By: Lily Mendoza, Kapampangan

(A response to the "Op-Ed: How Indigenous Filipinos are Erased from FAHM and Why You Need to Do Better")

I have watched the reaction of community members unfold in response to Margaret Palaghicon Von Rotz's recent op-ed piece, published on One Down, and while I am heartened to see her so passionately embrace her Indigenous roots, I find gaps in her approach in this discussion and want to encourage a broader community discourse--one without threat of erasure, blocking, or cancellation. 

So, thank you, One Down, for providing this platform and opportunity.

If I may rehearse Margaret’s key argument, I’d understand it as follows: 1) It is wrong to claim an identity not your own by appropriating its material culture; 2) For non-Indigenous Filipinos wanting to reclaim a non-colonized identity, what they need to realize is that “Filipino culture is not colonized or lost forever,” and that, whether speaking of adobo or lumpia, both colonial culinary imports, there’s creative adaptation going on (i.e., no need to feel unoriginal for having been colonized; 3) Hence, “Filipino identity and culture is not about colonization and profound loss” and that “[c]entering your identity and culture on the idea of undoing colonialism erases the agency of the very people who fought to survive it with their flesh and blood.” 4) Rather than “exoticizing themselves” by “getting tattoos and wearing colorful fabrics,” and reaching for “ancient indigenous blood” to feel they matter, non-Indigenous Filipinos can “find [alternative] inspiration” in the social movements of the past (e.g., the People Power Movement, the Philippine Revolution, the struggles of the Delano manongs, etc.) as well as in ongoing struggles around gentrification, defunding the police, BIPOC solidarity, etc. and, lastly, 5) Insistence on reaching for a deep Indigenous past is false decolonization and does real harm and erases the voices of real Indigenous peoples.  

On the surface, the argument seems straightforward and unproblematic. Mindless cultural appropriation is wrong, who could argue with that? After all, history is replete not only with the genocide of Indigenous peoples but also the theft of their cultures, including their intellectual legacies. In the Philippines, the nation-state, committed to modernization (which, by definition, means leaving behind “traditional/anachronistic” ways of living), routinely reaches for displays of native dances and staged-managed “Indigenous” performances in its national celebrations and tourism promotions as a way of projecting an image of having “our” own  unique “national” identity. But it does so all the while condoning the ongoing endangerment of Indigenous communities through unregulated state-sanctioned corporate mining, logging, fishing, and other extractive operations--notoriously landing the Philippines in second place ranking, next only to Brazil, in the rate of murder of Indigenous activists and land defenders worldwide.

So, when it comes to tokenism and empty deployment of “Indigenous” signifiers, there’s enough  said already.

But what of Margaret’s beef with what she sees as unwarranted FilAm “appropriation” of Indigenous material culture (e.g., tattooing, the donning of malongs, the traditions of FAHM/Filipino American History Month, PCN/Pilipino Cultural Night, etc.)?

“Indigenous” as defined by whom? And toward what investment?

The op-ed author, by virtue of her claim to Indigenous authority (as “Igorot”), presumes to judge which diasporic Filipino interactions with Indigenous traditions and material culture should be allowed and which not. But this begs the question of what we mean by the term “Indigenous.” 

Is it a matter of blood quantum? If so, by how much quanta of blood? I.e., how much Igorot, T’boli, Manobo, Ifugaw, Ayta, etc. blood must one have to qualify as “Indigenous”? One hundred percent? One-half? A quarter perhaps? A drop? What about  a full (or partial)-blooded US-born, modern-schooled Igorot or Ibanag descendant living a largely modernized/urbanized existence--is he or she still “Indigenous”? And who gets to say? 

That the author fails to delineate the meaning of her use of “Indigenous” can lead to another kind of appropriation. In appearing to freeze (or as academics would put it, “essentialize”) identities into static categories, she also effectively erases the socio-historical processes and conditions that give form and materiality to such “identities,” as though she’s claiming that such identities just are (i.e., inherently “Indigenous”) instead of the result of millenia of human-other species interactions and co-dwelling in a given place or ecology.

By the same token, the author implies that “non-Indigenous” Filipinos (and here, I presume she’s referring to the more mainstreamed Kapampangan, Tagalog, Visayan, etc. cultures) also simply are  (i.e., “non-Indigenous”)--so much so that the only history they can rightfully/authentically claim as their own is that which is circumscribed within the more recent anti/colonial era (e.g., the Philippine Revolution, the People Power Movement, or, for those in the diaspora, that of the Delano manongs, and other more recent struggles). They cannot, nay, need not, claim an older, earlier, past than that; to do so is to do damage to themselves and to the “real” Indigenous communities whose voices purportedly “get erased” in the process.

And here, I expose a deep flaw in the argument. Why set an arbitrary end-point to the tracing of one’s ancestry? What were these now-mainstreamed regional identities before they became “non-Indigenous”? Is non-Indigeneity in their case just a natural condition? What to do with the vast expanse of time when the older ancestors of Kapampangans, Tagalogs, Visayans, etc. likewise lived well on the land, following land-based and land-taught practices and observing their own cosmologies and ritual practices of keeping life alive before agricultural, urban, and colonial, settlement overtook and assimilated them? Do we just arbitrarily cut all that out and say, “You’re only allowed to trace your lineage this far back but no further”? 

The fact is, all our human ancestors lived indigenously prior to the advent of city-state-building and modernization. That is what the evidence says. Widen the historical lens beyond the mere 500 years of modern history (and beyond the last 5,000 to 10,000 years of agricultural settlement) and we get human ancestors of all tribes and geographic locations across the globe (yes, including European) knowing how to live in reciprocity and in relative balance and sustainability with their respective land bases. Indeed, contrary to the usual stereotype of “savagery” often associated with pre-colonial peoples, scholars of the deep past mark such peoples’ lifestyles as expressions of “the original affluent society” (Marshall Sahlins). They had “unlimited means to meet limited wants” and “[were able to find] everything they needed to survive and thrive in the biological richness that surrounded them,” according to John Gowdy, scholar of ecological economics. 

This, for me, is what the potent sign of “indigeneity” references--not simply bloodline, but a particular way of living. This is not to suggest erasing contemporary material differences that now define the unequal fates of modernized Filipinos and those of our Indigenous kin that necessarily raise questions of justice and accountability. We must indeed talk about the politics of inter-group relations and their eventual shaping by supremacist power relations (e.g., Kapampangans’ racialization of the Ayta). But for this, we need to do responsible historical analysis and not simply issue “dos and don'ts” or “right and wrong things to do” without proper contextualization.

Which leads to the next critical question for me: What exactly is the purchase of attempting to reclaim indigeneity? Is it just to be able to “use” such for self-empowerment and the overcoming of colonial trauma? Or perhaps to gain a platform for visibility and representation and thus claim status and prestige now that Indigenous resurgence appears, all of a sudden, to be the latest newfangled “craze” everywhere in North America (in Canada, especially, but now increasingly also in the US) given the emerging consensus around the unsustainability of our modern industrial way of life in the face of climate change?

Or is “indigeneity” rather a marker of something deeper and much more consequential than any of these more immediate (and perhaps self-serving) motivations--nay, deeper than the surface significations of lumpia, tinikling, tattoos, PCNs, FAHMS, and adobo? This is a question the author doesn’t address. 

What are FilAms doing when they turn to native dances and “Indigenous” traditions?

I will speak for myself.

I come from a community of FilAms and FilCanadians whose journey began with a need to find some other ground on which to base one’s presence in the North American diaspora as Filipinos formerly known for their penchant for assimilation into white mainstream culture (earning them the moniker, “the invisible minority”). 

When I came to the US in 1995, a nationalist discourse on “Filipinoness” called Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP) or Sikolohiyang Mapagpalaya (Filipino “Liberation” Psychology), became the primary vehicle for that search. It was a decolonizing framework first pioneered in the Philippine academy in the 1970s by the late Dr. Virgilio Enriquez and introduced to the US FilAm community during his Visiting Faculty stint at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s.  

The rise of Sikolohiyang Pilipino in the US brought tremendous empowerment to the FilAm community, providing various practitioners (particularly those in mental health and social work) for the first time with a values-affirming framework that served as a counter to the “cultural deficit” model that for so long had defined “dysfunctionality” or mental or social “problems” within the Filipino community as inherent in the culture itself. Instead, within the framework of SP, colonial oppression, epistemic violence, internalized racism, and loss of traditional support systems began to be understood as key factors in a lot of the presenting problems, thereby mitigating the tendency to internalize the pathologies of the colonial condition.

Indeed, I would say that the first-time valorization of formerly disparaged identities (as SP has done) always begins with the phenomenon of that one “great refusal.” This is the  moment when one for the first time begins to shake off notions of being (supposedly) “primitive, backward, or inferior” to assert instead a public presence as “Proud Pinoy” or, for that matter, “Proud Igorot” (Filipino equivalents of African American assertions that “Black is beautiful”). This is what Sikolohiyang Pilipino, in effect, made possible in its irruption into what had previously been a heavily deconstructive-dominated discourse in the US academy (heavy on critique but not on any positive reconstruction of cultures and identities). It filled a gaping hole crying out for some kind of an affirmative representation of Filipino subjectivity within the US mainstream discourse. 

Leny Mendoza-Strobel would describe the transformative impact of SP in the FilAm community thus:

 Sikolohiyang Pilipino not only historicized and problematized the values that have come to be identified as Filipino: (hiya [shame], utang na loob [inordinate sense of indebtedness], amor propio [pride], pakikisama [smooth interpersonal relationship]) through previously Western-imposed psychological models; [it] also offered an alternative conceptual framework that came to be known as “Filipino core values” (kapwa [shared being], pakikiramdam [empathy], paninindigan [conviction], dangal [honor]).

Throngs of Filipino American college students would call this their ‘born again’ Filipino experience….

And here a note on the homogenized use of “Filipino” is necessary: for as long as the historic relations between the US and the Philippines served as the primary context of engagement, the nationalist discourse of SP within the FilAm community tended unwittingly to homogenize FilAms into a singular group, regardless of their diverse ethnic backgrounds. This is quite similar to the way the terms “Native” and “Black” have been used to lump together as one quite culturally-diverse populations--not because they are essentially one people, but because they share common histories of genocide, dispossession, enslavement, etc. So vis-à-vis the US, all of our lineages from what have come to be called the “Philippine” islands are positioned by the anti/colonial discourse as one subject people, not because we are one in essence but because we happen to have undergone a common experience of historic colonization, racialization, and continuing marginalization within the US society. 

“Identity” therefore is always constructed in difference; it is relational, not fixed or essential and must be read as such. Outside that context of engagement when it’s just us Filipinos speaking to one another, we inevitably confront and wrestle with our internal diversity and ethnolinguistic differences, histories, and political positionings. 

What has happened in our FilAm community from that initial introduction of SP as a decolonizing framework is the evolution of our understanding that the identified “Filipino” characteristics (of kapwa, loob, damdamin, ginhawa, etc.), upon closer scrutiny, are actually remnants of much older ways of living that are in fact the true wellspring of those values. It is the earlier land-based communities--the Itneg, Subanon, Dulangan, Mandaya, etc.--that are the source of the “habits” we now reference in the singular as “Filipino.” All of our pre-colonial ancestors in the archipelago with their collective, place-based, land-taught wisdoms of sustainable living embodied Indigenous modes of being that continue to persist underneath the idiom of a modernized “Filipino” sensibility. And it is these older wisdoms that flash and summon, like jewels in the rough of modern society, when we begin to quest for our roots in an “Indigenous turn.” 

What are the stakes?

 And here we get to the heavy weight of my concern over different meanings of indigeneity. Far from (merely) serving as a signifier for anti-colonial recovery of a bit of general pride as Filipinos, the term for me points towards the big question of our time. How do we live justly and sustainably in place without destroying either that place or other places (by aggressing upon them to serve our own needs)? In other words, how heed the “schooling” that climate change, and now the coronavirus, are throwing down? Clearly, they are asking us to turn to whatever is there in our various ancestries--whether “Filipino,” Native American, Black, or even European--that was in fact sustainable, beautiful, just, worthy. South Indian writer Arundhati Roy notes in this regard, “[Indigenous Peoples] may look like the keepers of our past, but [they] may really be the guides to our future.”

This, for me, is what makes “indigeneity” such a live issue for our time, not just for identity politics. All of us are now being called upon, today, in this late hour, to re-learn ways of living that can pull us back from the brink of planetary catastrophe--ways of living still remembered by our Indigenous kin, albeit under conditions of so much duress. Whether nationalist or ethnonationalist, attempts at Indigenous reclamation gain their most crucial import precisely in enabling practical movement away from apocalypse and toward what is truly sustainable and just.

And thus: what better way to join our Indigenous kin in their struggle to keep that vision alive  than by us, no-longer-Indigenous Filipinos, weaning ourselves from a death-dealing mode of living that ultimately leads to Indigenous demise (such as when our demand for gadgets purportedly meant to make our modern lives “better” requires the mining of the last bit of metal or mineral from under their feet, to mention only one example)? Doing so necessarily entails striving to re-learn, alongside them, the old ways--before human domination of nature spiralled into war, hierarchy, privatization, enclosure, enslavement, accumulation, and all the other markers of what we now call “civilization.” 

Returning home to our Indigenous Soul 

I suggest that this is what the attraction to Indigenous material culture ultimately signifies for those of us who’ve had their hearts broken open by the beauty of this alternative way of seeing. Inside all of us is an imprisoned Indigenous Soul crying out for its home again in us, as Indigenous writer Martin Prechtel put it: 

It was nature, wildness, this undomesticated spirit that fled when it got enslaved, insulted, maimed, beaten or scared off. This trespass on one’s personal nature or soul is what Mayan Shamans considered the prime source of illness to humans. 

The epiphany may start with a quickening in the bones through the first time hearing of the sound of gong, or the thrumming of the kubing, the exquisite sound of the hegalong, or the witnessing of the rhythmic dances of the Ayta, or, for me, the first-time hearing of the mythic stories of Mangatia, the old Woman Spider weaving the world into being, the Mountain God Apung Sinukuan, the Great “Dapo” Crocodile on whose back the world rests, the great battle between siblings Aldo (Sun) and Bulan (Moon) that gave birth to the seasons and the separation of Night from Day, all told beautifully and ritually by Kapampangan culture-bearer, Mike Pangilinan. Something in us quickens--what mythologist Martin Shaw refers to as the stirring in us of “bone memory,” making us long again for that which we know in our deepest cultural DNA but have since been forced to abandon. 

We fall in love.

And it is that love that now compels us to seek tutelage and listen deeply to  the stories of the still living bearers of cultural wisdom. Invariably, like those of all Indigenous peoples around the globe, we learn they are stories of grief, dehumanization, displacement and dispossession, and in many cases, cultural disintegration with the loss of their land bases. They say, “Your way of life is killing our way of life.” And that silent charge, intuited from the stories told, cuts to the quick, making us realize it is not them who need saving, but us--we who have forgotten what Indigenous peoples call the “Original Agreement with the Wild” (of not taking without giving something back in return, taking only what you need, always asking for permission, etc.).

But those are not the only stories. If one has the eyes to see and the ears to hear, there are also the stories of resilience, courage, fierce love for the Holy in Nature, and always, no matter the cost, the tenacious determination to keep making beauty amidst the grief as an offering to the Holy.

The question of what is honorable and mutually empowering in regard to relating to our Indigenous Kapwa is multilayered and complex even for our fellow Filipinos in the homeland. How much more so then for those of us in the diaspora? The work itself is fraught--one that we’re having  to do on other peoples’ stolen land and all while we’re enveloped in highly-technologized environments with only fragments of memory and extant stories from our family lineages and those of others as clues to lead us. We do what we can to learn and listen. We wrestle with the complexity. We build accountable relationships. 

It is crucial not to approach this sacred work with rigid missionary certainty--which kills the Indigenous Spirit in the very attempt to champion it. In reflecting on the “inevitable human problem of tribalism and the tragic results of ethnocentricity,” Martin Prechtel warns us of the dangers of a  preoccupation with purity. He writes, “[A] people’s deep attachment to their homeland and customs is necessary, wonderful and life-giving, but should never be allowed to fuel a destructive chauvinism that excludes the rest of the world’s love for its own life and land.” Indigenous recovery requires Indigenous largesse of spirit in the very act of pursuing such a love. 

May our engagement with one another as Filipinos in the diaspora bear witness to this love which, after all, is the defining spirit of Indigenous life--wide, expansive, winsome, humble, generous, and full of heart.  Siya nawa. May it be.  

For an unabridged version of this article, see On “Filipinos” and the Question of the “Indigenous” | by S. Lily Mendoza | Nov, 2020

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S. Lily Mendoza was born and raised in Pampanga, Central Luzon, Philippines, home of the Ayta peoples. She is Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan and an Elder at the Center for Babaylan Studies. Together with her husband, Jim Perkinson, she studies indigenous history and practice at the Martín Prechtel's School: Bolad's Kitchen. Some of her writing can be accessed at S. Lily Mendoza and she can be reached at mendoza@oakland.edu.