babaylan tradition. I followed the tracks of other Babaylan scholars (Carolyn Brewer, Agnes Miclat, Katrin de Guia, Fe Mangahas, Alicia Magos, Mary John Mananzan, Mila Guerrero, and many others) and their inspiration led me to other sources of indigenous and cross-cultural knowledge from non-western, animist, and shamanic cultures and their practices from much older civilizations than the West.
I was also influenced by Indian scholar Ashis Nandy, black feminist schoalr bell hooks, Chicana scholar/ activist Gloria Anzaldua — about learning to love one’s self again by doing deep archeological work to bring to the surface the psychic and epistemic wounds of colonization. My deepest desires for myself and my kapwa became: to no longer be the split subjects of empire; to embody our Kabuuan at Kagandahan ng ating Loob; to overcome our mimicry and obsequiousness; to recognize and acknowledge the Beauty and Strength of our Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices. These are all still alive in our submerged mythic consciousness and imaginations and subverting our attempts to be thoroughly modern.
***
After two decades of academic focus on the process 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, Coast Miwok peoples lived next to one another for thousands of years? This Land has held you, grounded you, gave you Home; what have you given in return?
These questions pointed 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, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and to indigenous elders who became my mentors.
I began to learn about the local indigenous history of CA and the lingering impact of native genocide on today’s indigenous California communities. I learned about the creation stories of Sonoma Mountain written by the tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, Greg Sarris, who, by the way, is part Filipino. I make pilgrimages to sacred sites and make offerings; I introduce myself to the creek, the redwood trees, to the hills so that they may know me. I started to build relationships with indigenous elders and culture bearers. Today I am with a cohort of local folks who are engaged in an ongoing ceremony of repair and reconciliation as we reckon with the historical trauma of native genocide.
During the years that I didn’t return to visit the homeland, I was learning how to Dwell in Place; learning how to fall in love with this Place where I’ve lived for 40 years — more than half my life. On this Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok and Wappo lands, I acknowledge that I am a settler and immigrant and I’m only now beginning to embody a sensuous relationship with the beings who have lived here since time immemorial: Sonoma Mountain, Copeland Creek, Gravity Hill, Coyote, Hawk, Squirrel, Stone, Fog, Rain, Hawk, and so on.
Sometimes I wonder where my body would be today if I was taught how to dwell in place as a child…if I had an indigenous and culture-based education.
Beyond my personal practice, I am paying attention to the indigenous turn in our decolonization movement in the diaspora. Young decolonizing culture bearers in the diaspora are reclaiming and re-inventing cultural practices and producing indigenous-themed cultural productions. At the Center for Babaylan Studies we encourage participants to do ancestral research and re-claim their indigenous lineages. We are learning to value and practice rituals of grief-tending of the losses under colonial history; we engage with rituals of revival and reclamation of indigenous practices; — signaling a beginning movement that reclaims our native creative brilliance and intelligence. The practice of batok, hand-tapped tattooing, Filipino martial arts, Ablon healing arts, baybayin, bangka carving, laga weaving, babaylan research, plant and herbal medicine practices, publishing bilingual children’s books, Fil Ams returning to the land as sustainable farmers, etc — are thriving in the diaspora.
I am hoping or I’m envisioning that this kind of flowering of the beauty of our Indigenous practices and knowledge systems is also happening in the homeland not only for the sake of the tourist industry but because we truly love the islands of this archipelago. And what is love but learning how to Dwell in Place?
In the diaspora, we grapple with questions of appropriation, of romanticizing and exoticizing, and potential patronizing traps of these practices. We do not shy away from the call outs and criticism that come our way. We are intentional in our moves to foreground Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices as the necessary response and critique to the malaise of modernity.
Today I see social media facilitating conversations between homeland and diasporic communities; on FB and IG young people are discussing Filipino precolonial and indigenous beliefs and practices; there’s a growing interest in mythic storytelling and revitalization of indigenous languages. Many are using podcasts and webinars to deepen connections and build virtual communities.
Technology facilitates these positive developments but it is on the ground, in local and placed-based practices of dwelling and community building where Kapwa and Ginhawa thrives. I cannot emphasize this enough.
***
To be indigenous is to be in relationship with the Land and all that implies. This is what I needed to learn more deeply. Isn’t this what the indigenous peoples have been trying to tell us for centuries? To know the Land and the human and non-human beings of the Land where one’s ancestors have always lived is what makes the indigenous consciousness so different from our modern minds. Our separation from the Land created disconnection, forgetting, and fragmentation that characterize so much of our modern consciousness.
For years I asked myself what I can do about this feeling of overwhelm when I reckon with the personal and cultural losses under colonialism. I have felt burdened by the ecological devastation of my homeland and the displacement of the Lumads from their ancestral domains. I felt helpless. In my helplessness I prayed for answers. I was surprised by the answer that whispered to my heart and soul; the whisper brought me back to the importance of the local and the small. The inner voice said that it is only by choosing to act locally can I make a difference, reduce my carbon footprint and reduce the material clutter of my life. Slowing down and narrowing my lens of seeing through the indigenous world view is antithetical to the dominant culture’s maddening impulse to go fast and scale up and buy more. But the more I slowed down, the more my heart leaned closer to the tone, texture, rhythm, sounds, and shapes of the place I call home now. Keying in to the creation stories of the Wappo, Pomo and Coast Miwok who have lived in this place for tens of thousands of years, I began to know the sensuousness of Dwelling in a Place. It feels like falling in Love… with a tree, a creek, a mountain.
As I spend more time in the garden weeding, gathering herbs, watering, or simply humming a song as a way of thanking the plant beings; as I spend more time in Holy Tunganga, the art of doing nothing; as I practice a daily walking meditation; as I am cooking for friends and then washing dishes and cleaning house — my drivenness, my impulse to do more, my lofty goals of doing good in the world — all give way to a way of being in the world that simply says: Enough.
I play a thought experiment where I imagine that more and more people in the “first world” are choosing this way of being and I see the slowing down of the economy and the closing down of shopping malls. I see the proliferation of community-based land trusts that takes Land out of real estate market speculation. I see alternative and intentional communities and economies of sharing and gifting. I see people being happy in their tiny houses. I see people being content to stay home and spend more time creating a hand-made life. I see people wanting to know what that word — KAPWA — means…and they get it.
Just the other day, I visited a 900 acres site of unceded territory of the Kashaya Pomo which is now under the care of a small group of queer black and indigenous young people whose mission is to dwell in a Place that honors the Kashaya Pomo and practice indigenous stewardship of the land with an eye towards climate resiliency and building a community “through training & programming focused on antiracism, decolonizing conservation, inspiring resilient leadership, promoting artistic expression, and community health.” They are part of a movement called “Just Transition” that is thinking about shifting from extractive economies to regenerative economies. (https://climatejusticealliance.org/about/)
As young people’s modern values and world view change and shift to an indigenously-informed paradigm, then perhaps the madness of resource extraction on the remaining ancestral lands will cease. And indigenous peoples would no longer be driven out of their lands and pushed to assimilate; there will be a movement of peoples wanting to learn indigenous ways of seeing and being.
I suppose it is a good sign that many folks are now turning to spirituality in order to find ways of coping with the psychological impact of the global climate crisis. I point to the global climate crisis as a bottom line because the crisis is caused by the relentless plunder of the earth’s resources in the name of an ideology that sells the dream of an urban consumer culture as the only dream worth pursuing. But this dream is no longer what the younger generations want and it’s making their parents and grandparents nervous.
A lot of young people are choosing to eschew their parents’ materialist values, rejecting definitions of success that value competition, individualism, and the Darwinian ethos of survival of the fittest. They want meaningful lives with a purpose. They want to feel connected. They are looking for something more grounded. They want to serve. They want community. They call it “quiet quitting”. They call themselves fugitives from modernity.
Oh, I know I may sound naive. But I am sure I am not alone. In fact, I feel the stirrings of communities around the world rising up around this decolonial moment. Parents are deschooling their children and building Earth Schools. Young people look for Elders who can take responsibility for mentoring them. Writers, poets, filmmakers, artists, architects and designers are imagining indigenous futures. Intentional communities are on the rise. The Black Lives Matter and indigenous-led movements of Land Back or rematriation, of paying land taxes for stolen lands, and personal and collective acts of repair and reparations are emerging all over Turtle Island.
I hope similar movements are also happening in the Philippines and in the global south.
***
As we take a long look at the consequences of historical trauma, how do we reckon and think deeply about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as Filipinos? I think of the culpability of our educational and schooling system that has taught us a world view that renders indigenous peoples as lagging behind a linear trajectory of development, as primitives in need of rescue and redemption, in need of assimilation into the nation-state. So they, too, learn to see themselves from a deficit perspective.
Yet, so many environmental philosophers and ecologists point to the traditional ecological knowledge or TEK and indigenous wisdom of indigenous peoples. In the paradigm-shifting work of David Graeber and David WEngrow in The Dawn of Everything, they re-write the narrative of human social history by citing many of the indigenous civilizations that preceded Europe’s modern evolution that led up to the contemporary issues of social inequality. By citing the complexity of these indigenous social arrangements they upend the narrative of linear — from primitive to civilized — conceptualization of human history.
The indigenous vision is cosmic, Earth-bound, elemental, and poetic. The Earth is Alive and she is speaking. Listen to the voice of indigenous peoples who know this in their bones. We know it in our bones, too, except we have developed cultural amnesia. We can heal from this forgetting.
When indigenous peoples are evicted and displaced from their ancestral lands, I am culpable. We are culpable. To the extent that we have bought into the notion of progress, of becoming civilized, of being educated, of becoming modern — all of the attitudes we internalize and the habits we practice contribute to the manic phase of global capitalism that makes resource extraction mandatory.
My grief over my own complicity and culpability is deep. Undoing and unlearning what this modern culture has taught me is going to be my journey for the rest of my life. Returning to the wisdom of my ancient indigenous roots and the practice of listening to the Land is my gratitude practice.
***
So what would a decolonized culture-based education look like if we pay attention to this ecology of remembering and turning our gaze on the Land?
How would our bodies feel when we start to remember the stories of how we were disconnected from the Land; how we were disconnected from our ancestral roots?
Where does the wound of disconnection show up in our bodies?
How does your Breath/Hininga feel when you raise up these memories in your awareness?
When we begin to remember the ancestral and family stories that were buried, negated, invalidated, and dismissed, who is there to welcome these stories home and receive them?
What are the Ceremonies of Grief that we can create and how can we build containers for our Grief? How do we grieve well so that grief becomes Gratitude?
How do we restore our Ginhawa?
As we decolonize our memories, our bodies, what new desires emerge for ourselves and for the future generations? As we consider the rise of the oceans and the warming of the planet, how do we imagine different ways of Being and Doing?
For many decades I have focused on the life of the mind through intellectual pursuit in understanding of history, politics, culture, resistance movements. Seeing how my personal history fits into a larger story of empire and colonialism, corporate globalization, and now global climate crisis — has been illuminating. And if, as Taoist, indigenous, Buddhist teachings say, it’s all interconnected and it’s all Sacred, then I am learning how to train my mind to see the layers of stories that I carry in my body.
***
Our sense of wholeness/kabuuan ng pagkatao, depends on the condition of the breath/Hininga…and is embedded within the context of culture and community and the absence or presence of social support systems. Breath has a spiritual dimension and if social integration must be considered in looking at Ginhawa from a biological and psychological lens, it must also include ecological awareness and the importance and relevance of Filipino indigenous knowledge systems and practices (IKSP).
And since Ginhawa is embedded in culture and community, it is not individualistic as in the Western sense of a self-mastery that is often disconnected from culture, community, history, nature, Land/Place, and spirituality.²⁷
I can look back now on the last four decades of my life and feel gratitude for the work that continues to calls me to Decolonize and Re-indigenize!
For the young people who are just beginning this journey, may I give you this:
Understand colonialism and imperialism but know that this is not your full story. Learn about indigenous cultures in your places of origin. Know that your body has been displaced by history and you ended up a settler on indigenous people’s lands in the Philippines or on Turtle Island or somewhere on the planet. Know how the shadows of History can be uncovered, acknowledged, and healed. With this new awareness, you will learn to dis-identify with the Story of modernity, patriarchy, supremacy, and capitalism. You will write new stories. You will make different choices.
Most importantly, you must find or create community with those who care as you do. At the forefront of our awareness these days is the global climate crisis. When I think of the polar caps melting faster than ever, I visualize the 7000 islands of our homeland and I wonder how our kapwa will survive in a water world. If the people are to move inland and up to the mountains, will there be enough Land for all? Or will we learn how to live on water as some of our kapwa like the Badjaos have always done?
Yes, it is heartbreaking to hold this awareness. For me, I feel the Grief sitting on my chest and this is why I have to learn how to alchemize my fears and tears into an awareness that I am but a speck of dust swirling with the energies of the cosmos. I may be a body smacked with a racial, ethnic, cultural, class, and gender labels in a society that makes a mockery of such differences and weaponizes them to keep disconnection and alienation as the fear that drives the denial deep in the recesses of the brain… but I am also Stardust.
I do not believe the story of apocalyptic endings, nor in anything that puts too much faith in tech utopias. Make your way the best way you know how, Mabel McKay, Pomo medicine woman, always told her people. Find and court your Elders and Ancestors. They will show the way.
Once, a friend gave me a poster that said: What kind of Ancestor are you going to be? I had this on my wall years ago — like a beacon pointing in the direction of where I needed to move towards. That pointing led me to Poetry, to Taoism, Buddhist teachings, and teachings of Vedanta, to indigenous literature, to the practice of meditative qi gong. In my limited access to a body of an expansive codified knowledge about Filipino indigenous knowledge systems and practices, I found resonances in these ancient traditions of Asian animist cultures; after all Hindu and Buddhist and Islamic influences can be found in the Philippines just below the sheen of western and Catholic influences. My body knows these ancient healing practices. Sometimes a story, a flash of insight, a remembered fragment, the floating scent of fragrant ylang ylang oil washes over me and releases all the toxic dramas of a restless mind. This is how I am learning now about embodied practices — a belated liberation from the trauma of an educational system that privileged the mind over body and spirit.
I remember the story of Mangatia, the weaver of heaven and earth in the Kapampangan creation story. I remember the story of Mungan, the first babaylan of the Manobo people. I remember the story of the babaylans who were chopped up and fed to crocodiles by the Spanish colonizers. I remember the story of my magical grandmother who raised seven children by herself when her husband died young. I remember the famous Luna brothers — Antonio and Juan — and their not-famous brother, Joaquin, who is my great grandfather. They made history as revolutionaries — in battle and in the arts. I remember the beauty, strength, passion, humility, resilience, wisdom, and the integrity of my Kapwa. How else would we have survived our violent colonial history?
Let our mythic imaginations enliven us…again.
What stories would you want your descendants to remember? Who do I want my descendants to remember? I want them to remember their ancestors. I want them to know their history in all its complex entanglements and how it shows up in their lives. I want them to know their non-human kin — the trees, creeks, mountains, oceans — and I want them to feel the heartbeat of the Earth as she breathes. I want them to fall in love with a Place and be claimed by her. I want them to look up at the night sky and be swallowed by her vastness…and then be reminded that Mangatia is weaving heaven and earth with her needle and thread and you can see where the knots are because they sparkle like diamonds. I want them to put their hands in the soil and feel the fertile magic of microbes that keep everything alive so that we may be fed. I want them to know Coyote, the village chief beloved by his people, who is married to Frog Woman…and all the inhabitants of Sonoma Mountain where all the animals were people once and will be again.
If only we can shift our gaze towards this gentle horizon of the Local; if only we can decide to stay put so that we may become more intimate with our landscapes; if only we no longer feel the need to escape to exotic destinations; if only we no longer need to fill our houses with stuff to feel satisfied and enough; if only we no longer need to buy the sales pitch of glamor and celebrity — we might begin to quiet the hunger in our modern soul. We might begin to turn to a more beautiful Story.
The future is indigenous, says Fr. Albert E. Alejo, poet, philosopher, friend, and mentor. In my little corner, it already is.
In closing:
When I think about culture-based education for Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora, may your pedagogy be Land-based. How can the Land become the pedagogy so that education will be about creating a generation of land-based, community-based intellectuals and cultural producers who are accountable and whose lifework is concerned with the regeneration of our indigenous knowledge systems and practices? How do we educate land-based intellectuals, philosophers, theorists, medicine people, historians who will embody our indigenous intelligence? How do we revitalize our indigenous intellectual practices and relationship with the Land?
May all these questions and all that is remembered and re-membered create a decolonial path so that our bodies and the memories we carry deep in our cultural genes may inspire us to imagine our indigenous future.
