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Working with Indigenous Communities in the Philippines - Ep 72
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On today's episode, Jessica speaks with Dr. Oona Paredes, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Oona discusses her understanding of Indigenous Peoples growing up in the Philippines and how her work with the Higaunon Lumad of northern Mindanao has directly challenged those early beliefs. She also describes how Western concept of Indigeneity doesn’t cleanly fit in the context of Southeast Asia. She discusses how she and the the Higaunon Lumad communities she works with have jointly shaped their work together and her vision for this work moving forward.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/72
Links
- Heritage Voices on the APN
- A Mountain of Difference: The Lumad in Early Colonial Mindanao
- https://www.alc.ucla.edu/person/oona-paredes/
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Oona-Paredes
- http://oonaparedes.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Heritage Voices Episode 72
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Heritage Voices, Episode 72. I'm Jessica Uquinto, and I'm your host. And today we are talking about working with Indigenous communities in the Philippines. Before we begin, I'd like to honor and acknowledge that the lands I'm recording on today are part of the Nooch, or Yeap Pupils Treaty Lands, the Dinata, and the ancestral Pueblo and Homeland.
00:00:26
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Una Paredes
00:00:32
Speaker
And today we have Dr. Una Paredes on the show. Una Paredes is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. She is the author of A Mountain of Difference, the Lumad in early colonial Mindanao published in 2013, as well as multiple academic articles on indigenous peoples in the Philippines. And she was born and raised in the Philippines.
00:00:58
Speaker
So welcome to the show, Una. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So I'm really excited about this conversation. Like you and I talked about before we started, there's lots to cover here that I think will be new and interesting for our listeners. So I'm really excited to dive into all of that. Also, I didn't mention this beforehand, but it's kind of funny to be
00:01:22
Speaker
talking about the Philippines today because it is snowing pretty hard here in Southwest Colorado, so it feels a little funny to be.
00:01:30
Speaker
talking about a tropical place when it's snowing pretty good. But yeah, so to get us started, could you talk a little bit about what got you into this field? How did you get interested in this kind of work?
Journey to Anthropology
00:01:45
Speaker
I sort of stumbled into anthropology in college. I guess I've always been interested in culture and different cultures. Growing up in the Philippines, it's a very
00:01:54
Speaker
multicultural kind of place, every new island you go to or every section of an island that you go to, there's a different language, a different culture group, different heritage. And so I was exposed to all of that from an early age. And so I've always been interested in that kind of stuff. And when it came to deciding on what to major in, I think I was already in my
00:02:19
Speaker
junior year and I still had to pick a major. And I sort of realized that all the books on my shelf were about culture and about anthropology and ethnography. And so I ended up majoring in anthropology with a minor in history. And between my BA and graduate school, I interned at Cultural Survival Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And if you're not familiar with cultural survival, they're one of these NGOs that work on
00:02:48
Speaker
I guess, sort of trying to, they work on indigenous rights, or at least that's their focus. There's a lot of stuff about preserving disappearing cultures, but that kind of approach. And in that internship, I thought, well, I'd really like to do this, but I realized I didn't know that much about the indigenous groups in the country that I grew up in, in my own homeland.
Promise and Focus on Mindanao
00:03:15
Speaker
It sort of started from there. I eventually landed in the community that I've been working with for over 20 years now, about over 25 years, I think. And that's basically how it happened. It just sort of, just sort of fumbled along and, and, and landed where I did. Yeah. So, I mean, with the Philippines having so much diversity and, you know, so many different people and islands and
00:03:43
Speaker
places you could have worked, how did you choose the community that you've been working with for the past 20 years? Oh, well, yeah, that's a good question. I think most, when most people think about the Philippines and indigenous communities, indigenous peoples, they think of the North, the Igarots are, I think, more famous around the world than any other
00:04:06
Speaker
sort of subcategory of indigenous minority groups in the Philippines. But I thought, well, you know, I'd like to learn more about where I grew up. And I'm from the island of Mindanao, which is in the south. And a lot of people in the Philippines are, you know, just look at Mindanao with trepidation. We're sort of really considered to be a very dangerous sort of area, was the frontier for Filipino settlers and, you know, in terms of internal migration.
00:04:33
Speaker
And so, but that's where my family's from. And, but it was hard. It was really, it was really difficult to find ethnographies of such groups in Mindanao. And I landed upon one by a anthropologist slash priest named Gabriel Casal. And it was on the tiboli of Mindanao and they're from south, they're from Cotabato, which is in the north, sorry, the south.
00:04:59
Speaker
west portion of Mindanao. And it was, you know, a really lovely sort of, I would say sort of a B flat type of ethnography, very sort of romanticized sort of something produced in the 60s, I think his book was. And so initially I went over there and sort of again, fumbled my way through, met some cool people, talked to some people, hung out. And I thought maybe I can, you know, go back
00:05:22
Speaker
and do something serious here. It just so happened that at the same time that same year and that same sort of period when I was in Mindanao, one of my uncles was dying and he happened to be my favorite uncle and he was from my home province in the north. I'm from the northern coast of Mindanao Island. So I went over there and he was dying. Well, we didn't know he was dying then. He was in a hospital and he actually wanted to talk to me.
00:05:51
Speaker
And so I went over and talked to him at the hospital and he said, why are you studying the tiboli when we have our own tribes, what we call them in the Philippines, a tribo? We have our own tribo in our home province. And I didn't know that. And so he told me, yeah, I talked to my
00:06:15
Speaker
this, this colleague of his who I knew, I said, all right. And a few days, a couple of days after that, he died. And so I basically, it was sort of, I mean, not to be too melodramatic about it, but it literally was a deathbed promise for me to go, you know, go to, to, to this, this, this community. And so I
00:06:37
Speaker
I managed to arrange a trip up there, and I've just been working with them since. Everything just sort of clicked, and they, I think, in part, were willing to tolerate my presence because of my uncle, because he had worked with them in the past. He was a local government official. He was a mayor of the town that he was in, and he had spent a lot of time in that community. There's been, and still ongoing, there's been a lot of
00:07:04
Speaker
There's been a sort of an ongoing insurgency, a rebel movement in the Philippines, and a lot of it is in Mindanao, especially in the more remote sort of upland areas where a lot of the indigenous minorities live. And he had been helping the tribe out in terms of keeping the peace and making sure that they got left alone by both the military and the rebels. And so that was part of his work.
00:07:34
Speaker
as mayor and I think he just sort of endeared himself to just the tribe as a whole. So it's a very sort of a very personal type of relationship, a very personal reason why I went into this. But at the same time, I guess the core reason in terms of academic research was that I was just so shocked that I had never heard
00:08:02
Speaker
of these people at all in the whole time I was growing up in my home province. That was going to be my next question for you. I learned about them. Yeah, no, it was like a real eye opener for me. And I just, you know, one of those things where you just sort of wake up and realize how blind you've been and how colonized your mentality has been that you're so focused in terms of
00:08:26
Speaker
you know, who you are and the history of where you're from, that you just look at it from a very sort of Western outside perspective. You don't really know what's been going on, where you grew up. But the minute that I, you know, sort of learned about them, I started asking other people, like, you know about this, right? And they're like, yeah. So maybe it was just me. But even my grandmother knew about this. She remembered when she was small that they would come down.
00:08:54
Speaker
to trade with her father who owned a dry goods sort of shop. They would come in and trade rice, for example, for whatever they needed, hemp, and those sorts of products. And yeah, so it was a really profound learning experience for me, just getting to the point where I found
00:09:22
Speaker
the community to work with. So yeah, it was a journey, let me tell you. Well, that, okay, so that ties in to basically what we were talking about before we got on air, which was about how indigeneity is a little different in the Philippines and Southeast Asia than what a lot of our listeners are going to be used to hearing about, especially the show tends to
00:09:51
Speaker
heavily focused on the Americas and we've had some guests from other places, but predominantly the Americas. So can you get into, explain a little bit about some of the differences there?
Indigeneity in the Philippines vs. Other Regions
00:10:05
Speaker
Oh, sure. And I guess I should say that the differences in context and the differences in terms of how indigeneity is used and constructed and understood and
00:10:21
Speaker
All of that is itself a subject of academic theorizing, among those of us who work with indigenous minority groups in Southeast Asia, because we do use the terminology from the Americas, from the North, but we use the scholarship and the terminology used by indigenous scholars in the North. That particular understanding of indigeneity is really hegemonic around the world.
00:10:51
Speaker
We keep trying to still, I mean, maybe harmonizing these definitions is the wrong way to look at it, but we still were using that language to talk about a completely different context. But yeah, so that's also very interesting in terms of theorizing about it. Okay. Well, the key difference here is that even though Southeast Asia was colonized, it was colonized in a very different way. We didn't have
00:11:16
Speaker
kind of settler colonialism that you have in the North, sorry, in the Americas, or in Australia and New Zealand, certainly not white settler colonization. But there is a lot of internal resettlement and internal colonization that has gone on over the centuries, and even more significantly in the post-colonial period in Southeast Asia.
00:11:44
Speaker
So you have in Southeast Asia, then a paradox where it's true that practically everybody there is indigenous in the literal sense, where, you know, we're really from there. Like me, I am, you know, a native of Mindanao. Okay. And that's a true statement. My mom's family is from there from as early as we can trace back.
00:12:09
Speaker
I have ancestry from other parts of the Philippines, but that's the place that I consider home in my home town, my home province. But at the same time, there are so many different types of people, different types of communities in the Philippines, different types of ethnic groups. And some of these groups basically were more closely incorporated into the colonial system, whereas others were not.
00:12:39
Speaker
or they were incorporated in a very different kind of way. I don't like to use the word assimilation versus assimilated versus unassimilated because I think that's very misleading. We're talking about political incorporation, economic incorporation and all of that. So some groups are more incorporated than others and transformed in particular ways. And these are the
00:13:01
Speaker
ethnic groups that are now the majority that form the mainstream of Filipino society. And they do the sorts of things that we think of as being Filipino culture by default. And then you have these much smaller communities, usually in the uplands or less accessible areas in terms of highways and main waterways and that kind of stuff.
00:13:30
Speaker
And a lot of these communities either resisted incorporation into the colonial system or we're just sort of, or the colonial government never bothered that much because they were so hard to get to. And these communities are indigenous minorities in terms of the dynamic between the mainstream community, mainstream groups and minority groups.
00:13:57
Speaker
This kind of dynamic between them has been quite problematic most of the time, has been exploitative and it's that sort of relationship that has given rise to the use of indigenous peoples when we refer to the indigenous minorities. So the Philippines is the only country in Southeast Asia that uses the English words in indigenous peoples. And so it's shortened to IP
00:14:25
Speaker
in the Philippines, or we use some native words like Lumad or Catutubo, which basically means native or indigenous. And so, yeah, so the paradox is you have a country of natives, but some people are designated indigenous, using capital I indigenous as basically a political designation. And because their experience, even though it's their experience of
00:14:51
Speaker
oppression and marginalization and really colonization in the present day has been at the hands of other natives. That's the key difference between the Americas and the white settler situations and what's going on in the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia. It's like we use indigenous and indigeneity as a political designation rather than a, I don't know what
00:15:19
Speaker
what sort of designation you could call it in the Americas, because you have that paradox of you have indigenous people in a country of natives. Right. Okay. Sorry, this is really, my brain's going a million miles an hour. This is super interesting. I think it's interesting too, because one of the things that you're saying is making me think of
00:15:43
Speaker
you know, in the Americas, there was all of these same situations, I guess, if you will, where, you know, some indigenous groups, you know, conquered others or enslaved others or, you know, like, it's not like there's not, there wasn't that complexity here.
00:16:04
Speaker
It's, yeah, but you're right. Like it gets portrayed as if, I don't know, it all begins and ends with colonization, right? Yeah. And I mean, you know, when we, when we talk about colonization now, we're talking about European colonization, you know, so that was a very, uh, that, that, that was a distinct, uh, type of colonization that, that did happen in Southeast Asia and in the Philippines have been colonized since the 1500s.
00:16:32
Speaker
Yeah, and then under Spain and the United States in the first half of the 20th century. And those are two very different types of experiences. But the colonial experiences was profound and really shaped what the Philippines is now. And same thing for other parts of Southeast Asia.
00:16:52
Speaker
But they did not have that. While there were white people who did move over there, it just wasn't the type of settler colonization that we know and understand and what is our default understanding of how indigenous peoples became minoritized in their own lands.
00:17:18
Speaker
Oh man. Okay. So much more to discuss. We are already at our first break point, but very excited to keep talking to you once we get back.
00:17:28
Speaker
Okay. Uh, we are back from our break and I want to ask you, I want to keep going with this topic a little bit further because it's really interesting. And so, okay. So you're living in LA and I'm curious what your thoughts are, you know, growing up in the Philippines, how
00:17:51
Speaker
how indigenous communities were portrayed in the Philippines, like, you know, like maybe in the media or just conversations that you heard.
Media Portrayals of Indigenous Groups
00:17:59
Speaker
And then maybe how that's different from what you're seeing and hearing in living in LA now. Well, yeah, it's very similar, but also different, similar, but distinct. The way we think about indigenous peoples in the Philippines, and I'm just speaking really broadly.
00:18:18
Speaker
here generalizing about the population, just based on how I grew up and conversations I've had with people and as well as the educational system I went through, is that there's very much this civilizational discourse that's attached to the idea of Indigenous peoples, very similar to how you have a lot of stereotypes about Native Americans and Natives and Indigenous peoples, not just in the North, but elsewhere in the world.
00:18:47
Speaker
So by the civilizational discourse, I mean that some people are more primitive than others or less evolved culturally or less complex culturally. And that's definitely at play in the Philippines. And part of that was very strongly influenced by this kind of very racialized thinking that came out of Europe in the late 1800s and was definitely sort of
00:19:14
Speaker
kind of solidified during the American colonial period in the Philippines, which started in the late 1890s. And so there's even a kind of theory of cultural diversity, population diversity in the Philippines
00:19:29
Speaker
that we were taught in school when I was growing up. A lot of people still believe this, and it's still propagated in many ways, even though it's already been debunked definitively by scientists, by anthropologists. It's the waves of migration theory. That theory goes that the reason why in the late 1800s, early 1900s,
00:19:53
Speaker
why by that time you had basically the sort of very, very hispinized, Christianized mainstream groups that were dominant in the archipelago. And you also had these much smaller groups that were, I guess, to the general public
00:20:12
Speaker
sort of tribal with all the stereotypes that come with it. Smaller communities that were not very Western, not very comprehensible in terms of Western culture. And so the idea of behind ways of migration is that the reason why you have this sort of cultural diversity in the Philippines
00:20:33
Speaker
now is because thousands and thousands of years ago, you had different waves of people coming in to the archipelago with their present day cultures basically fully formed. And the level, if you will, of cultural achievement and sophistication that they were able to display had to do with their level of evolution, their whatever step on evolutionary ladder they were.
00:21:00
Speaker
on and also behind that, the subtext of that is that the reason why you have the mainstream societies were the ones who converted to Christianity and became very Western and very Hispanic, mainstream Filipino culture is because they were the last wave of migrants that came and therefore they were the most evolved.
00:21:22
Speaker
And they were the ones who were able to sort of grasp this sort of highly evolved European culture. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous when you think about it now. But when we were growing up, this was taught as sort of scientific. And a lot of people still buy into this idea that and of course, what goes hand in hand with that is that is the notion that the indigenous minorities today
00:21:47
Speaker
that the reason why they are different from mainstream society is not because of different historical processes that acted upon them and how completely or incompletely or how differently they were incorporated into the colonial society, but that they're just one, that they're primitive, they're just more primitive as a subspecies of humans.
00:22:13
Speaker
It's an extremely racist idea. It's definitely a racist idea. It's somehow in their biology. And then two, that their traditional cultures that they practice today are pre-colonial. How they are today and their languages, their traditions, their songs, their dances, their understanding of the world is somehow pre-colonial and was not
00:22:39
Speaker
transformed profoundly by the colonial experience, even though the archipelago had been colonized since the 1500s. So those things are wrapped up in this whole waves of migration idea. And you can only imagine, I'm giving you a lot of information right now, but when you think about it, if you think about it more,
00:23:03
Speaker
of stew on it for a while, you realize that this can have how profound the impact could be on how indigenous peoples are perceived in the Philippines and how mainstream society thinks of them and where they belong in terms of mainstream society. So there's a lot of very racialized prejudice that indigenous minority groups are subjected to
00:23:32
Speaker
And at the same time, they're also being exploited and being co-opted in mainstream society's efforts at decolonization. And because they're seen as sort of pre-colonial and therefore that's somehow who we were supposed to be.
00:23:51
Speaker
if we had not been colonized so it's it's like there's all these different sort of weird forces acting upon them when they're you know it's basically damned if you do damned if you don't if you're if you're a one of these you know in a member of one of these communities they can't win and they're just being used as tools by mainstream society for their own sort of
00:24:13
Speaker
because self-actualization, if you could call it that. And by decolonization, I'm talking about sort of an intellectual movement in the Philippines that's been very, very important in the country since the late 1800s. It's not a new thing like it is in North America. It's been going on since our sort of national sort of heroes and forefathers in the late 1800s that eventually formed the Philippines as the nation, I guess, as a concept.
00:24:42
Speaker
they were already doing that. And indigenous peoples were an important component of that, basically exploiting, co-opting them, co-opting their cultures. So yeah, I know it's a lot. Yeah, no, that actually sounds in some ways more similar to what happened in Mexico, from my understanding, you know, with basically, you know, like the Mexican Revolution and trying to form this like Mexican identity and
00:25:08
Speaker
really centering that around, you know, La Raza, Kosmika and this mix of cultures and indigenous cultures, while at the same time, indigenous people are being discriminated against. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yep. Yep, exactly. Okay. So thinking about all of that, obviously you went into working with this community without even realizing
00:25:34
Speaker
you know, that they were there, that they were indigenous. And so can you talk about, you know, the process when you started working with this community and maybe what some of your, your learning moments were through that process of, you know, I mean, kind of challenging some of your, what you were initially taught and things like that.
00:25:55
Speaker
Oh, well, yeah. Well, first of all, the community that I work with, the group in general, they are a Lumad group and the Lumad are the indigenous non-Muslims of the South. And there are quite a few different Lumad groups, about 18 sort of major groups and then a lot of subgroups under that.
00:26:17
Speaker
The group I work with is called the Higa Onon. And among the Higa Onon, there are many different subgroups, a lot of cultural variation. And I work mostly with people in the eastern part of Misamis Oriental Province, so the Higa Onon Lumad.
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, there were a lot of sort of major learning or aha moments along the way. And a lot of it had to do with the prejudices and the biases that I grew up with. I, you know, as enlightened as I thought I was, being in the field and actually meeting these people and getting to know them and listening to them, spending time with them, I, you know, there was a lot of unlearning that I had to do.
00:27:01
Speaker
as far as how I believed the world was. And so that was a very interesting experience for me. And there were a lot of things that I learned from just sort of listening and in the course of my work. And this is, again, a very, very long period. First of all, how the idea of assimilation versus not being assimilated, that's really a farce.
00:27:30
Speaker
in terms of how people really live and present themselves on a daily basis. One way I learned this was exploring people's life histories, individual's life and employment histories. And when I was in the field, you know, it was so tempting to look at the different people I interviewed as sort of, oh yeah, you know, so they're this way, the way that I see them now, they're this way. You know, they're doing traditional sort of upland farming.
00:27:57
Speaker
They live in really, really small settlements. They live in these kinds of houses and that kind of stuff. They have traditional gardens and fish in the rivers and live like indigenous peoples in a very romanticized sense. But then talking to people, some of them had actually done military service. Some of them had worked in the logging companies that their own people got into trouble fighting.
00:28:25
Speaker
Some of them had joined the rebel movement and fought to fight the logging companies that were there. Some of them had even gone to work in Saudi Arabia as migrant workers.
Diverse Indigenous Experiences and Military Service
00:28:37
Speaker
And so in the course of any given adult's life, they had gone through these different sorts of experiences that if you had caught them at a different time, you would say, oh, they're fully assimilated versus seeing them at a different time. Oh, they're not really that assimilated. And so that whole thing I realized was just a complete farce. Yeah, another significant thing I learned was that there was a lot of meaningful contact between
00:29:05
Speaker
the ancestors of these communities and the colonial figures in the Spanish period. That's actually what my book was about in 2013. I was going to say my first book, but I don't have another book out yet. It's still working on it. It's my only book right now. But that is basically the subject of a mountain of difference. I went into the colonial archives in Spain and tried to find traces of these communities and see what I could just pull out of these archives.
00:29:34
Speaker
that in combination with the oral traditions of theirs that I knew about, you know, I came up with a very interesting history, I mean, interesting to me, because it really blew up the whole idea that the people that we identify as indigenous minorities today, as opposed to mainstream Filipinos, that they were somehow isolated from the colonial experience, that they somehow were not touched by it, that they somehow
00:30:01
Speaker
did not have a colonial experience. And that's why they're different. So it really just destroyed this, not just dismantled, but just annihilated that whole idea. And again, that was another eye-opening experience for me. And that led to the realization. And it's supported by their oral traditions, which I've been studying more. That's my current research topic now, or part of it.
00:30:29
Speaker
picked up on is that it's this contact actually with colonial figures that helped create what we identify as traditional cultures today among the Lumad.
00:30:42
Speaker
And I don't mean that it was the key to traditional cultures today, but that what we see as traditional, in quotation marks, traditional Lumad cultures today, which most Filipinos perceive as being pre-colonial cultural traditions. And their deepest traditions that they hold to today were profoundly influenced by this colonial contact.
00:31:09
Speaker
And it's embedded in their oral traditions. And so not only that, but that their oral traditions, the oral traditions themselves, emphasize change and innovation throughout their history as a people. That's what the traditions are about. And so that basically turned my whole understanding of tradition and heritage
00:31:34
Speaker
completely upside down and inside out, that to them, their idea of heritage and tradition, what counts to them as, you know, what's important to preserve, is their history of innovation, the history of the changes that they made. And these are the new things we did.
00:31:53
Speaker
That's how they remember their specific ancestors. This ancestor is the person who introduced this new practice. This is the person who came up with this new innovation. This is the person who did this and who did that. Their understanding of tradition and heritage is completely different from mainstream society's understanding of heritage and tradition, which is about
00:32:21
Speaker
making sure things didn't change so much about preserving the past, about basically salvaging ancient things and making sure that they don't disappear. So it was a completely different take that I did not expect going into it. But in terms of aha moments, those are definitely the aha moments for me in terms of my own work.
00:32:46
Speaker
But to them, of course, it was not an aha moment. They're like, yeah. Well done.
00:32:55
Speaker
No, I said that. Yeah, not done. Yeah, no, it was great because I was just, you know, constantly just sort of being, you know, constantly falling off my chair, you know, when I talk to people because I'm just so surprised. Oh man. Okay. Yeah. So I'm still trying to get it, you know? So we're at our second break point, but I really want to keep diving into some of this when we get back. So everybody hold tight and we'll be back here in a second.
00:33:23
Speaker
All right. We are back from our break. And I want to ask you, you mentioned earlier about, you were talking about your first book and you mentioned that you were working on another book.
Oral Traditions Book by Higa Onon
00:33:37
Speaker
And so I'm curious if you could tell us more about that book. Okay. Well, there are actually two books. The book that's my book that I'm writing and that's based on my field research, the research that I got permission for from the community, from different communities.
00:33:53
Speaker
is about traditional political authority and how that's changed over the years and how the challenges that indigenous leaders face in their increasing interactions with the national government. And it's been very, very interesting, a lot of questions about
00:34:13
Speaker
tradition versus modernity and that sort of debate and how the idea of identity and heritage is being debated internally in these various communities. So that's still in progress and that's going to take another couple of years, I think. But the book I'm really excited about now is a book that's not going to be available in the States, but it's a
00:34:37
Speaker
book that's being put together, that has been put together by several people in one of these communities. It's basically authored by a DATU named Budluo Anzihagan, and he's, I guess, what you would call a canter for the oral traditions. And he was assisted by one of his cousins and by my research assistant,
00:34:59
Speaker
and some other people over the years, and it took them 10 years to put this together. And it's something that I helped with in, as I would say, a supporting and supervisory capacity. And this is a book of their oral traditions written by them, and it's entirely in their language, and it's going to be, I think, probably maybe the second real book that's in their own language, the first one being the New Testament.
00:35:26
Speaker
which was put together by foreign missionaries. So we're very excited about this book and it's going through the editing stage right now and we're hoping to print it and distribute it to the community and to the Indigenous People's Education System in their ancestral land area through the Department of Education in the coming months. And what it is is basically the story of their ancestors
00:35:52
Speaker
from I guess the moment of, it's not the moment of creation, but it starts with a flood and then the peopling of their area and the first ancestors and the succeeding ancestors after that and how they became who they are and ended up where they are as a people.
00:36:10
Speaker
And it's called Suppanod the Baligian. And it's just basically the oral history of Baligian, which is one Higa'onan community in Mindanao. Yeah, that's what we've been working on more recently. And this will eventually become another book that I'm hoping to, that will come out here when we translate it into English, or I translate it into English and annotate it. But right now it's basically being produced by the community for the community.
00:36:38
Speaker
Um, and I've been so, I feel so, so incredibly lucky to be a part of it. Yeah. Okay. Um, I'm curious about this when you're talking about, uh, you know, that it's in their language and just, I'm just thinking like logistically, you know, cause I imagine that's, that's not a language that you speak. Is that true? And then how you, how you did that work? Oh, well, I, I can understand it.
00:37:04
Speaker
I speak it in a ham-handed way. I can read it. I'm going to read enough to spot errors in terms of editing. And yeah, so I actually do know this language. I'm just not fluent in it in terms of speaking. But it's something that started out as a side thing. My project was this traditional political authority thing. But everybody I spoke to, all the traditional leaders said they're called datus and baes.
00:37:31
Speaker
male and female leaders, they all said, well, you need to actually learn the panod to understand what you're looking for in terms of the questions about like how people become traditional leaders and what that whole idea of leadership and political authority, you know, what's behind that is the panod. And so the panod is their oral traditions. And then so in the course of learning about this, they're like, you know, let's write it down because there's no, it's not written down like
00:38:01
Speaker
properly, and the guy that I, the main, Dato Budlua, basically told me, you know, people aren't learning this anymore, kids aren't learning this anymore, and so when I die, this is all going to be gone, or a lot of it's going to be gone. He was pointed out to me by Dato's in other parts of Higa Onon land as being the one who's the most knowledgeable of all this. So basically this is his version of the Panud and him, and he can't really write
00:38:31
Speaker
But so he's had help from his cousin who's very literate and other people like my research assistant who's from the community. And so they would, you know, after farming, like maybe a couple of nights a week would get together, you know, with a lamp or, you know, a flashlight or this is like a kerosene lamp and then work on it, writing it down on yellow pad. And then my research assistant would type it into computer when he got back to town.
00:39:01
Speaker
And that's how they worked for 10 years. And I provided funding, support, moral support, support in terms of like, how do we do this thing? How do we write it down? And, you know, it was really a labor of love for them. And yeah, and it took 10 years. It's 10 years labor. And when we finally presented the draft to the community, different parts of the community,
00:39:24
Speaker
just a couple of months ago, everybody was really, really excited about it. And, and that's how I know that it's, you know, this is a good thing that we've, that, that they've done. So yeah, that's, that's really is, it's, it's, I emphasize that it's authored by them and there it's, it's, it's going to have their names on there as author. That's awesome. I, you know, fortunate to be part of it. Yeah. I mean, I was, when you were first talking, I was wondering if, if your research assistant was involved in the community in some way, shape or form, and if that helped.
00:39:54
Speaker
with all of that. So it sounds like that, that was a big part of it as well. Yeah, no, it was, it was a really big part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Community is really excited about this book, you know, and, and obviously I'm sure that has a huge impact. Like you've been working with them for all this time and you know, it started with your uncle, but now you have this thing that they wanted, you know, you've shown that you can
00:40:16
Speaker
deliver on what they want. So what is next? What direction are y'all going from here?
Community Involvement in Ethnographic Work
00:40:25
Speaker
Well, one interesting sort of impact of this is just the process of working on it. I mean, over 10 years, most people didn't pay the working group any mind, but once I was sort of
00:40:38
Speaker
getting more involved again, especially with the editing and stuff like that, then it sort of cost a bit of a stir and people were concerned that who's going to own the oral tradition and all of that. And so it generated a lot of interesting conversations and debates about this. And at the same time, in the process, it revived all this interest.
00:41:01
Speaker
in the panode again, even in communities where people had already converted to Christianity, and they were looking at the Bible as their new panode. That's been an interesting thing that's developing in its process. One of the other things here is that, not directly caused by this, but
00:41:20
Speaker
we've joined up with them, is that the IP Indigenous Peoples Education Program, which is basically put together in this part of the Philippines by
00:41:32
Speaker
other Higa Onons, younger Higa Onons who had gone to college and gotten teaching degrees. And they're certified as teachers and they basically developed over the years this thing that they now refer to as IP Ed, IP Education. A lot of those people working there are in their 30s and they're in IP Education and they're very interested in
00:41:56
Speaker
you know, compiling these sorts of things, a lot of things that they can make into books and use as teaching materials in the school system to promote this sort of indigenous curriculum.
Training Indigenous Ethnographers
00:42:08
Speaker
And so we've been in conversation with them and they're very interested in doing more stuff.
00:42:15
Speaker
And so I'm very excited that I'm going to go back in a couple of months and we're going to actually workshop all these different things that they want to do. And so my role here is going to be as somebody who's just sort of going to be training them how to do this. So they're going to be ethnographers. I mean, they're already doing it as amateur ethnographers, but I'm going to provide what I know and try to kind of
00:42:41
Speaker
make it make it make it a more formal thing and we've talked about maybe co-authoring you know academic articles where they analyze these things and so it's going to become it's sort of a more more collaborative than this panode was
00:42:57
Speaker
And so that's the sort of the new direction that I see my role, at least in this going, because for me, it's I think more meaningful if they produce this stuff themselves and it should not be me who's an outsider who's positioned as an authority on culture. Outsiders shouldn't be driving the research agenda here. And so by providing my
00:43:21
Speaker
I guess I'm sort of training them to be their own researchers. And so that's the direction that I see this going that I would like for it to go. And so it wouldn't have been possible without this work on the Panud, which was really kind of where it started, I think. And that just happened. Like I said, that's just a byproduct of the
00:43:41
Speaker
the project that I got permission for, which is a study on political authority and me interviewing different indigenous leaders in the field. So yeah, so that's sort of what's going on. So I mean, I think I'm getting a sense of this already from what you're talking about, but I want to ask you this specifically. So what's the best part of this work for you?
Personal Growth and Relationships in Community
00:44:07
Speaker
Oh, well, definitely. Well, you know, you get excited about, you know, learning and all of that stuff. But for me, the best part really here has been the relationships that I've formed.
00:44:18
Speaker
It's not just that I made friends when I got there. We all like to be liked and everything. There were some people who hated my guts when I first got there because I was such a pain. But over the years, after the first decade or so, after I'd been gone for a while and I came back, there was this one guy who really hated me. He just couldn't stand to be around me. He would just sort of
00:44:38
Speaker
make, you know, make happy noises and stuff and just stomp his feet and leave when I would show up. When I came back, he embraced me and called me his niece. And so that was kind of interesting for me. And it was really suspicious at first. But I guess it took that long for them to actually trust and accept me instead of just tolerating me. And it just sort of I think has been quite good and much more productive since then.
00:45:07
Speaker
So the relationships that I...
00:45:09
Speaker
that I made over almost a quarter of a century. Part of this is watching the kids grow up and them having their own kids. My research assistant, for example, Jerry Obelno, was two when I met him the first time. He was a toddler. I have a picture of him with no clothes on and he has a bowl cut. It's very, very funny. But he's done with college. He's been working for an NGO and he's now going into the Department of Education.
00:45:38
Speaker
to join this IP Ed program. And so to watch, to watch these kids grow up. And, you know, I guess it feels like it's a very special feeling, I think, to, to sort of to be a part of people's lives and watch them change and grow and become, you know, adults and do these amazing things with their life and, you know, the personal journeys that they go through to get there. And so I've
00:46:06
Speaker
I've been really honored to watch all of that with the kids that I met when I first got there, who are all grown up now with their own kids. So that to me has been the best part of it. That's the part that means the most, not any of these sort of journal articles or anything like that. Those are the things that I...
00:46:25
Speaker
that I hold on to when I start to question my career choices. I know that feeling. Yeah. So how often do you get to go spend time with these communities? Well, it had been a while because of the pandemic, but I was there recently for about three months, about three months. And like I said, I'm from Mindanao and it's in my home province.
00:46:53
Speaker
I get to also go home for better or worse and at the same time go do that. So that's sort of interesting. But before I was at UCLA, which I joined in 2019, I actually worked for the National University of Singapore. And so I was very, very close. It was like a three hour or three and a half hour flight or less to the Philippines, direct flight from
00:47:20
Speaker
Singapore. And so when I worked there and I worked there for almost eight years, I was able to go on brief trips, go there for a week, go there for a weekend, go for a couple of weeks. And so I was there quite often over that stretch of time, but I hadn't been back for a long extended period until just earlier this year, from August to November.
00:47:46
Speaker
So, and then I'm going to go back again in February and March to finish up this book and hopefully be able to hand it over. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's how often I, not often enough, I think.
Aspiration for Indigenous Scholars
00:48:02
Speaker
So is there anything, anything that you're like, oh, I feel like this needs to be talked about or mentioned, anything that we missed?
00:48:13
Speaker
Okay. Well, I mean, we talked about, you know, what direction, you know, I think it's going, what direction I'd like for things to go. I guess I wanted to maybe add to that a little bit, is that what I would really like to see in terms of where I work is to have the communities themselves have the power to be their own ethnographers. And I don't mean just sort of that they collect, you know,
00:48:43
Speaker
these sorts of data, but that they become the gatekeepers of their own cultural knowledge. And even though there's a process now where they have to, that outside researchers have to be given free prior informed consent, it's a FBI process, it's in the law. In practice, it's not really as ethical as it sounds and it's easily exploited. But I'd really like for people in these communities to become ethnographers themselves and to become
00:49:13
Speaker
recognized scholars in their own right. And not just as sort of research assistants, but as co-investigators, co-researchers, co-authors, a true community partnership in terms of academic research for them to be the recognized authorities that people turn to when they have questions about, you know, that concern their particular populations. And to be in this
00:49:39
Speaker
in that capacity interact with other indigenous communities around the world. And beyond that, I would really love to see, and it would be a fantastic outcome if you had IPs, indigenous peoples or post-colonial natives or minority communities studying mainstream majority colonizer communities.
00:50:05
Speaker
I would really love to see that, to have, for example, a Higa Onan Lumad write an ethnography about people in LA. I think that would yield very interesting results. And I think that would really turn everybody's world upside down. And I can't wait for that to happen. Yes. Yes.
00:50:25
Speaker
Well, on that note, I mean, mic drop, no need to add anything there.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:50:30
Speaker
I just want to say thank you again so much for coming on the show. So everyone make sure you check out from Cornell University Press Mountain of Difference, the Lumad in early colonial Mindanao. And we will all look forward to your next books.
00:50:46
Speaker
And so excited for you that that oral history project is wrapping up and everyone's so excited. And again, just thank you so much for coming on and bringing a new, very interesting perspective for our listeners. Thank you very much for having me. It's been a lot of fun.
00:51:10
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Heritage Voices podcast. You can find show notes at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash Heritage Voices. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Google Play Music Store. Also, please share with your friends or write us a review. Sharing and reviewing helps more people find the show and gets the perspectives of Heritage Voices amazing guests out there into the world.
00:51:32
Speaker
No, we just need more of that in anthropology and land management. If you have any more questions, comments, or show suggestions, please reach out to me at Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. If you'd like to volunteer to be on the show as a guest or even a co-host, reach out to me as well, Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org.
00:51:50
Speaker
You can also follow more of what I'm doing on Facebook at Living Heritage Anthropology and the non-profit Living Heritage Research Council or on Twitter at LivingHeritageA. As always, huge thank you to Liable Enqua and Jason Nez for their collaboration on our incredible logo.
00:52:15
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.