Babaylan Files

Contemporary Ethnography Across Disciplines

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 03:19:00 +0000

Contemporary Ethnography Across Disciplines
Conference Abstracts

See Keynote Panel below:

Keynote Panel Discussion (90 mins)

Maintaining Balance in Research Climates for Indigenous Academics

Paul Whitinui (Chair), School of Maori and Indigenous Studies, University of Canterbury,

Christchurch

The four keynote speakers for this conference will speak on ways of Maintaining Balance in

Research Climates for Indigenous Academics. The conference committee has provided six

questions to help shape the nature and scope of the panel discussion. The questions for

consideration include:

1. How might one balance the cultural demands from indigenous scholars' host

communities with institutional demands from the dominant academic culture?

2. How do indigenous scholars maintain their own sense of community within their host

culture while working for mainstream academic institutions?

3. How does privilege work into establishing a viable research climate in "the

academy"?

4. What is your concept/notion of reciprocity in doing research? What notion should we

strive for as academics?

5. As an academic, how do you manage institutional positioning of yourself as "the

other"?

6. How have things changed for indigenous scholars in academia since, roughly, the

new millennium?

Keynote Panel Speakers:

Rogelia Pe-Pua, The University of New South Wales, Head of School, School of Social

Sciences and International Studies

Ahukaramū Charles Royal, Professor of Indigenous Development, University of Auckland

Anoop Nayak, Professor in Social and Cultural Geography, University of Newcastle

Ruth Behar, Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies, University of Michigan.

ARNIS by Rene J. Navarro

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 20:36:00 +0000

Here is one of my essays on arnis de mano as it was integrated into our own culture. The usual arnis vocabulary is Spanish. Sometime, along its evolutionary path, the native masters developed their own language and movement. Is there an attempt to study our native martial arts among the organizers of our ethnic/indigenous movements? Perhaps I haven't looked in the right places, buti I've not found any serious effort in this direction.

Arnis: The Language of Combat

By Rene J. Navarro

Consider different words translated from the original language to English. Very often, the meaning is lost because the English equivalent does not quite carry the import of the original word. To convey the connotation of a word, it may be necessary to go into an extended footnote. It gets worse when as in acupuncture or Arnis de Mano a mere number is assigned to designate a point or a strike.

In acupuncture, numbers are often used in the West to designate the meridian point. Stomach 25 is lateral to the navel or Conception Vessel 8. That does not say much really. But if we look at the original name of Stomach 25, we realize that it is "Tianshu" and that Conception Vessel 8 is "Shen que." Tianshu is the Axis of Heaven -- meaning the North Star, thus making an allusion to the macrocosm and the division of the body into Heaven and Earth. Shen Que is Spirit Gate -- the place where the Spirit makes its entry to the foetus. Now that no doubt implies much, much more than Conception Vessel 8. Knowing the meaning of the original name is indeed important in understanding its meaning. We can go on with a many more examples in acupuncture.

In arnis, the same problem arises. For example, in the Tagalog region, "Tagang San Miguel" means the sword strike (Taga) of Saint Michael (San Miguel). It is basically a diagonal downward strike from right to left usually with the left foot leading. It's often given the number "1" in the alphabet of strikes. The different implications of the name are lost because the number is not adequate to carry them. True, "1" may refer to "1 o'clock" and using the pattern of man, it is the left shoulder. But "Tagang San Miguel" refers to more than that. It refers to Saint Michael as well and the posture he assumes in Philippine iconography. It is in short a strike that describes not merely the trajectory of the blade or stick but also the dynamics of the body, the way the shoulders are angled, the way the whole movement flows in a powerful fusion of different elements. He is also, as everybody knows, on the logo of the leading street drink called, well, Ginebra San Miguel, not the popular beer but a potent gin also called cuatro cantos or four corners referring to the square shape of the bottle.)

Another example: "Tagang Buhat Araw" means a strike (Taga) coming from (buhat) the sun (araw). It is in the system of Arnis Lanada of Porferio Lanada number 8 in the sequence.; in the system of Balintawak arnis of the late Venancio Bacon it is number 12. It is also number 12 in Lapunti Arnis de Abanico, the system founded by the late Filemon Caburnay and Johnny Chiuten. But "Tagang Buhat Araw" implies a whole world of meaning. It is not only that it is a vertical downward strike coming from above, it is also a strike that requires that the sun be behind the practitioner; and the opponent should not see it because he gets a glare from the sun that's directly shining on his eyes.

Still another example: "Sungkit." This word describes a movement that includes a poking gesture, but not merely a poke, it's really a flick basically of the wrist, that imitates the act of pulling down a fruit with a hook. I don't think there is an English word that is the equivalent of the original here. Perhaps "pluck" may be used, with an asterisk of course. Most of the popular systems of arnis do not include it or many other names in their abecederio (alphabet of numbered strikes).

"Panastas"has an affinity to "sungkit" in that the tip of the stick or the blade is the focus of the trajectory. "Panastas" however refers to an entirely different technique. It mimics the act of unravelling a thread from a cloth with a knife or blade. Therefore the target is not the eyes; it could be any other part of the body but the direction is usually upward vertical. "Panastas" likewise suggests that it is not really a stick technique but one for a bladed weapon such as a knife or a bolo.

"Sungkit" is different from "Saksak" which is a thrusting movement. "Saksak" means not just a flick of the blade which would blind or nick but a deep forced entry into the body or face using the tip of the weapon..

We can go down a long list of words that graphically depict the concept behind the strike.

Imagine if numbers were employed in tai chi chuan to represent the movements in the form. It is difficult enough to conceive of "Peng" as "Ward-Off," but say, we call "Peng" as number 1. Or "Rollback" as number 2 and so on down through the 8 core techniques. It's even worse if we just numbered all the movements in sequence, from 1 to 108. In the Sword form of the Yang Family, we can appreciate the imagery and allusiveness of "Monkey Presents the Peach of Immortality," "Seven Stars of the Big Dipper" and "Immortal Points the Way." There are limits to translation, as many experts have realized. "Yin-Yang" will always be "Yin-Yang," Tai chi chuan will always be Tai chi chuan, not Grand Ultimate Fist, Qi will always be Qi, not simply energy or vitality.

When I studied arnis with the legendary Amante "Mat" Marinas in the early 70s, it was at first basically learning the "numbers" of the different strikes. Dan Inosanto and Porferio Lanada were likewise using "numeros." Each of the 12 strikes had a corresponding number. Every now and then, Mat would tell me the Tagalog names, apparently drawn from the Luzon region, including Manila, Bulacan, Batangas, and Quezon. I learned later on that he was giving the names used in the book "Mga Karunungan sa Larong Arnis" by Yambao, the first book ever on arnis de mano.

The book "Karunungan" is written in Tagalog. At this writing (June 2004), no English translation has been done on it, as far as I know. Mat gave me a few pages of the book when I wrote an article about him in 1973.

Later on, I asked my father to get a copy of it in the Philippine National Library. With the description of Mat and my own background as a guide, I began studying the different techniques from the book. I analysed the different names and how the techniques were applied in an actual fighting situation. To me, it was a revelation to understand the names and descriptions of the strikes and movements.

I realized how different the techniques are when one studies them in the language that they were originally described. Even the counting -- isa (one), dalawa (two), tatlo (three), etc. -- was different. It had a different cadence and rhythm to it. Like a Philippine dance, arnis assumed a beat, a syncopation. "Bulusok ng dalawang kamay o sandata" and "indayog ng katawan" gave me ideas that a mere numbering system would not have.

When I studied Lapunti Arnis de Abanico in Cebu and Bantayan Island in the Philippines, I pressed my teachers to use the original Visayan names of the strikes. It took more time to study the names and write them down but it was a satisfying endeavour. Certainly more than a number, "Witik" has a nice rhythm to it that conveys a certain panache.

How then do we translate the original words into English? Since some words are almost impossible to translate, possibly the best solution for some practitioners is to study the art in the original language. But since not everybody can spend all the time in learning Tagalog or Pilipino, Capampangan or Visayan (one of the languages in Central Philippines where arnis is extensively practiced), the second best step is to study the different names of the strikes in the original language along with the closest English translation. Besides how many instructors are there who speak the Philippine language of the arnis style that they are teaching? Many instructors of arnis, even unfortunately Filipinos, often do not even know the native names of the techniques. The foreigner learning arnis in the Philippines will be surprised to note that many Filipinos teach arnis in English!

Which brings us back to the question: In practice, is it really necesssary to know the original names and meanings?

I have seen quite a number of practitioners who did not learn the original names, some of them seem to do quite well in practice, others don't have have much idea of what they are supposed to do. There are also those practitioners who have learned the original names of the arnis strikes who seem to have more clarity and information in their teachings. There are also those who have been able to understand and adopt the techniques despite lack of knowledge of the original names. In practice of course, there are factors that come into play such as physical dexterity, tactical instinct, kinesthetic gifts, etc. I have played sparring with practitioners who have no idea of the names, whether in English or in the original language, but I have a strong respect for their abilities.

As a Filipino, I take pride in the beauty and symbolism of the arnis names. It gives me joy to see somebody teaching the art in my own language. It makes me feel that s/he cares deeply not only for the enlightenment of the student but also for the art and my culture.

Learning the original language of the art likewise deepens one's understanding of the culture and may ultimately bring the practitioner to the deeper spiritual content of arnis de mano. Many of the names used, for instance, allude to environmental conditions and Filipino imagery. "Tagang Buhat Araw" is not just a downward overhead strike. It suggests nature (the sun). So does "Tabas Talahib" (cogon grass). In short, like the Chinese, Filipinos picture their movements in terms of their living conditions and cultural milieu. Movements are not just numbers or hours on the clock. As in Tai chi chuan and qigong and other Chinese arts, the names are poetic and carry meanings that cannot otherwise be conveyed with numbers.

"Tagang San Miguel" is an allusion to Michael, the revered Saint who occupies a high position in Christian heraldic iconography, along with Raphael. Here we are treading on some of the mystical and religious aspects of Philippine martial culture. For arnis de mano is not just a fighting system; it is not just scoring points or bashing heads. It is imbued with a mystical tradition -- with orasyon (prayers/meditation), animism, respect for nature and reverence for the spirits who live there, healing, occult, magic, search for connection to the divine, etc. Certain movements, even the sound of the sticks, are a means of communication -- conveying for instance an invitation to an opponent or a friend. The amulets and talisman or anting-anting that the arnisadores carry in their person or tattooed on their bodies (like the late Antonio Illustrisimo) contain prayers, exorcism and symbols.

The arnisador who is steeped in the Philippine tradition is usually a "hilot," a healer who knows energetics, herbs and massage, and is connected to the nature spirits of his homeland. One such arnis master I studied with was the late Guillermo "Guiling" Tinga of Bantayan Island who as a healer used herbs, anting-anting and orasyon to heal his patients. He carried the Philippine martial artist's amulet which has a crucified Christ on both sides of a brass metal cross. The hilots in my hometown who treated me with massage and herbs in my childhood for a sprained elbow or ankle were likewise arnisadores, although they did not announce it. I did not know it at the time but I realised much later that the prayers they muttered were probably a mishmash of Latin and possibly Hebrew and Aramaic, Jesus' original language.

When acupuncture was brought to the United States from China in the 70s, it was almost divorced from its cultural foundation. In many schools, it was taught as an independent, free-standing course. But later, it was realised that it could not be practiced optimally without the other arts like qigong, meditation, nutrition, massage and others, that acupuncture has principles, that it was not just a mechanical needling of "points."

To fully present it, Arnis should be learned and taught along with its related cultural foundation. But learning the language of the art can be a good beginning.

Mat Marinas said, "Arnis is communicating with sticks." Here he was not referring to verbal language or nomenclature but to techniques. What he meant was the practitioner's use of the stick to convey a repertoire of meaning through rhythm/beat/kumpas, deception, strategy and tactic. Language here refers to the sum total of his postures, intention, agenda expressed through movement, speed, sound and whatever else can contribute to victory, including the way the stick cuts the air or hits the opponent's stick . At this point, we progress to the world of mastery.

The Ancestors/Sylvia Mayuga

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 06:21:00 +0000

This article is soon to be published in a book for students of the Marine Academy of
Asia-Pacific in Zambales, Philippines."

THE ANCESTORS

by Sylvia Morningstar on Saturday, October 13, 2012 at 6:55pm ·

By Sylvia L. Mayuga

Filipino memory older than the Philippine Republic is linked to a world of far greater scale than its boundaries, by our ancestors — the Austronesians — who took to the seas from mainland Asia into these islands 6000 to 4000 years ago. Their coastal and riverine settlements came to be known in relation to bodies of water: the Tagalog (Taga-ilog, people of the river), Pampango (of the pampáng, shoreline), Bicolano (people of the Bico River), Pangasinense (people of the salt [asín]-producing coastline), Cebuano (people of thesug, water current), Ilonggo (people of iróng-irong, a nose-shaped islet in the middle of a river), Maguindanao (people of the floodplains), Maranao (people of the danao, lake), Subanën (people of the subà, wetland), and so forth.

Today most of them have forgotten their origins in a maritime civilization linking prehistory with recorded history in Southeast Asia, Oceania and beyond. Linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and, of late, geneticists, have formed a consensus that Taiwan, a.k.a. Formosa, was the Austronesian point of dispersal into the Pacific, with population pressure driving their southward migration. Evidence shows the grand sweep of their further migration — from 3000 years ago, west to Africa on the Indian Ocean, where they settled the island of Madagascar; east on the Pacific Ocean, settling Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Hawaii to the north and New Zealand to the south through millennia.

Australian anthropologist Alan Christian Anderson writes that reconstructed Proto-Austronesian languages and archaeological evidence indicate their navigation through “hundreds of miles of open sea” in one of “the greatest feats of human creativity.” In this deep layer of Filipino cultural memory lies a different worldview awaiting rediscovery.

Like a Second Skin

It comes alive in the account by the 18th century geographer Alexander Dalrymple, the British Admiralty’s first hydrographer, who encountered Bahatol, a hundred-year old fisherman in Sulu. His ability to create accurate maps of the region from memory amazed Dalrymple, who wrote:“...the conclusion of this chapter, which are signs of weather and land, communicated by Bahatol, the old Sulu, may expose me to ridicule. However, few are so ignorant of human nature as not to know that experience exceeds the deepest reasoning... that an illiterate fisherman shall often be found better acquainted with the signs which indicate changes of the weather than the most acute philosopher with his barometer.

“Bahatol informed me that these signs have passed down from father to son through many successions, and that his long experience has warranted their veracity...These signs are chiefly taken from lightning. When lightning explodes upwards, it shews there will soon be wind, though it does not denote a storm. A storm is predicted by a woo-ing sound in the water. Tremulous lightning very high is a sign of rain. The same, not so high, indicates a hill. When the lightning is red and fiery, it shews the hill to be rocky. When yellow, it is a sign the hill is earth. Low flashes upon the surface of the water denote a shoal under water.

“A shoal above water has an atmosphere hanging over it, which appears like an island. Low long lightning upon the surface shews an island with trees; and when an island, or hill, is high at one end, and low at the other, the lightning will be in an inclining line like the hill.”

Modern Southeast Asian History professor James Francis Warren also discovered this worldview among the Iranun and Balangingi people in Mindanao:“...when the Iranun struck off across expanses of open sea, bearings were taken from the direction of the winds, the currents, and the position of the sun. At night they were guided by the stars, the moon and weather signs.

“Even in the sky, the Iranun and Samal raiders saw the sea; every type of star, wave and current, every rock and navigational landmark had been given a name. There are at least a dozen words to describe the color of the sea and the varying tides. In deep haze and fog, the Iranun and Samal navigated by reading the currents, swells and sounds as if hunting a living creature. The ability to navigate in haze and fog – when no visible means of orientation are available – using only the action and sound of the waves and currents – mirrors the practice of navigation used by Micronesian Mau Piailug and other Pacific navigation.”

Filipino anthropologist Eric S. Casiño described Mindanao’s sea people, the Jama Mapun, living with Nature like a second skin: “When visible, the Jama Mapun use the stars, Sun and Moon to guide them. However, during storms and other conditions of limited visibility, they depend only on the currents and winds to know what direction they are traveling, and how far they have traveled toward reaching their destination. They know the difference between prevailing winds and currents, and those kicked up by storms and other weather conditions. One method they use to detect an original current as opposed to a current that arises from a squall... is to dip their legs or paddles into the water so that they can feel the old current under the surface. In this way, they are able to calculate the boat's drift and changes in bearing. These seafarers have an advanced vocabulary for winds, currents, swells.”

History professor Dante L. Ambrosio plumbed the winds, stars and sea with the Sama Dilaut a.k.a. Bajau, whose people once manned the ships of the Sultan of Sulu:“My informants said that the position of the stars, which form the rope used to ‘pull up’ out of the sea, indicated the strength of the current. These stars form the handle of the Big Dipper - the Bubu. When they are in the east, the current is strong but when they are in the west, the current is weak or there is no current at all. Several stars, together with the wind, are used in direction-finding. Samas know that the morning star Lakag or Maga is in the east, Bubu and Mamahi Uttara are in the north, while Bunta is in the south. The western direction is reckoned with the stars Tunggal Bahangi and Mamahi Magrib...The same goes for Mamahi Satan, the south star. Of course, the east-west direction is easily identifiable with the aid of the sun, which is also a star. For the same directions, the Samas also observe Batik and Mupu which traverse the sky from the east to the zenith to the west.

"Together with stars, winds are also used to mark direction. Satan or Salatan, the south wind, is associated with Bunta, the asterism (star group) named after a puffer fish. The heavenly fish releases the air from its puffy body once it ends its seasonal appearance in the night sky. That air is Satan or Salatan. When (the star) Anakdatu, which follows Bunta, has come and gone, the north wind called Uttara replaces the south wind. Another marker for Uttara is the appearance of Mupu in the east at nightfall. It is also Uttara that blows when the northern stars of Batik get dimmer. Its southern stars dim when it is Satan’s turn to blow.”

Both the Sama Dilaut, who call it Mamahi Uttara, and the Jama Mapun, who call it Sibilu, use the North Star to venture farther out on the Sulu Sea. A Sama navigator told Ambrosio: “Using this star as guide, one may reach Cotabato and Zamboanga by sailing northeast, Sabah northwest, Celebes or Sulawesi and Balikpapan in Kalimantan southeast with some necessary adjustments along the way. Bunta (the South Star) is used in crossing the Sulu Sea from Mapun near Palawan to the capital town of Bongao on the Tawi-tawi mainland. To reach Bongao, the pilot with an outstretched arm must keep Bunta one dangkál—from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the middle finger—to the left of the boat’s prow. If the prow veers to the left by a dangkál, it will reach Languyan instead...at the northern end of Tawi-tawi. But if it veers to the right, the boat will land at Sibutu... at the southern end of the archipelago.”

Correcting a vessel’s bearings by knowing the "relative position" of one's destination is a clue to how Austronesians directed their course in the open sea. Ambrosio found this tradition throughout the archipelago in more indigenous names for constellations— like the Tagalog and Bisayan Balatik , also known as Tatlóng Maria (Orion’s belt a.k.a. Pleiades); the Bikolano’s Moroporo and Samarnon Lusóng for the Big Dipper; and the Christianized Tagalog's Krus na Bituin (Bunta in Sulu) for the Southern Cross.

Stargazing with islanders was nothing new to the 18th century explorer James Cook. He, too, found indigenous star names throughout the Pacific, with Tupia in Tahiti drawing maps from memory like Bahatol in Sulu. Similar techniques have been found among the island-dwelling Bugis in eastern Indonesia. Bemused Europeans noted these native seafarers acquiring their compasses and telescopes but rarely using them. Confident in their own knowledge, they regarded Western instruments as mere prestige items.

In 1597 William Barlowe recorded an encounter with two “East Indians” brought back to England by Thomas Cavendish, who pirated the Manila galleon Santa Ana: “...one of them was of Mamillia [Manila] in the Isle of Luzon, the other of Miaco in Japan. I questioned them concerning their shipping and manner of sayling. They described all things farre different from ours, and shewed, that in steade of our Compas, they use a magneticall needle of sixe ynches long, and longer, upon a pinne in a dish of white China earth filled with water; in the bottome whereof they have two crosse lines, for the foure principall windes; the rest of the divisions being reserved to the skill of their Pilots.”

Austronesian navigational skill extended to seacraft. Contemporary Australian scientist Adrian Horridge observed: “Boats of different sizes and shapes are found in every Austronesian culture, from Madagascar, Maritime Southeast Asia, to Polynesia... Although the origins of the basic structures and rigs are lost in the prehistoric past, a survey of a wide variety of examples and their known history shows that Pacific outrigger canoes were originally as homogeneous as the Austronesian people...The earliest transport was probably a raft of large bamboo stems, with a rig consisting of a two-boom triangular plaited mat sail supported on a loose prop, as survived into modern times in several places. The canoe hull evolved from a dug-out tree trunk, to which side planks and stem and stern pieces were sewn. The interaction between the raft and the dugout produced the outrigger canoes and the double canoes that made possible the conquest of the Pacific.”

Horridge writes that voyages were always launched upwind, returning downwind as “the Austronesian triangular sail spread westwards across the Indian Ocean and became the lateen, which continued to the Mediterranean and eventually to Portugal by the 14th century.”

Unearthing

In the late 20th century, diggers building deep canals for drainage in flood-prone Butuan City in Mindanao struck wooden coffins and antique ceramics in Sitio Ambangan along the mighty Agusan River. Two years later in 1976, pothunters stumbled on an almost intact wooden boat of substantial dimension. Local excitement matched the international maritime scholars’ own. It was the first of the oldest extant boats in the world to be unearthed. This seacraft is the balanghaí, recorded by Antonio Pigafetta, chronicler of Ferdinand Magellan's voyage in 1521.

Spelling barangay in Italianate balanghai, Pigafetta described its “100 rowers on one side commanded by proud warriors and chieftains.” Fr. Ignacio Francisco Alcina, S.J., himself a master shipwright, reporting to the Spanish king in 1668, described “a 15-meter long wooden boat built with planks expertly carved from a tree with an ax." Among its virtues was its hardwood :"abundant, excellent, of a great variety... Perhaps there is no land in the world that would, I do not say exceed, but even equal it," Alcina wrote. But there was more. “Its planks were laid before the ribs were fastened after the ship took shape ... its edges perfectly fitted with wooden pegs” in masterful construction, unlike Western ships whose keel and ribs were laid before planks were fastened with iron nails or spikes. Caulked with indigenous fibers and native resins, propelled with a square or rectangular sail on a tripod mast, the balanghai was both an oceangoing ship and a versatile warship easily maneuverable in shallower inland waters.

"The care and technique with which they build them makes their ships sail like birds, while ours are like lead in comparison,” wrote the missionary Fr. Francisco Combes, S.J. in 1667-70. Austronesian spirit matched mastery of seacraft. Rowers seated two to three on each side of outrigger platforms paddled at high speeds - 12 to 15 knots to the galleon’s 5 to 6 knots. With a singer setting the rhythm, they sailed the wind from dawn to dusk, paddling, singing and chanting of their people’s heroes in unison.

Three of the nine balanghai discovered deep in Butuan mud confirmed Alcina’s description of Austronesian handiwork. The first was carbon dated to 320 AD, the second to 1250 AD, the fifth, large enough for a boatload of 60 at 25 meters long, to 900 AD. In 1986 President Cory Aquino declared the balanghai National Cultural Treasures. Balanghais 3 and 4 are due for excavation at this writing.

In 2006, with archaeological reports completed, UNESCO recognized their “tremendous historical impact in the Asian region.” Although “boats with the same construction were recovered in Sumatra and Pontian in Malaysia... there is no other known site in the Southeast Asian region’s archaeological recoveries (with) a concentration of large, openwater-going boats ...of Neolithic marine architecture...very unique.” Also unique was an “entire village site (with) evidences of specialization in the purification of gold and manufacture of gold ornaments, dating at least to the Ming Dynasty,” lead(ing) UNESCO to conclude that “an extensive gold ornaments industry was located in these areas,” with “no report of a similar find in the rest of the region.”

In a nearby site were found “deformed skulls in underground coffin burials...with frontally flattened skulls ascribed to the 14th-15th century.” Unlike similar relics found in caves along Philippine coastlines and in Sulawesi, these were buried in the ground. Another “significant feature” were “tremendous amounts of high-fired trade ceramics...from China, Cambodia, Thailand and other southeast Asian countries, distinctive white stamped pottery from Thailand, Persian glassware suggesting prehistoric links as far as the Middle East and other notable discoveries like the Ivory Seal and the Silver Paleograph... altogether demonstrat(ing) that Butuan was a thriving international trading port a thousand years ago.”

All that summoned back what historian William Henry Scott once described as a "vigorous and mobile population adjusting to every environment in the archipelago, creatively producing local variations in response to resources, opportunities and culture contacts, able to trade and raid, feed and defend themselves, in sharp contrast to the passive Philippine population...formless cultural clay ready to be stamped with patterns introduced from abroad."

Tangible proof of Butuan’s Austronesian origin fired modern Filipino imagination. Generations of antique ceramic collections from their global sea trade merged with scholarship and legend. One enduring myth had ten Bornean datus and their families datus escaping by sea from a tyrannical sultan, landing in the island of Aninipay (today’s Panay). During the Marcos presidency in the 20th century, the smallest unit of political governance in the islands, was given the name of the datus’ balanghai — “barangay,” boatload. This ancient boat just had to be reconstructed!

The last Philippine community to retain the craft, the Sama of Sibutu and Sitangkai in Tawi-tawi, were asked to build a flotilla. Replacing the hadlayati (teak) of the original, they used scarce hardwood - lawaan, dungon, molave, kalantás and yakál along with non-hardwood acacia, for various parts of the new balanghai. The results were Diwatà ng Lahì(Spirit of the Race), 18 meters long and 3 meters wide, Masawa hong Butuan (Radiance of Butuan), 25 meters long and 6 meters wide, and Balangay Sama Tawi-Tawi, the lead boat named after its shipwrights, 23 meters long and 4.5 meters wide. Built like a kumpít, the trading boat of Southern Philippines, it was the only one with an engine. Tiririt, a 3-meter long boat, was for scouting and tugging.

A 40-man team was organized with Filipino mountaineers (who had recently scaled Mt. Everest), Sama boatbuilders, historical chroniclers, members of the Philippine Coast Guard, Navy and the Joint Manning (Seafarers) Group for an expedition launched from Manila Bay in September 2009. It retraced Austronesian migration and trading routes with their own navigational methods—monitoring cloud formations, wave patterns, bird migrations and positions of the sun and stars through interisland waters and open sea. After covering 2,108 nautical miles (3,908 km) around the Philippines, it proceeded to Sabah, Brunei, Sarawak, Kalimantan, Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia, the Gulf of Thailand, Cambodia and the coast of Vietnam. They crossed the world's heaviest sea traffic in the South China Sea and returned to Manila in December 2010. News of the third leg west to the Indian Ocean, homeward through the Pacific in 2013 is awaited.

Age of Discovery and Loss

As a native saying goes, the Philippines was "cooked in its own fat," when Western “discovery” led to colonization of Southeast Asia, Polynesia and Oceania. The Fil-American marine biologist Jonathan R. Matias looks back to the irony:“The later conquest of the islands was made possible not by Spanish warships... too big, too slow and the draft too deep to navigate close to the coast to make effective use of their cannons. The conquistadores’ ships were mostly anchored in the natural harbors of Cebu or Iloilo from where they boarded hundreds of balanghai, referred to by the Spanish as caracoa, manned mostly by native allies to attack the next island.

“ After consolidating their conquest, the Spanish colonial government banned the building of balanghai, interisland trade and communication. The natives were redirected to building churches and forts, and serving in mines and plantations.” Bisayans, the most skilled boat-builders in conquered territory, were set to building galleons with hardwoods of their own forests. Two centuries after the lucrative Galleon Trade that helped keep the ailing Spanish imperial economy afloat, Matias was “struck” by gravely denuded mountains and 5% remaining forest cover on a first visit to Panay in 1994. A local historian told him that recent logging was not solely to blame: “The center of shipbuilding was in the old city of Iloilo in Panay because of its natural harbor and thick forests. The Spanish colonial government had consumed all the big hardwood trees 200 years earlier to build the ships that served the Galleon Trade.”

In those times, “the old borderless world of Southeast Asian trading was replaced by the new overlords’ arbitrary frontiers,” writes Mindanao historian Greg Hontiveros. Filipino boat-building skills were progressively lost in changing technology. With commercial logging introduced by Americans in the early 20th century, those "abundant, excellent” Philippine forests of yore began to vanish until their massive decimation in the Marcos years. With their primary wealth gone, precious few of 103 million Filipinos even remember their own accomplished origins in a vast, pre-Conquest maritime world.

A Maritime Future

Meanwhile Austronesian remains “the most geographically widespread of any language family prior to the European colonization,” as anthropologist David Blundell writes. Wikipedia estimates that 387 million people speak its mutually intelligible variants in the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Madagascar, indigenous Taiwan, minority areas in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Burma and, except for the farthest coasts and inland areas of New Guinea, Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea, nearly all of Oceania.

Built on rice, root crops, fruit trees, domesticated pigs and chickens, pottery-making and trading, like most Philippine barrios, Austronesian civilization spanned two of the world’s largest oceans. Traces of their intimacy with the maritime world endure in a prevailing world “order” alienated from Nature. Anthropologist/ historian Zeus Salazar recently recalled key concepts that built their civilization encoded in language.

The first is the Proto Malayo-Polynesian barani-bagani (Tagalog bayani) meaning “leader.” Paired with it is the concept of pangángayáw —“caring for the welfare of thecommunity,” the banua (bayan, home country in Tagalog). Onland pangángayáw meant agriculture for sustenance; at sea, it meant trading, even raiding, for more resources for the banua. A third key concept, mana—divine creative power in Nature and humans—underlies surviving rituals venerating a departed bagani’s skull with ceremonial ornaments ornamented with symbols of bird and sun. Granted to the bagani to wield for his banua in life, mana is transmitted to the living upon his death. Mana is believed to flow from the gods and departed ancestors in an unbroken unity of life through the balian-bailan-babaylan or shaman/healer.

Mana means “inheritance,” material and otherwise, in Tagalog. Strange that the Hebrew name of the substance that fell from heaven to sustain the Jews wandering in the desert ismanna, streamlined to mana today. The British geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer offers a possible explanation in his book, ‘Eden in the East.’ Citing ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, creation stories, myths, linguistics and DNA analysis, he stands present history on its head. His thesis: the world’s first civilization that fertilized the great cultures of the Middle East 6,000 years ago was not Mesopotamian but Southeast Asian. By this theory, the word manna may well have spread west to the Middle East from Austronesia.

Whatever the case, its traces endure in its descendants. Salazar suggests thatpangángayáw is really what over a million Filipino Overseas Foreign Workers do in roaming the world for jobs to sustain their banua. Among them are Filipino seamen, now 30% and growing in a total 1.5 million seafarers worldwide. Not only have their remittances shored up the Philippine economy: 4.34 billion dollars, 21.58% of a total 20.12 billion-dollar OFW remittances in 2011. With the Philippines second only to far more populous China as a global supplier of seafarers now, NEDA chief Cayetano Paderanga projects a boost in the country’s status with recent maritime developments.

UNCTAD reports that 90% of world trade today is transported by sea, with the “center of maritime gravity” shifting to Asia in recent years. Global demand for seafarers is rising. On the international Day of the Seafarer in June, International Maritime Organization Secretary-General Koji Sekimizu said: “To meet the growing demands of the world trade and the needs of the shipping and related industries, some 20,000 additional trained seafarers are required every year." The Centre for International Transport Management in the London Metropolitan Business School projects the demand for naval ofﬁcers to grow to 499,000 in 2015, from 476,000 in 2005, some 4.7% over 10 years. With it is a growing demand for ratings (basic seamanship) - from 586,000 in 2005 to 607,000 in 2015, or 3.5%. Candice Gotianuy, chancellor of the University of Cebu-Maritime Education and Training Center has remarked: “Vessel owners opt to hire Filipinos because of excellent communication skills, intelligence and adaptability.”

Department of Trade and Industry statistics show that the Philippines also ranks fifth in the world’s shipbuilding industry, with 2 percent of the total market. Paderanga projects: “With good management and skilled human resource matched with capital, technology and global market opportunities, the industry is moving forward to make the Philippines the fourth largest shipbuilding country in the world in the next five to 10 years."

Scientist Matias reflects: “There are so many more island nations with similar economies, yet with little participation in the maritime industry. Perhaps the Philippine psyche is still tied with the sea despite the ban that Spain imposed... The thousands of years of riding the balanghai cannot be erased by such a brief interlude.” As more lives are lost in progressively frequent extreme weather and natural disasters in relentless global urban spread, fossil-fuel dependence, deforestation, thoroughgoing pollution and resource extraction changing the planet’s climate are imperilling mankind’s very life-support system. The cry for a global paradigm shift has never been louder.

Former Philippine Navy chief Eduardo Santos observes that most Filipino seamen are also music lovers, if not musicians themselves. Filipinos who remember their Austronesian roots are heirs to a maritime world, present and future. This harks back to a pre-Conquest past paddling a balanghai and singing in unison. Is this precisely what the whole world needs today?

Austronesian canoe

Oceangoing boat, Borobodur

Boat-shaped roofs of ancestral houses, Toraja

Steering by the stars in a vast sea

Babaylan – The Legend

noreply@blogger.com (Perla Daly) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 01:42:00 +0000

From the organizers of the Babaylan Festival, Bago City

GENERAL JUAN ANACLETO ARANETA RESIDENCE & LANDMARK MUSEUM

CORNER RIZAL & MATTI STREETS, BAGO CITY, NEGROS OCCIDENTAL, PHILIPPINES 6101

Tel. No. (34) 4610 – 189/Telefax (34) 732 – 4194 Email: tanjuanmuseum@gmail.com

Babaylan – The Legend

Babaylan – “babai” – woman “belian” – spirits. Old woman who presided over the religious rites of the ancient times. She was “katalonan” of the old days. Since the offerers to the gods were limited to women the Babaylan is a doctor, herbalist, artist, medium, adviser, agriculturist and more all rolled in one very interesting character. They are the keeper of rituals and spirit agents in the normal world. They were held in high esteem and deference by the natives even of fear. The natives deferred to them in all ways. Their word was received with great respect and their capabilities held with awe.

There are no written records on the native religion that the Spaniards found in the Philippines. It was based on oral tradition which was passed from generation to generation through songs. They reconstructed this pre-conquest religion from beliefs and observation. These were done by chroniclers mostly missionaries and laymen who came to the Philippines and left accounts of what they saw, heard and observed.

The Babaylan phenomenon in the Philippines can be traced to antiquity. It is an integral part of the pre-Hispanic life and still survives today in many rural areas of the country. At the base of this phenomenon are animistic beliefs and practices expressed in ritual activities.

The basic idea to Babaylan is belief that certain individuals are chosen to follow a “calling” to become folk healers. In preparation of such “calling” the“chosen” people undergoes cosmic emersion a rare experience wherein the“self” gets absorbed in the cosmos or the beyond. There, the potential Babaylan gets tutored on the Babaylan craft by his ancestral spirit(s), who acts as his supernatural sponsor or spirit guide(s). This experience is repeated in the performance of rites in connection with his craft and becomes master of spirit beings. In other societies around the world cited in literatures, referred to as “Shamanism”.

Definitions and Characteristics

A Babaylan is a religio-initiated person who has undergone a deep intense spiritual experience. The successful passage of which is considered critical to his mental and physical well-being. He eventually overcomes this state resulting in his being sensitive to psychic or supernatural forces.

A Babaylan is a folk therapist, not only of physical ailments but more especially of the mental and emotional stress experienced by an individual. He employs similar method and cures (plus his own improvisations) similar to those of senior Babaylans but with guidance from them.

A Babaylan is a priest who officiates in rites involving the invoking of supernatural beings. As a “favored” person by the ancestral soul-spirits, he has a “surog”, or a spirit-guide whom he can call on during a rite to ask for assistance as in the case of diagnosing an illness. He appeases the spirits who where offended by unintended misdemeanors or intrusion to the spirit’s habitat. Rituals performed by the Babaylan are meant to be preventive or curative. Others are ceremonies pertain to passage from one stage of life to another or nourish and strengthen the soul of a living person. Also rituals are intended for a bountiful harvest and a good catch.

The Babaylan is a folk philosopher and an ideologue. He muses and ponders about the universe. He reflects on man’s physical and spiritual (or dungan – the soul or “double” of a person) composition and how it affects man’s well-being. How the soul, an entity giving man’s vitality, can be nurtured and strengthened to protect him from harm caused by environmental spirits or by the competition of the soul with others who are better protected by health-related rituals.

Babaylans are the keepers of culture. As a bearer of tradition for the community, he directly and indirectly socializes or trains initiates and potential initiates for social participation by setting up norms for others to follow. Because he invokes supernatural sanctions, members of the community comply with the tradition. Thus, he insures the recruitment of individuals to institutionalize the traditional roles resulting in the stability and endurance of the social structures.

Powers of a Babaylan

A Babaylan can communicate with ancestral and environmental spirits through a medium he alone knows. This is performed with the use of a ritual language he has mastered and by striking a metallic bell-shaped object. Chants and prayers he has, mastered also accompanied by dancing and other forms of body movements were used during rituals. Also, certain types of food are offered, ritual materials arrangements used has meaning and symbolisms for communicating with the spirit beings. His ritual garb composed of a triangular scarf and a piece of long cloth, also conveys meaning understood only in the context of the occasion. All these comprise a ritual drama meant to impress the spirit beings and to get their favor.

A Babaylan can make the supernatural spirits enter and leave his body at will. When a Babaylan asks a supernatural spirit and guide or “surog” for assistance in a certain rite, he may choose to have the spirit enter his body or simply talk to him. The body trembles or trance-like manner. This are just few manifestation that a Babaylan have been possessed by his “surog”. Acting like a deaf-mute and talking in a different tone of voice and using a language not understood by the audience are other indications of such possessions. A master of the craft can select the spirits they want to admit into their bodies.

A Babaylan can persuade back and lured or captured “dungan”. This is done by offering and thru negotiation to the enraged or hostile spirits. If all fails, he engages in a fight.

Clem del Castillo, Curator

Stephen, Assistant Curator

References:

Bisayas 1582 – 1583; Miguel de Loarca

Pigafetta

Salazar (1989)

Yamamoto

Negros Occidental History; Modesto P. Sa-onoy

The Enduring Ma-aram Tradition; Alicia P. Magos

Babaylanism in Negros; Evelyn Tan Cullamar

Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:11:00 +0000

Prof. Analyn Amores' papers on Cordillera Studies, specifically tattoing practices.

Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 03:58:00 +0000

Settler Colonialism and Decolonization

Compare the above with the essay below:

Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society

Vol.1,No.

1,2012,pp.1-°©‐40

2012 E. Tuck & K.W. Yang This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), permitting all noncommercial

use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Decolonization is not a metaphor

Eve Tuck

State University of New York at New Paltz

K. Wayne Yang

University of California, San Diego

Abstract

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization.

Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for

other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of

decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing

number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize

student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be,

social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have

objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built

upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, nonwhite,

immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement,

reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of

decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that

problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In

this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of

incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of

decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to

unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical spaceplace

pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for

more meaningful potential alliances.

Keywords: decolonization, settler colonialism, settler moves to innocence, incommensurability,

Indigenous land, decolonizing education

Tuck

K.W.

Yang

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program

of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural

shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical

process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to

itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it

historical form and content.

-Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36

Let us admit it, the settler knows perfectly well that no phraseology can be a substitute

for reality.

-Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 45

Introduction

For the past several years we have been working, in our writing and teaching, to bring attention

to how settler colonialism has shaped schooling and educational research in the United States

and other settler colonial nation-states. These are two distinct but overlapping tasks, the first

concerned with how the invisibilized dynamics of settler colonialism mark the organization,

governance, curricula, and assessment of compulsory learning, the other concerned with how

settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these

perspectives - repackaged as data and findings - are activated in order to rationalize and maintain

unfair social structures. We are doing this work alongside many others who - somewhat

relentlessly, in writings, meetings, courses, and activism - don’t allow the real and symbolic

violences of settler colonialism to be overlooked.

Alongside this work, we have been thinking about what decolonization means, what it

wants and requires. One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with

which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other

social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or

approaches which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct

project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed

into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something

different than those forms of justice. Settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights based

terms, seemingly to signal both an awareness of the significance of Indigenous and decolonizing

theorizations of schooling and educational research, and to include Indigenous peoples on the list

of considerations - as an additional special (ethnic) group or class. At a conference on

educational research, it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to

“decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or “decolonize student thinking.” Yet,

we have observed a startling number of these discussions make no mention of Indigenous

Decolonization

not

metaphor

peoples, our/their1 struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of

Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization. Further,

there is often little recognition given to the immediate context of settler colonialism on the North

American lands where many of these conferences take place.

Of course, dressing up in the language of decolonization is not as offensive as “Navajo

print” underwear sold at a clothing chain store (Gaynor, 2012) and other appropriations of

Indigenous cultures and materials that occur so frequently. Yet, this kind of inclusion is a form of

enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in

how it recapitulates dominant theories of social change. On the occasion of the inaugural issue of

Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, we want to be sure to clarify that

decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very

possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to

the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot

easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they

are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and

transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about

decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other

experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do

to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym.

Our goal in this essay is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization - what

is unsettling and what should be unsettling. Clearly, we are advocates for the analysis of settler

colonialism within education and education research and we position the work of Indigenous

thinkers as central in unlocking the confounding aspects of public schooling. We, at least in part,

want others to join us in these efforts, so that settler colonial structuring and Indigenous critiques

of that structuring are no longer rendered invisible. Yet, this joining cannot be too easy, too

open, too settled. Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles

present grievances nor forecloses future conflict. There are parts of the decolonization project

that are not easily absorbed by human rights or civil rights based approaches to educational

equity. In this essay, we think about what decolonization wants.

There is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples making moves to

alleviate the impacts of colonization. The too-easy adoption of decolonizing discourse (making

decolonization a metaphor) is just one part of that history and it taps into pre-existing tropes that

get in the way of more meaningful potential alliances. We think of the enactment of these tropes

as a series of moves to innocence (Malwhinney, 1998), which problematically attempt to

reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. Here, to explain why

decolonization is and requires more than a metaphor, we discuss some of these moves to

innocence:

1 As an Indigenous scholar and a settler/trespasser/scholar writing together, we have used forward slashes to reflect

our discrepant positionings in our pronouns throughout this essay.

Tuck

K.W.

Yang

i. Settler nativism

ii. Fantasizing adoption

iii. Colonial equivocation

iv. Conscientization

v. At risk-ing / Asterisk-ing Indigenous peoples

vi. Re-occupation and urban homesteading

Such moves ultimately represent settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation. Actually, we

argue, attending to what is irreconcilable within settler colonial relations and what is

incommensurable between decolonizing projects and other social justice projects will help to

reduce the frustration of attempts at solidarity; but the attention won’t get anyone off the hook

from the hard, unsettling work of decolonization. Thus, we also include a discussion of

interruptions that unsettle innocence and recognize incommensurability.

The

set

settler

colonial

relations

Generally speaking, postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality attend to two forms of

colonialism2. External colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes

the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings,

extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the

appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first world. This includes so-thought

‘historic’ examples such as opium, spices, tea, sugar, and tobacco, the extraction of which

continues to fuel colonial efforts. This form of colonialism also includes the feeding of

contemporary appetites for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material,

cadmium and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External colonialism often requires a

subset of activities properly called military colonialism - the creation of war fronts/frontiers

against enemies to be conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into

military operations. In external colonialism, all things Native become recast as ‘natural

resources’ - bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel.

The other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of

coloniality is internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land,

flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of

2 Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism. Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires

(e.g. Chinese colonialism in Tibet). “In other words,” writes Sandy Grande, “both Marxists and capitalists view land

and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the

second by Marxists for the good of all” (2004, p.27). Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism,

developed over time to further colonial projects. Racism is an invention of colonialism (Silva, 2007). The current

colonial era goes back to 1492, when colonial imaginary goes global.

Decolonization

not

metaphor

particularized modes of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure

the ascendancy of a nation and its white3 elite. These modes of control, imprisonment, and

involuntary transport of the human beings across borders - ghettos, their policing, their economic

divestiture, and their dislocatability - are at work to authorize the metropole and conscribe her

periphery. Strategies of internal colonialism, such as segregation, divestment, surveillance, and

criminalization, are both structural and interpersonal.

Our intention in this descriptive exercise is not be exhaustive, or even inarguable; instead,

we wish to emphasize that (a) decolonization will take a different shape in each of these contexts

- though they can overlap4 - and that (b) neither external nor internal colonialism adequately

describe the form of colonialism which operates in the United States or other nation-states in

which the colonizer comes to stay. Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial

modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony. For

example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their

homelands onto reservations, indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the form of

colonization as simultaneously internal (via boarding schools and other biopolitical modes of

control) and external (via uranium mining on Indigenous land in the US Southwest and oil

extraction on Indigenous land in Alaska) with a frontier (the US military still nicknames all

enemy territory “Indian Country”). The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and

require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective

expropriation of profit-producing fragments.

Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with

the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty

over all things in their new domain. Thus, relying solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of

coloniality that ignore settler colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization

must take in settler colonial contexts. Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is

land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most

valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new

home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land

represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not

temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is

why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In

the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land

are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and

cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made

savage.

3 In using terms as “white” and “whiteness”, we are acknowledging that whiteness extends beyond phenotype.

4 We don’t treat internal/external as a taxonomy of colonialisms. They describe two operative modes of colonialism.

The modes can overlap, reinforce, and contradict one another, and do so through particular legal, social, economic

and political processes that are context specific.

Tuck

K.W.

Yang

In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the

Indigenous peoples that live there. Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not

colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they

came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies,

and cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of

Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy,

Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a

resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts (Tuck and Ree,

forthcoming).

At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel

slaves5, whose bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in

settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is

extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the slave’s

person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land, the slave’s very

presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a desirable

commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The violence

of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination;

they are reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror.

The settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as holding

dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more

developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species. The settler is making a

new "home" and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild

people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land

produce, and produce excessively, because "civilization" is defined as production in excess of the

"natural" world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous

world). In order for excess production, he needs excess labor, which he cannot provide himself.

The chattel slave serves as that excess labor, labor that can never be paid because payment would

have to be in the form of property (land). The settler's wealth is land, or a fungible version of it,

and so payment for labor is impossible.6 The settler positions himself as both superior and

normal; the settler is natural, whereas the Indigenous inhabitant and the chattel slave are

unnatural, even supernatural.

Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and

epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous

5 As observed by Erica Neeganagwedgin (2012), these two groups are not always distinct. Neeganagwedgin

presents a history of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in Canada as chattel slaves. In California, Mexico, and

the U.S. Southwest under the Spanish mission system, Indigenous people were removed from their land and also

made into chattel slaves. Under U.S. colonization, California law stipulated that Indians could be murdered and/or

indentured by any “person” (white, propertied, citizen). These laws remained in effect until 1937.

6 See Kate McCoy (forthcoming) on settler crises in early Jamestown, Virginia to pay indentured European labor

with land.

Decolonization

not

metaphor

laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations (See also A.J.

Barker, 2009).

Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as an empire

- utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization simultaneous to the settler colonial

project. This means, and this is perplexing to some, that dispossessed people are brought onto

seized Indigenous land through other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include

enslavement, as discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-wage labor

recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and

displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn by U.S. wars or

devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects

who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal

colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white

European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly

wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is

meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces.

Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of imperial

wealth by the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing imperial wealth is

inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion. Likewise, the promise of integration and civil

rights is predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated

‘third-world’ wealth). Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement,

and internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features of settler colonialism in the

US context - empire, settlement, and internal colony - make it a site of contradictory decolonial

desires7.

Decolonization as metaphor allows people to equivocate these contradictory decolonial

desires because it turns decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track towards

liberation. In reality, the tracks walk all over land/people in settler contexts. Though the details

are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must

involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land

have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just

symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across

lines of solidarity. “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler

colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone.

7 Decolonization is further fraught because, although the setter-native-slave triad structures settler colonialism, this

does not mean that settler, native, and slave are analogs that can be used to describe corresponding identities,

structural locations, worldviews, and behaviors. Nor do they mutually constitute one another. For example,

Indigenous is an identity independent of the triad, and also an ascribed structural location within the triad. Chattel

slave is an ascribed structural position, but not an identity. Settler describes a set of behaviors, as well as a structural

location, but is eschewed as an identity.

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Playing

Indian

and

the

erasure

Indigenous

peoples

Recently in a symposium on the significance of Liberal Arts education in the United States, Eve

presented an argument that Liberal Arts education has historically excluded any attention to or

analysis of settler colonialism. This, Eve posited, makes Liberal Arts education complicit in the

project of settler colonialism and, more so, has rendered the truer project of Liberal Arts

education something like trying to make the settler indigenous to the land he occupies. The

attendees were titillated by this idea, nodding and murmuring in approval and it was then that

Eve realized that she was trying to say something incommensurable with what they expected her

to say. She was completely misunderstood. Many in the audience heard this observation: that the

work of Liberal Arts education is in part to teach settlers to be indigenous, as something

admirable, worthwhile, something wholesome, not as a problematic point of evidence about the

reach of the settler colonial erasure.

Philip Deloria (1998) explores how and why the settler wants to be made indigenous,

even if only through disguise, or other forms of playing Indian. Playing Indian is a powerful U.S.

pastime, from the Boston Tea Party, to fraternal organizations, to new age trends, to even those

aforementioned Native print underwear. Deloria maintains that, “From the colonial period to the

present, the Indian has skulked in and out of the most important stories various Americans have

told about themselves” (p. 5).

The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability

to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the

continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness.

Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants.

(Deloria, 1998, p.5)

L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz) famously asserted in 1890 that the safety of

white settlers was only guaranteed by the “total annihilation of the few remaining Indians” (as

quoted in Hastings, 2007). D.H. Lawrence, reading James Fenimore Cooper (discussed at length

later in this article), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Henry David Thoreau,

Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and others for his Studies in Classic American Literature

(1924), describes Americans’ fascination with Indigeneity as one of simultaneous desire and

repulsion (Deloria, 1998).

“No place,” Lawrence observed, “exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until

the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed.” Lawrence argued that in order to meet the

“demon of the continent” head on and this finalize the “unexpressed spirit of

America,” white Americans needed either to destroy Indians of assimilate them

into a white American world...both aimed at making Indians vanish from the

landscape. (Lawrence, as quoted in Deloria, 1998, p. 4).

Decolonization

not

metaphor

Everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in

order to disappear them from the land - this is how a society can have multiple simultaneous and

conflicting messages about Indigenous peoples, such as all Indians are dead, located in faraway

reservations, that contemporary Indigenous people are less indigenous than prior generations,

and that all Americans are a “little bit Indian.” These desires to erase - to let time do its thing and

wait for the older form of living to die out, or to even help speed things along (euthanize)

because the death of pre-modern ways of life is thought to be inevitable - these are all desires for

another kind of resolve to the colonial situation, resolved through the absolute and total

destruction or assimilation of original inhabitants.

Numerous scholars have observed that Indigeneity prompts multiple forms of settler

anxiety, even if only because the presence of Indigenous peoples - who make a priori claims to

land and ways of being - is a constant reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete

(Fanon, 1963; Vine Deloria, 1988; Grande, 2004; Bruyneel, 2007). The easy adoption of

decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) is a form of this anxiety, because it is a

premature attempt at reconciliation. The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice

frameworks is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain

the unbearable searchlight of complicity, of having harmed others just by being one’s self. The

desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not

have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore.

Settler

moves

innocence

We observe that another component of a desire to play Indian is a settler desire to be made

innocent, to find some mercy or relief in face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting

(see Tuck and Ree, forthcoming, on mercy and haunting). Directly and indirectly benefitting

from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept.

The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any

reprieve. In her 1998 Master’s thesis, Janet Mawhinney analyzed the ways in which white people

maintained and (re)produced white privilege in self-defined anti-racist settings and

organizations.8 She examined the role of storytelling and self-confession - which serves to equate

stories of personal exclusion with stories of structural racism and exclusion - and what she terms

‘moves to innocence,’ or “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of

domination” (p. 17). Mawhinney builds upon Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack’s (1998)

conceptualization of, ‘the race to innocence’, “the process through which a woman comes to

believe her own claim of subordination is the most urgent, and that she is unimplicated in the

subordination of other women” (p. 335).

Mawhinney’s thesis theorizes the self-positioning of white people as simultaneously the

oppressed and never an oppressor, and as having an absence of experience of oppressive power

8 Thank you to Neoma Mullens for introducing Eve to Mawhinney’s concept of moves to innocence.

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relations (p. 100). This simultaneous self-positioning afforded white people in various

purportedly anti-racist settings to say to people of color, “I don’t experience the problems you

do, so I don’t think about it,” and “tell me what to do, you’re the experts here” (p. 103). “The

commonsense appeal of such statements,” Malwhinney observes, enables white speakers to

“utter them sanguine in [their] appearance of equanimity, is rooted in the normalization of a

liberal analysis of power relations” (ibid.).

In the discussion that follows, we will do some work to identify and argue against a series

of what we call ‘settler moves to innocence’. Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or

positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving

up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may

gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet

settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler. This discussion will likely

cause discomfort in our settler readers, may embarrass you/us or make us/you feel implicated.

Because of the racialized flights and flows of settler colonial empire described above, settlers are

diverse - there are white settlers and brown settlers, and peoples in both groups make moves to

innocence that attempt to deny and deflect their own complicity in settler colonialism. When it

makes sense to do so, we attend to moves to innocence enacted differently by white people and

by brown and Black people.

In describing settler moves to innocence, our goal is to provide a framework of excuses,

distractions, and diversions from decolonization. We discuss some of the moves to innocence at

greater length than others, mostly because some require less explanation and because others are

more central to our initial argument for the demetaphorization of decolonization. We provide this

framework so that we can be more impatient with each other, less likely to accept gestures and

half-steps, and more willing to press for acts which unsettle innocence, which we discuss in the

final section of this article.

Moves to innocence

I: Settler nativism

In this move to innocence, settlers locate or invent a long-lost ancestor who is rumored to have

had “Indian blood,” and they use this claim to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted

eradications of Indigenous peoples. There are numerous examples of public figures in the United

States who “remember” a distant Native ancestor, including Nancy Reagan (who is said to be a

descendant of Pocahontas) and, more recently, Elizabeth Warren9 and many others, illustrating

how commonplace settler nativism is. Vine Deloria Jr. discusses what he calls the Indiangrandmother

complex in the following account from Custer Died for Your Sins:

9 See Francie Latour’s interview (June 1 2012) with Kim Tallbear for more information on the Elizabeth Warren

example. In the interview, Tallbear asserts that Warren’s romanticized claims and the accusations of fraud are

evidence of ways in which people in the U.S. misunderstand Native American identity. Tallbear insists that to

understand Native American identity, “you need to get outside of that binary, one-drop framework.”

Decolonization is not a metaphor

During my three years as Executive Director of the National Congress of

American Indians it was a rare day when some white [person] didn't visit my

office and proudly proclaim that he or she was of Indian descent...

At times I became quite defensive about being a Sioux when these white people

had a pedigree that was so much more respectable than mine. But eventually I

came to understand their need to identify as partially Indian and did not resent

them. I would confirm their wildest stories about their Indian ancestry and would

add a few tales of my own hoping that they would be able to accept themselves

someday and leave us alone.

Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about

Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their

grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently

most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white

occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear.

It doesn't take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of

the Indian-grandmother complex that plagues certain white [people]. A male

ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive,

the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a

young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking. Somehow the white

was linked with a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an

Indian princess who ran away with an intrepid pioneer...

While a real Indian grandmother is probably the nicest thing that could happen to a

child, why is a remote Indian princess grandmother so necessary for many white

[people]? Is it because they are afraid of being classed as foreigners? Do they need

some blood tie with the frontier and its dangers in order to experience what it

means to be an American? Or is it an attempt to avoid facing the guilt they bear for

the treatment of the Indians? (1988, p. 2-4)

Settler nativism, or what Vine Deloria Jr. calls the Indian-grandmother complex, is a settler

move to innocence because it is an attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy

settler privilege and occupying stolen land. Deloria observes that settler nativism is gendered and

considers the reasons a storied Indian grandmother might have more appeal than an Indian

grandfather. On one level, it can be expected that many settlers have an ancestor who was

Indigenous and/or who was a chattel slave. This is precisely the habit of settler colonialism,

which pushes humans into other human communities; strategies of rape and sexual violence, and

also the ordinary attractions of human relationships, ensure that settlers have Indigenous and

chattel slave ancestors.

Further, though race is a social construct, Indigenous peoples and chattel slaves,

particularly slaves from the continent of Africa, were/are racialized differently in ways that

support/ed the logics and aims of settler colonialism (the erasure of the Indigenous person and

E. Tuck & K.W. Yang

the capture and containment of the slave). “Indians and Black people in the US have been

racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society,”

Patrick Wolfe (2006) explains:

Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically

enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this

taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule,” whereby any amount of

African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical

appearance, makes a person Black. (p. 387)

Kim Tallbear argues that the one-drop rule dominates understandings of race in the United States

and, so, most people in the US have not been able to understand Indigenous identity (Latour,

2012). Through the one-drop rule, blackness in settler colonial contexts is expansive, ensuring

that a slave/criminal status will be inherited by an expanding number of ‘black’ descendants.

Yet, Indigenous peoples have been racialized in a profoundly different way. Native Americanness10

is subtractive: Native Americans are constructed to become fewer in number and less

Native, but never exactly white, over time. Our/their status as Indigenous peoples/first

inhabitants is the basis of our/their land claims and the goal of settler colonialism is to diminish

claims to land over generations (or sooner, if possible). That is, Native American is a

racialization that portrays contemporary Indigenous generations to be less authentic, less

Indigenous than every prior generation in order to ultimately phase out Indigenous claims to land

and usher in settler claims to property. This is primarily done through blood quantum registries

and policies, which were forced on Indigenous nations and communities and, in some cases,

have overshadowed former ways of determining tribal membership.

Wolfe (2006) explains:

For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity,

producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum

regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their

owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their

increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of

Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. (p. 387)

The racializations of Indigenous people and Black people in the US settler colonial nation-state

are geared to ensure the ascendancy of white settlers as the true and rightful owners and

occupiers of the land.

In the national mythologies of such societies, it is believed that white people came

first and that it is they who principally developed the land; Aboriginal peoples are

presumed to be mostly dead or assimilated. European settlers thus become the

10 Native American, then, can be a signifier for how Indigenous peoples (over 500 federally recognized tribes and

nations in the U.S. alone) are racialized into one vanishing race in the U.S. settler-colonial context.

Decolonization is not a metaphor

original inhabitants and the group most entitled to the fruits of citizenship.”

(Razack, 2002, p. 1-2; emphasis original.)

In the racialization of whiteness, blood quantum rules are reversed so that white people can stay

white, yet claim descendance from an Indian grandmother. In 1924, the Virginia legislature

passed the Racial Integrity Act, which enforced the one-drop rule except for white people who

claimed a distant Indian grandmother - the result of strong lobbying from the aristocratic “First

Families of Virginia” who all claim to have descended from Pocahontas (including Nancy

Reagan, born in 1921). Known as the Pocahontas Exception, this loophole allowed thousands of

white people to claim Indian ancestry, while actual Indigenous people were reclassified as

“colored” and disappeared off the public record11.

Settler nativism, through the claiming of a long-lost ancestor, invests in these specific

racializations of Indigenous people and Black people, and disbelieves the sovereign authority of

Indigenous nations to determine tribal membership. Dakota scholar Kim Tallbear (in an

interview on the recent Elizabeth Warren example), provides an account that echoes and updates

Deloria’s account. Speaking to the many versions of settler nativism she has encountered, in

which people say,

“My great-great grandmother was an Indian princess.” [or] “I'm descended from

Pocohantas.” What Elizabeth Warren said about the high cheekbones, I've had so

many people from across the political spectrum say things that strange or stranger.

And my point is, maybe you do have some remote ancestor. So what? You don't

just get to decide you're Cherokee if the community does not recognize you as

such (as quoted in Latour, 2012).

Ancestry is different from tribal membership; Indigenous identity and tribal membership are

questions that Indigenous communities alone have the right to struggle over and define, not DNA

tests, heritage websites, and certainly not the settler state. Settler nativism is about imagining an

Indian past and a settler future; in contrast, tribal sovereignty has provided for an Indigenous

present and various Indigenous intellectuals theorize decolonization as Native futures without a

settler state.

Moves to innocence

II: Settler adoption fantasies

Describing acts of passing, Sara Ahmed (2000) asserts the importance of being able to replace

“the stranger”, or take the place of the other, in the consolidation and (re)affirmation of white

identity. To “become without becoming,” is to reproduce “the other as ‘not-I’ within rather than

beyond the structure of the ‘I’” (p. 132). Sherene Razack, reading Ahmed, tells us that

11 The 1940 Census only recorded 198 Indians in the State of Virginia. 6 out of 8 tribes in Virginia are currently

unable to obtain federal recognition because of the racial erasure under the Racial Integrity Act (Fiske, 2004).

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appropriating the other’s pain occurs when, “we think we are recognizing not only the other’s

pain but his or her difference. Difference becomes the conduit of identification in much the same

way as pain does” (Razack, 2007, p. 379). Discussing the film Dances with Wolves (a cinematic

fiction of a Union soldier in the post-bellum Civil War era who befriends and protects the Lakota

Sioux, who are represented as a noble, dying race), Ahmed critically engages the narrative, in

which a white man (played by Kevin Costner) comes to respect the Sioux,

to the point of being able to dance their dances...the white man in this example is

able to ‘to become without becoming’ (Ahmed, 2000, p. 32)...He alone is

transformed through his encounter with the Sioux, while they remain the

mechanism for his transformation. He becomes the authentic knower while they

remain what is to be known and consumed, and spit out again, as good Indians

who confirm the white man’s position as hero of the story...the Sioux remain

objects, while Kevin Costner is able to go anywhere and be anything. (Ahmed’s

analysis, as discussed by Razack, 2007, p. 379).

For the purposes of this article, we locate the desire to become without becoming [Indian]

within settler adoption fantasies. These fantasies can mean the adoption of Indigenous practices

and knowledge, but more, refer to those narratives in the settler colonial imagination in which

the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct) hands over his land, his claim to the land,

his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping. This is a fantasy that is invested in a settler

futurity and dependent on the foreclosure of an Indigenous futurity.

Settler adoption fantasies are longstanding narratives in the United States, fueled by rare

instances of ceremonial “adoptions”, from John Smith’s adoption in 1607 by Powhatan

(Pocahontas’ father), to Lewis Henry Morgan’s adoption in 1847 by Seneca member Jimmy

Johnson, to the recent adoption of actor Johnny Depp by the family of LaDonna Harris, a

Comanche woman and social activist. As sovereign nations, tribes make decisions about who is

considered a member, so our interest is not in whether adoptions are appropriate or legitimate.

Rather, because the prevalence of the adoption narrative in American literature, film, television,

holidays and history books far exceeds the actual occurrences of adoptions, we are interested in

how this narrative spins a fantasy that an individual settler can become innocent, indeed heroic

and indigenized, against a backdrop of national guilt. The adoption fantasy is the mythical trump

card desired by critical settlers who feel remorse about settler colonialism, one that absolves

them from the inheritance of settler crimes and that bequeaths a new inheritance of Native-ness

and claims to land (which is a reaffirmation of what the settler project has been all along).

To more fully explain, we turn to perhaps the most influential version of the adoption

narrative, penned by James Fenimore Cooper in 1823-1841. James Fenimore, son of “that genius

in land speculation William Cooper” (Butterfield, 1954, p. 374), grew up in Six Nations territory

that his father had grabbed and named after himself as Cooperstown, New York. In these

Iroquois lakes, forests, and hills, James Fenimore, and later his daughter, Susan, imagined for

themselves frontier romances full of tragic Indians, inventive and compassionate settlers, and

virginal white/Indian women in virgin wilderness. Cooper’s five-book series, collectively called

Decolonization

not

metaphor

the Leatherstocking Tales, are foundational in the emergence of American literature. Melville

called Cooper “our national author” and it was no exaggeration. His were the most widely read

novels of the time and, in the age of the printing press, this meant they were the most circulated

books in a U.S. print-based popular culture. Mass print established national language and

identity, an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991) from which emerges ‘America’ as a nation

as opposed to just an assortment of former colonies. The Tales are credited with the

constructions of the vanishing Indian, the resourceful Frontiersman, and the degenerate Negro:

the pivotal triad of archetypes that forms the basis for an American national literature.

The Last of Mohicans is undoubtedly the most famous among the Tales and has been

remade12 into three separate television series in 1957, 1971, and 2004; an opera in 1977; a BBC

radio adaptation in 1995; a 2007 Marvel comic book series; a stage drama in performance since

2010; and eleven separate films spanning 1912 to 1992. In a sense, Last of the Mohicans is a

national narrative that has never stopped being remade13.

Across all five books, Cooper’s epic hero is Natty Bumppo, a white man ‘gone native’, at

home in nature, praised for his wisdom and ways that are both Indian and white. In Last of the

Mohicans, this hero becomes the adopted son of Chingachgook, fictional chief of the fictional

tribe “Mohicans”, who renames Natty, Nathaniel Hawkeye - thus legitimating and completing

his Indigeneity. At the same time, Chingachgook conveniently fades into extinction. In a critical

symbolic gesture, Chingachgook hands over his son Uncas - the last of the Mohicans - to the

adopted, Indigenized white man, Hawkeye. When Uncas dies, the ramification is obvious:

Hawkeye becomes without becoming the last of the Mohicans. You are now one of us, you are

now Native. “The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet

come again” (Cooper 2000, p.407).

Cooper’s books fantasize the founding and expansion of the U.S. settler nation by

fictionalizing the period of 1740-1804, distilled into the single narrative of one man. The arc of

his life stands in for the narrative of national development: the heroic settler Natty Bumppo

transitions from British trapper to ‘native’ American, to prairie pioneer in the new Western

frontier. Interestingly, the books themselves were written in reverse chronological order, starting

with the pioneer, going backwards in time. Through such historical hypnosis, settler literature

fabricates past lives, all the way back to an Indian past. ‘I am American’ becomes ‘I was

frontiersman, was British, was Indian’.

In this fantasy, Hawkeye is both adopter and adoptee. The act of adopting indigenous

ways makes him ‘deserving’ to be adopted by the Indigenous. Settler fantasies of adoption

alleviate the anxiety of settler un-belonging. He adopts the love of land and therefore thinks he

belongs to the land. He is a first environmentalist and sentimentalist, nostalgic for vanishing

12 Tellingly, these remakes were produced in Canada, Britain, Germany and the United States.

13 To include all the ‘remakes’ of the story in its different forms (e.g. the post 9/11 historical fiction Gangs of New

York, the 2009 film Avatar, or the 2011 film The Descendants - also discussed in this article), would require an

exhaustive and exhausting account well beyond the scope of this article.

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Native ways. In today’s jargon, he could be thought of as an eco-activist, naturalist, and Indian

sympathizer. At the same time, his cultural hybridity is what makes him more ‘fit’ to survive -

the ultimate social Darwinism - better than both British and Indian; he is the mythical American.

Hawkeye, hybrid white and Indian, becomes the reluctant but nonetheless rightful inheritor of

the land and warden of its vanishing people.

Similarly, the settler intellectual who hybridizes decolonial thought with Western critical

traditions (metaphorizing decolonization), emerges superior to both Native intellectuals and

continental theorists simultaneously. With his critical hawk-eye, he again sees the critique better

than anyone and sees the world from a loftier station14. It is a fiction, just as Cooper’s Hawkeye,

just as the adoption, just as the belonging.

In addition to fabricating historical memory, the Tales serve to generate historical

amnesia. The books were published between 1823-1841, at the height of the Jacksonian period

with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and subsequent Trail of Tears 1831-1837. During this time,

46,000 Native Americans were removed from their homelands, opening 25 million acres of land

for re-settlement. The Tales are not only silent on Indian Removal but narrate the Indian as

vanishing in an earlier time frame, and thus Indigenous people are already dead prior to removal.

Performing sympathy is critical to Cooper’s project of settler innocence. It is no accident

that he is often read as a sympathizer to the Indians (despite the fact that he didn’t know any) in

contrast to Jackson’s policies of removal and genocide. Cooper is cast as the ‘innocent’ father of

U.S. ideology, in contrast to the ‘bad white men’ of history.

Performing suffering is also critical to Cooper’s project of settler innocence. Hawkeye

takes on the (imagined) demeanor of the vanishing Native - brooding, vengeful, protecting a

dying way of life, and unsuccessful in finding a mate and producing offspring. Thus sympathy

and suffering are the tokens used to absorb the Native Other’s difference, coded as pain, the ‘not-

I’ into the ‘I’.

The settler’s personal suffering feeds his fantasy of mutuality. The 2011 film, The

Descendants, is a modern remake of the adoption fantasy (blended with a healthy dose of settler

nativism). George Clooney’s character, “King” is a haole hypo-descendant of the last surviving

princess of Hawai’i and reluctant inheritor of a massive expanse of land, the last wilderness on

the Island of Kauai. In contrast to his obnoxious settler cousins, he earns his privilege as an

overworked lawyer rather than relying on his unearned inheritance. Furthermore, Clooney’s

character suffers - he is a dysfunctional father, heading a dysfunctional family, watching his wife

wither away in a coma, learning that she cheated on him - and so he is somehow Hawaiian at

heart. Because pain is the token for oppression, claims to pain then equate to claims of being an

innocent non-oppressor. By the film’s end, King goes against the wishes of his profiteering

settler cousins and chooses to “keep” the land, reluctantly accepting that his is the steward of the

land, a responsibility bequeathed upon him as an accident of birth. This is the denouement of

14 His lament is that no one else can see what he sees, just as Hawkeye laments his failed attempts to rescue white

people from bad Indians, and good Indians from ignorant white people. He is the escapee from Plato’s Cave. The

rest of us are stuck in the dark.

Decolonization

not

metaphor

reconciliation between the settler-I and the interiorized native-not-I within the settler. Sympathy

and suffering are profoundly satisfying for settler cinema: The Descendants was nominated for 5

Academy Awards and won for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2012.

The beauty of this settler fantasy is that it adopts decolonization and aborts it in one

gesture. Hawkeye adopts Uncas, who then conveniently dies. King adopts Hawai’i and negates

the necessity for ea, Kanaka Maoli sovereignty. Decolonization is stillborn - rendered irrelevant

because decolonization is already completed by the indigenized consciousness of the settler.

Now ‘we’ are all Indian, all Hawaiian, and decolonization is no longer an issue. ‘Our’ only

recourse is to move forward, however regretfully, with ‘our’ settler future.

In the unwritten decolonial version of Cooper’s story, Hawkeye would lose his land back

to the Mohawk - the real people upon whose land Cooperstown was built and whose rivers,

lakes, and forests Cooper mined for his frontier romances. Hawkeye would shoot his last arrow,

or his last long-rifle shot, return his eagle feather, and would be renamed Natty Bumppo, settler

on Native land. The story would end with the moment of this recognition. Unresolved are the

questions: Would a conversation follow after that between Native and the last settler? Would the

settler leave or just vanish? Would he ask to stay, and if he did, who would say yes? These are

questions that will be addressed at decolonization, and not a priori in order to appease anxieties

for a settler future.

Moves

innocence

III:

Colonial

equivocation

A more nuanced move to innocence is the homogenizing of various experiences of oppression as

colonization. Calling different groups ‘colonized’ without describing their relationship to settler

colonialism is an equivocation, “the fallacy of using a word in different senses at different stages

of the reasoning" (Etymonline, 2001). In particular, describing all struggles against imperialism

as ‘decolonizing’ creates a convenient ambiguity between decolonization and social justice work,

especially among people of color, queer people, and other groups minoritized by the settler

nation-state. ‘We are all colonized,’ may be a true statement but is deceptively embracive and

vague, its inference: ‘None of us are settlers.’ Equivocation, or calling everything by the same

name, is a move towards innocence that is especially vogue in coalition politics among people of

color.

People of color who enter/are brought into the settler colonial nation-state also enter the

triad of relations between settler-native-slave. We are referring here to the colonial pathways that

are usually described as ‘immigration’ and how the refugee/immigrant/migrant is invited to be a

settler in some scenarios, given the appropriate investments in whiteness, or is made an illegal,

criminal presence in other scenarios. Ghetto colonialism, prisons, and under resourced

compulsory schooling are specializations of settler colonialism in North America; they are

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produced by the collapsing of internal, external, and settler colonialisms, into new blended

categories15.

This triad of settler-native-slave and its selective collapsibility seems to be unique to

settler colonial nations. For example, all Aleut people on the Aleutian Islands were collected and

placed in internment camps for four years after the bombing of Dutch Harbor; the stated

rationale was the protection of the people but another likely reason was that the U.S.

Government feared the Aleuts would become allies with the Japanese and/or be difficult to

differentiate from potential Japanese spies. White people who lived on the Aleutian Islands at

that same time were not interned. Internment in abandoned warehouses and canneries in

Southeast Alaska was the cause of significant numbers of death of children and elders, physical

injury, and illness among Aleut people. Aleut internment during WWII is largely ignored as part

of U.S. history. The shuffling of Indigenous people between Native, enslavable Other, and

Orientalized Other16 shows how settler colonialism constructs and collapses its triad of

categories.

This colonizing trick explains why certain minorities can at times become model and

quasi-assimilable (as exemplified by Asian settler colonialism, civil rights, model minority

discourse, and the use of ‘hispanic’ as an ethnic category to mean both white and non-white) yet,

in times of crisis, revert to the status of foreign contagions (as exemplified by Japanese

Internment, Islamophobia, Chinese Exclusion, Red Scare, anti-Irish nativism, WWII antisemitism,

and anti-Mexican-immigration). This is why ‘labor’ or ‘workers’ as an agential

political class fails to activate the decolonizing project. “[S]hifting lines of the international

division of labor” (Spivak, 1985, p. 84) bisect the very category of labor into caste-like bodies

built for work on one hand and rewardable citizen-workers on the other. Some labor becomes

settler, while excess labor becomes enslavable, criminal, murderable.

The impossibility of fully becoming a white settler - in this case, white referring to an

exceptionalized position with assumed rights to invulnerability and legal supremacy - as

articulated by minority literature preoccupied with “glass ceilings” and “forever foreign” status

and “myth of the model minority”, offers a strong critique of the myth of the democratic nationstate.

However, its logical endpoint, the attainment of equal legal and cultural entitlements, is

actually an investment in settler colonialism. Indeed, even the ability to be a minority citizen in

the settler nation means an option to become a brown settler. For many people of color,

becoming a subordinate settler is an option even when becoming white is not.

“Following stolen resources” is a phrase that Wayne has encountered, used to describe

Filipino overseas labor (over 10% of the population of the Philippines is working abroad) and

other migrations from colony to metropole. This phrase is an important anti-colonial framing of a

15 E.g. Detention centers contain the foreign, non-citizen subject who is paradoxically outside of the nation yet at the

mercy of imperial sovereignty within the metropole.

16 We are using Orientalized Other in sense of the enemy other, following Edward Said’s (1978) analysis of

Orientalism.

Decolonization

not

metaphor

colonial situation. However an anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonizing

framework; anti-colonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize

denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn’t strive to undo

colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it. Seeking stolen resources is entangled with

settler colonialism because those resources were nature/Native first, then enlisted into the service

of settlement and thus almost impossible to reclaim without re-occupying Native land.

Furthermore, the postcolonial pursuit of resources is fundamentally an anthropocentric model, as

land, water, air, animals, and plants are never able to become postcolonial; they remain objects to

be exploited by the empowered postcolonial subject.

Equivocation is the vague equating of colonialisms that erases the sweeping scope of land

as the basis of wealth, power, law in settler nation-states. Vocalizing a ‘muliticultural’ approach

to oppressions, or remaining silent on settler colonialism while talking about colonialisms, or

tacking on a gesture towards Indigenous people without addressing Indigenous sovereignty or

rights, or forwarding a thesis on decolonization without regard to unsettling/deoccupying land,

are equivocations. That is, they ambiguously avoid engaging with settler colonialism; they are

ambivalent about minority / people of color / colonized Others as settlers; they are cryptic about

Indigenous land rights in spaces inhabited by people of color.

Moves

innocence

IV:

Free

your

mind

and

the

rest

will

follow

Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward

overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to

focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole

activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task

of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to

aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology,

and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and

exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness

building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be

critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change.

Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts

settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic (1970) and

En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind, the rest (your ass) will follow.”

Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian,

wrote his celebrated book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanon’s

Wretched of the Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the practices of educators

committed to social justice cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out

significant differences between Freire and Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization.

Freire situates the work of liberation in the minds of the oppressed, an abstract category of

dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a similarly abstract category of oppressor. This is a sharp right

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turn away from Fanon’s work, which always positioned the work of liberation in the

particularities of colonization, in the specific structural and interpersonal categories of Native

and settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is unclear who the oppressed are, even more ambiguous

who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout that an innocent third category of

enlightened human exists: “those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side” (Freire,

2000, p. 42). These words, taken from the opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed,

invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering.

Fanon positions decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition

that is already over determined by the violence of the colonizer and unresolved in its possible

futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor and

oppressed through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to work on the

‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and indeed read the word (critical consciousness)

in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no Natives, no Settlers, and

indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present. Settler

colonialism is absent from his discussion, implying either that it is an unimportant analytic or

that it is an already completed project of the past (a past oppression perhaps). Freire’s theories of

liberation resoundingly echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a continental philosophy of mental

emancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically emerges from the dark cave of

ignorance into the light of critical consciousness.

By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in the darkness of the cave, in that well

of feeling and wisdom from which all knowledge is recreated.

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and

hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep

places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of

unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power

within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

(Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37)

Audre Lorde’s words provide a sharp contrast to Plato’s sight-centric image of liberation: “The

white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us - the poet -

whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not action

upon the world. Rather, poetry is giving a name to the nameless, “first made into language, then

into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37). Importantly, freedom is a possibility that is not

just mentally generated; it is particular and felt.

Freire’s philosophies have encouraged educators to use “colonization” as a metaphor for

oppression. In such a paradigm, “internal colonization” reduces to “mental colonization”,

logically leading to the solution of decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will follow. Such

philosophy conveniently sidesteps the most unsettling of questions:

Decolonization

not

metaphor

The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to

answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization?

(Cesaire, 2000, p. 32)

Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be

considered globally and historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer, nor a

historical answer. To do so is to use colonization metaphorically. “What is colonization?” must

be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the

relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’.

Colonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings, settler

sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific

ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities.

To agree on what [decolonization] is not: neither evangelization, nor a

philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance,

disease, and tyranny... (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32)

We deliberately extend Cesaire’s words above to assert what decolonization is not. It is not

converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic

process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle

against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad umbrella of social justice may have room

underneath for all of these efforts. By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the

repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.

We don’t intend to discourage those who have dedicated careers and lives to teaching

themselves and others to be critically conscious of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism,

xenophobia, and settler colonialism. We are asking them/you to consider how the pursuit of

critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be

settler moves to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt

or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.

Anna Jacobs’ 2009 Master’s thesis explores the possibilities for what she calls white

harm reduction models. Harm reduction models attempt to reduce the harm or risk of specific

practices. Jacobs identifies white supremacy as a public health issue that is at the root of most

other public health issues. The goal of white harm reduction models, Jacobs says, is to reduce the

harm that white supremacy has had on white people, and the deep harm it has caused non-white

people over generations. Learning from Jacobs’ analysis, we understand the curricularpedagogical

project of critical consciousness as settler harm reduction, crucial in the

resuscitation of practices and intellectual life outside of settler ontologies. (Settler) harm

reduction is intended only as a stopgap. As the environmental crisis escalates and peoples around

the globe are exposed to greater concentrations of violence and poverty, the need for settler harm

reduction is acute, profoundly so. At the same time we remember that, by definition, settler harm

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reduction, like conscientization, is not the same as decolonization and does not inherently offer

any pathways that lead to decolonization.

Moves

innocence

A(s)t(e)risk

peoples

This settler move to innocence is concerned with the ways in which Indigenous peoples are

counted, codified, represented, and included/disincluded by educational researchers and other

social science researchers. Indigenous peoples are rendered visible in mainstream educational

research in two main ways: as “at risk” peoples and as asterisk peoples. This comprises a settler

move to innocence because it erases and then conceals the erasure of Indigenous peoples within

the settler colonial nation-state and moves Indigenous nations as “populations” to the margins of

public discourse.

As “at risk” peoples, Indigenous students and families are described as on the verge of

extinction, culturally and economically bereft, engaged or soon-to-be engaged in self-destructive

behaviors which can interrupt their school careers and seamless absorption into the economy.

Even though it is widely known and verified that Native youth gain access to personal and

academic success when they also have access to/instruction in their home languages, most Native

American and Alaskan Native youth are taught in English-only schools by temporary teachers

who know little about their students’ communities (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006; Lee, 2011).

Even though Indigenous knowledge systems predate, expand, update, and complicate the

curricula found in most public schools, schools attended by poor Indigenous students are among

those most regimented in attempts to comply with federal mandates. Though these mandates

intrude on the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, the “services” promised at the inception of

these mandates do little to make the schools attended by Indigenous youth better at providing

them a compelling, relevant, inspiring and meaningful education.

At the same time, Indigenous communities become the asterisk peoples, meaning they are

represented by an asterisk in large and crucial data sets, many of which are conducted to inform

public policy that impact our/their lives (Villegas, 2012). Education and health statistics are

unavailable from Indigenous communities for a variety of reasons and, when they are made

available, the size of the n, or the sample size, can appear to be negligible when compared to the

sample size of other/race-based categories. Though Indigenous scholars such as Malia Villegas

recognize that Indigenous peoples are distinct from each other but also from other racialized

groups surveyed in these studies, they argue that difficulty of collecting basic education and

health information about this small and heterogeneous category must be overcome in order to

counter the disappearance of Indigenous particularities in public policy.

In U.S. educational research in particular, Indigenous peoples are included only as

asterisks, as footnotes into dominant paradigms of educational inequality in the U.S. This can be

observed in the progressive literature on school discipline, on ‘underrepresented minorities’ in

higher education, and in the literature of reparation, i.e., redressing ‘past’ wrongs against nonwhite

Others. Under such paradigms, which do important work on alleviating the symptoms of

Decolonization

not

metaphor

colonialism (poverty, dispossession, criminality, premature death, cultural genocide), Indigeneity

is simply an “and” or an illustration of oppression. ‘Urban education’, for example, is a code

word for the schooling of black, brown, and ghettoized youth who form the numerical majority

in divested public schools. Urban American Indians and Native Alaskans become an asterisk

group, invisibilized, even though about two-thirds of Indigenous peoples in the U.S. live in urban

areas, according to the 2010 census. Yet, urban Indians receive fewer federal funds for

education, health, and employment than their counterparts on reservations (Berry, 2012).

Similarly, Native Pasifika people become an asterisk in the Asian Pacific Islander category and

their politics/epistemologies/experiences are often subsumed under a pan-ethnic Asian-American

master narrative. From a settler viewpoint that concerns itself with numerical inequality, e.g. the

achievement gap, underrepresentation, and the 99%’s short share of the wealth of the metropole,

the asterisk is an outlier, an outnumber. It is a token gesture, an inclusion and an enclosure of

Native people into the politics of equity. These acts of inclusion assimilate Indigenous

sovereignty, ways of knowing, and ways of being by remaking a collective-comprised tribal

identity into an individualized ethnic identity.

From a decolonizing perspective, the asterisk is a body count that does not account for

Indigenous politics, educational concerns, and epistemologies. Urban land (indeed all land) is

Native land. The vast majority of Native youth in North America live in urban settings. Any

decolonizing urban education endeavor must address the foundations of urban land pedagogy

and Indigenous politics vis-a-vis the settler colonial state.

Moves

innocence

VI:

Re-°©‐occupation

and

urban

homesteading

The Occupy movement for many economically marginalized people has been a welcome

expression of resistance to the massive disparities in the distribution of wealth; for many

Indigenous people, Occupy is another settler re-occupation on stolen land. The rhetoric of the

movement relies upon problematic assumptions about social justice and is a prime example of

the incommensurability between “re/occupy” and “decolonize” as political agendas. The pursuit

of worker rights (and rights to work) and minoritized people’s rights in a settler colonial context

can appear to be anti-capitalist, but this pursuit is nonetheless largely pro-colonial. That is, the

ideal of “redistribution of wealth” camouflages how much of that wealth is land, Native land. In

Occupy, the “99%” is invoked as a deserving supermajority, in contrast to the unearned wealth

of the “1%”. It renders Indigenous peoples (a 0.9% ‘super-minority’) completely invisible and

absorbed, just an asterisk group to be subsumed into the legion of occupiers.

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Yang

Figure 1.1. If U.S. land were divided like U.S. wealth

For example, “If U.S. land were divided like U.S. wealth” (figure 1.1) is a popular graphic that

was electronically circulated on the Internet in late 2011 in connection with the Occupy

movement. The image reveals inherent assumptions about land, including: land is property; land

is/belongs to the United States; land should be distributed democratically. The beliefs that land

can be owned by people, and that occupation is a right, reflect a profoundly settling,

anthropocentric, colonial view of the world.

In figure 1.1, the irony of mapping of wealth onto land seems to escape most of those

who re-posted the images on their social networking sites and blogs: Land is already wealth; it is

already divided; and its distribution is the greatest indicator of racial inequality17. Indeed the

current wealth crisis facing the 99% spiraled with the crash in home/land ownership. Land (not

money) is actually the basis for U.S. wealth. If we took away land, there would be little wealth

left to redistribute.

17 Wealth, most significantly in the form of home ownership, supercedes income as an indicator of disparities

between racial groups. See discussions on the wealth gap, home ownership, and racial inequality by Thomas Shapiro

(2004), in The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality.

Decolonization

not

metaphor

NATIVE LAND: 100%. RESERVATION LAND: 2.3%.

Figure 1.2. If Native land were [is] divided like Native land

Settler colonization can be visually understood as the unbroken pace of invasion, and

settler occupation, into Native lands: the white space in figure 1.2. Decolonization, as a process,

would repatriate land to Indigenous peoples, reversing the timeline of these images.

As detailed by public intellectuals/bloggers such as Tequila Sovereign (Lenape scholar

Joanne Barker), some Occupy sites, including Boston, Denver, Austin, and Albuquerque tried to

engage in discussions about the problematic and colonial overtones of occupation (Barker,

October 9, 2011). Barker blogs about a firsthand experience in bringing a proposal for a

Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples,18 to the General Assembly in Occupy

Oakland. The memorandum, signed by Corrina Gould, (Chochenyo Ohlone - the first peoples of

Oakland/Ohlone), Barker, and numerous other Indigenous and non-Indigenous activist-scholars,

called for the acknowledgement of Oakland as already occupied and on stolen land; of the

ongoing defiance by Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and around the globe against imperialism,

18 The memorandum can be found at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/10/29/18695950.php, last retrieved

June 1, 2012.

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Yang

colonialism, and oppression; the need for genuine and respectful involvement of Indigenous

peoples in the Occupy Oakland movement; and the aspiration to “Decolonize Oakland,” rather

than re-occupy it. From Barker’s account of the responses from settler individuals to the

memorandum,

Ultimately, what they [settler participants in Occupy Oakland] were asking is

whether or not we were asking them, as non-indigenous people, the impossible?

Would their solidarity with us require them to give up their lands, their resources,

their ways of life, so that we – who numbered so few, after all – could have more?

Could have it all? (Barker, October 30, 2011)

These responses, resistances by settler participants to the aspiration of decolonization in Occupy

Oakland, illustrate the reluctance of some settlers to engage the prospect of decolonization

beyond the metaphorical or figurative level. Further, they reveal the limitations to “solidarity,”

without the willingness to acknowledge stolen land and how stolen land benefits settlers.

“Genuine solidarity with indigenous peoples,” Barker continues, “assumes a basic understanding

of how histories of colonization and imperialism have produced and still produce the legal and

economic possibility for Oakland” (ibid., emphasis original).

For social justice movements, like Occupy, to truly aspire to decolonization nonmetaphorically,

they would impoverish, not enrich, the 99%+ settler population of United States.

Decolonization eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty. It requires the abolition

of land as property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people.

There are important parallels between Occupy/Decolonize and the French/Haitian

Revolutions of 1789-1799 and 1791-1804, respectively. Haiti has the dubious distinction of

being “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere” (Central Intelligence Agency, 2012); yet,

it was the richest of France’s colonies until the Haitian Revolution, the only slave revolution to

ever found a state. This paradox can be explained by what/who counts as whose property. Under

French colonialism, Haiti was a worth a fortune in enslaved human beings. From the French

slave owners’ perspectives, Haitian independence abolished not slavery, but their property and a

source of common-wealth. Unfortunately, history provides us with the exact figures on what

their property was worth; in 1825, “France recognized Haitian independence by a treaty

requiring Haiti to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs payable in 5 years to compensate

absentee slaveowners for their losses” (Schuller, 2007, p.149). The magnitude19 of these

19 150 million Francs was the equivalent of France’s annual budget (and Haiti’s population was less than 1% of

France’s), 10 times all annual Haitian exports in 1825, equivalent to $21 billion in 2010 U.S. Dollars. By contrast

France sold the Louisiana Purchase to the United States in 1803 for a net sum of 42 million Francs. The indemnity

demand, delivered by 12 warships armed with 500 canons, “heralded a strategy of plunder” (Schuller, 2007, p.166),

as a new technology in colonial reconquest.

Decolonization

not

metaphor

reparations not for slavery, but to former slave owners, plunged Haiti into eternal debt20. Occupy

draws almost directly from the values of the French Revolution: the Commons, the General

Assembly, the natural right to property, and the resistance to the decolonization of Indigenous

life/land. In 1789, the French Communes (Commons) declared themselves a National Assembly

directly “of the People” (the 99%) against the representative assembly of “the Estates” (the 1%)

set up by the ruling elite, and adopted the celebrated Declaration of the Rights of the Man and

the Citizen. Not unlike the heated discussions at the December 4, 2011 General Assembly of

Occupy Oakland that ultimately rejected the proposal to change the name to “Decolonize

Oakland”, the 1789 National Assembly debated at great length over the language of

emancipation in the Declaration. Ultimately, the Declaration abolished slavery but not property,

and effectively stipulated that property trumped emancipation. While rhetorically declaring men

as forever free and equal (and thus unenslavable), it assured the (revolutionary) colonial

proprietors in the assembly that their chattel would be untouched, stating unequivocally: “The

right to property being inviolable and sacred, no one ought to be deprived of it...” (Blackburn,

2006, p. 650).

Table 1.

Outnumbers. Incommensurable.

French Revolution

99% French, 1% Slaves21

Haitian Revolution

90% Slaves, 10% Whites & Free Blacks

Decolonizing the Americas means all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless.

It is incommensurable with the redistribution of Native land/life as common-wealth.

Table 2.

Outnumbers. Incommensurable.

Occupy

99% Occupiers, 1% Owners

Decolonize

0.9% Indigenous22, 99.1% Settlers23

20 Haiti has literally been in debt from the moment it was recognized as a country. Haiti paid off its indemnity to

France in 1937, but only through new indemnity with the United States. Ironically, in contemporary times, the Paris

Club has power over Haiti’s debt, and thus maintains Haiti’s poverty.

21 At 28 million people, France was the 3rd most populous country in the world in 1789, after China and India.

Haiti’s slave population in 1791 was approximately 452,000 - a fluctuating number as the slave mortality rate

exceeded the birth rate, requiring a constant supply of newly enslaved Africans; and approximately 200,000 slaves

died in the revolution. 1% refers to this number of enslaved people in Haiti relative to the French population, and

does not include those enslaved in France or its other colonies.

22 According to the 2010 U.S. census, Native Americans comprise 0.9% of U.S. inhabitants.

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Our critique of Occupation is not just a critique of rhetoric. The call to “occupy

everything” has legitimized a set of practices with problematic relationships to land and to

Indigenous sovereignty. Urban homesteading, for example, is the practice of re-settling urban

land in the fashion of self-styled pioneers in a mythical frontier. Not surprisingly, urban

homesteading can also become a form of playing Indian, invoking Indigeneity as ‘tradition’ and

claiming Indian-like spirituality while evading Indigenous sovereignty and the modern presence

of actual urban Native peoples. More significant examples are Occupiers’ claims to land and

their imposition of Western forms of governance within their tent cities/colonies. Claiming land

for the Commons and asserting consensus as the rule of the Commons, erases existing, prior, and

future Native land rights, decolonial leadership, and forms of self-government.

Occupation is a move towards innocence that hides behind the numerical superiority of

the settler nation, the elision of democracy with justice, and the logic that what became property

under the 1% rightfully belongs to the other 99%.

In contrast to the settler labor of occupying the commons, homesteading, and possession,

some scholars have begun to consider the labor of de-occupation in the undercommons,

permanent fugitivity, and dispossession as possibilities for a radical black praxis. Such “a labor

that is dedicated to the reproduction of social dispossession as having an ethical dimension”

(Moten & Harney, 2004, p.110), includes both the refusal of acquiring property and of being

property

Incommensurability

unsettling

Having elaborated on settler moves to innocence, we give a synopsis of the imbrication of settler

colonialism with transnationalist, abolitionist, and critical pedagogy movements - efforts that are

often thought of as exempt from Indigenous decolonizing analyses - as a synthesis of how

decolonization as material, not metaphor, unsettles the innocence of these movements. These are

interruptions which destabilize, un-balance, and repatriate the very terms and assumptions of

some of the most radical efforts to reimagine human power relations. We argue that the

opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across

these efforts.

We offer these perspectives on unsettling innocence because they are examples of what

we might call an ethic of incommensurability, which recognizes what is distinct, what is

sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social

justice projects. There are portions of these projects that simply cannot speak to one another,

cannot be aligned or allied. We make these notations to highlight opportunities for what can

only ever be strategic and contingent collaborations, and to indicate the reasons that lasting

solidarities may be elusive, even undesirable. Below we point to unsettling themes that

challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors broadly assembled into three areas:

23 Wayne would like to give special thanks to Jodi Byrd for pointing out this numerical irony.

Decolonization

not

metaphor

Transnational or Third World decolonizations, Abolition, and Critical Space-Place Pedagogies.

For each of these areas, we offer entry points into the literature - beginning a sort of bibliography

of incommensurability.

Third

world

decolonizations

The anti-colonial turn towards the transnational can sometimes involve ignoring the settler

colonial context where one resides and how that inhabitation is implicated in settler colonialism,

in order to establish “global” solidarities that presumably suffer fewer complicities and

complications. This deliberate not-seeing is morally convenient but avoids an important feature

of the aforementioned selective collapsibility of settler colonial-nations states. Expressions such

as “the Global South within the Global North” and “the Third World in the First World” neglect

the Four Directions via a Flat Earth perspective and ambiguate First Nations with Third World

migrants. For people writing on Third World decolonizations, but who do so upon Native land,

we invite you to consider the permanent settler war as the theater for all imperial wars:

● the Orientalism of Indigenous Americans (Berger, 2004; Marez, 2007)

● discovery, invasion, occupation, and Commons as the claims of settler sovereignty (Ford,

2010)

● heteropatriarchy as the imposition of settler sexuality (Morgensen, 2011)

● citizenship as coercive and forced assimilation into the white settler normative (Bruyneel,

2004; Somerville, 2010)

● religion as covenant for settler nation-state (A.J. Barker, 2009; Maldonado-Torres, 2008)

● the frontier as the first and always the site of invasion and war (Byrd, 2011),

● U.S. imperialism as the expansion of settler colonialism (ibid)

● Asian settler colonialism (Fujikane, 2012; Fujikane, & Okamura, 2008, Saranillio, 2010a,

2010b)

● the frontier as the language of ‘progress’ and discovery (Maldonado-Torres, 2008)

● rape as settler colonial structure (Deer, 2009; 2010)

● the discourse of terrorism as the terror of Native retribution (Tuck & Ree, forthcoming)

● Native Feminisms as incommensurable with other feminisms (Arvin, Tuck, Morrill,

forthcoming; Goeman & Denetdale, 2009).

Abolition

The abolition of slavery often presumes the expansion of settlers who own Native land and life

via inclusion of emancipated slaves and prisoners into the settler nation-state. As we have noted,

it is no accident that the U.S. government promised 40 acres of Indian land as reparations for

plantation slavery. Likewise, indentured European laborers were often awarded tracts of

‘unsettled’ Indigenous land as payment at the end of their service (McCoy, forthcoming).

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Communal ownership of land has figured centrally in various movements for autonomous, selfdetermined

communities. “The land belongs to those who work it,” disturbingly parrots Lockean

justifications for seizing Native land as property, ‘earned’ through one’s labor in clearing and

cultivating ‘virgin’ land. For writers on the prison industrial complex, il/legality, and other forms

of slavery, we urge you to consider how enslavement is a twofold procedure: removal from land

and the creation of property (land and bodies). Thus, abolition is likewise twofold, requiring the

repatriation of land and the abolition of property (land and bodies). Abolition means selfpossession

but not object-possession, repatriation but not reparation:

● “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans

any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men” (Alice

Walker, describing the work of Marjorie Spiegel, in the in the preface to Spigel’s 1988

book, The Dreaded Comparison).

● Enslavement/removal of Native Americans (Gallay, 2009)

● Slaves who become slave-owners, savagery as enslavability, chattel slavery as a sign of

civilization (Gallay, 2009)

● Black fugitivity, undercommons, and radical dispossession (Moten, 2008; Moten &

Harney, 2004; Moten & Harney, 2010)

● Incarceration as a settler colonialism strategy of land dispossession (Ross, 1998; Watson,

2007)

● Native land and Native people as co-constituitive (Meyer, 2008; Kawagley, 2010)

Critical

pedagogies

The many critical pedagogies that engage emancipatory education, place based education,

environmental education, critical multiculturalism, and urban education often position land as

public Commons or seek commonalities between struggles. Although we believe that “we must

be fluent” in each other’s stories and struggles (paraphrasing Alexander, 2002, p.91), we detect

precisely this lack of fluency in land and Indigenous sovereignty. Yupiaq scholar, Oscar

Kawagley’s assertion, “We know that Mother Nature has a culture, and it is a Native culture”

(2010, p. xiii), directs us to think through land as “more than a site upon which humans make

history or as a location that accumulates history” (Goeman, 2008, p.24). The forthcoming special

issue in Environmental Education Research, “Land Education: Indigenous, postcolonial, and

decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research” might be a good

starting point to consider the incommensurability of place-based, environmentalist, urban

pedagogies with land education.

● The urban as Indigenous (Bang, 2009; Belin, 1999; Friedel, 2011; Goeman, 2008;

Intertribal Friendship House & Lobo, 2002)

● Indigenous storied land as disrupting settler maps (Goeman, 2008)

Decolonization

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metaphor

● Novels, poetry, and essays by Greg Sarris, Craig Womack, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor

● To Remain an Indian (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006)

● Shadow Curriculum (Richardson, 2011)

● Red Pedagogy (Grande, 2004)

● Land Education (McCoy, Tuck, McKenzie, forthcoming)

More

incommensurability

Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the

order of the world (Fanon, 1963). This is not to say that Indigenous peoples or Black and brown

peoples take positions of dominance over white settlers; the goal is not for everyone to merely

swap spots on the settler-colonial triad, to take another turn on the merry-go-round. The goal is

to break the relentless structuring of the triad - a break and not a compromise (Memmi, 1991).

Breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign

Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of

the imperial metropole. Decolonization “here” is intimately connected to anti-imperialism

elsewhere. However, decolonial struggles here/there are not parallel, not shared equally, nor do

they bring neat closure to the concerns of all involved - particularly not for settlers.

Decolonization is not equivocal to other anti-colonial struggles. It is incommensurable.

There is so much that is incommensurable, so many overlaps that can’t be figured, that

cannot be resolved. Settler colonialism fuels imperialism all around the globe. Oil is the motor

and motive for war and so was salt, so will be water. Settler sovereignty over these very pieces of

earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms. The same yellow pollen in the

water of the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, Leslie Marmon Silko reminds us, is the

same uranium that annihilated over 200,000 strangers in 2 flashes. The same yellow pollen that

poisons the land from where it came. Used in the same war that took a generation of young

Pueblo men. Through the voice of her character Betonie, Silko writes, “Thirty thousand years

ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done; you saw the witchery ranging as

wide as the world" (Silko, 1982, p. 174). In Tucson, Arizona, where Silko lives, her books are

now banned in schools. Only curricular materials affirming the settler innocence, ingenuity, and

right to America may be taught.

In “No”, her response to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, Mvskoke/Creek poet

Joy Harjo (2004) writes, “Yes, that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government

issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved, my relative.” Don’t

Native Americans participate in greater rates in the military? asks the young-ish man from Viet

Nam.

“Indian Country” was/is the term used in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S.

military for ‘enemy territory’. The first Black American President said without blinking, “There

was a point before folks had left, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and

were flying back to base, where they said Geronimo has been killed, and Geronimo was the code

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name for bin Laden.” Elmer Pratt, Black Panther leader, falsely imprisoned for 27 years, was a

Vietnam Veteran, was nicknamed ‘Geronimo’. Geronimo is settler nickname for the Bedonkohe

Apache warrior who fought Mexican and then U.S. expansion into Apache tribal lands. The Colt

.45 was perfected to kill Indigenous people during the ‘liberation’ of what became the

Philippines, but it was first invented for the ‘Indian Wars’ in North America alongside The

Hotchkiss Canon- a gattling gun that shot canonballs. The technologies of the permanent settler

war are reserviced for foreign wars, including boarding schools, colonial schools, urban schools

run by military personnel.

It is properly called Indian Country.

Figure 1.3. Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon

Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism.

South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then

nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S.

seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed

in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This

book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race). The admiration is

sometimes mutual, the doctors and administrators of forced sterilizations of black, Native,

disabled, poor, and mostly female people - The Sterilization Act accompanied the Racial

Integrity Act and the Pocohontas Exception - praised the Nazi eugenics program. Forced

sterilizations became illegal in California in 1964. The management technologies of North

American settler colonialism have provided the tools for internal colonialisms elsewhere.

So to with philosophies of state and corporate land-grabbing24. The prominence of “flat

world” perspectives asserts that technology has afforded a diminished significance of place and

borders. The claim is that U.S. borders have become more flexible, yet simultaneously, the

physical border has become more absolute and enforced. The border is no longer just a line

suturing two nation-states; the U.S. now polices its borders interior to its territory and exercises

24 See also Arundhati Roy (2012) in Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Decolonization

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sovereignty throughout the globe. Just as sovereignty has expanded, so has settler colonialism in

partial forms.

New Orleans’ lower ninth ward lies at the confluence of river channels and gulf waters,

and at the intersection of land grabbing and human bondage. The collapsing of levies heralded

the selective collapsibility of native-slave, again, for the purpose of reinvasion, resettlement,

reinhabitation. The naturalized disaster of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters laid the perfect

cover for land speculation and the ablution of excess people. What can’t be absorbed, can’t be

folded in (because the settlers won't give up THEIR land to advance abolition), translates into

bodies stacked on top of one another in public housing and prisons, in cells, kept from the labor

market, making labor for others (guards and other corrections personnel) making money for

states -human homesteading. It necessitates the manufacturing of crime at rates higher than

anywhere in the world. 1 in 6 people in the state of Louisiana are incarcerated, the highest

number of caged people per capita, making it the prison capital of United States, and therefore

the prison capital of the world.

Table 3

Prison capital of the world25.

Prisoners per 100,000 residents

Louisiana 1,619

United States 730

Russia 450

Iran 333

China 122

Afghanistan 62

The Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers’ delta flood plain was once land so fertile that it could

be squeezed for excess production of cotton, giving rise to exceptionally large-scale plantation

slavery. Plantation owners lived in houses like pyramids and chattel slavery took an extreme

form here, even for the South, beginning with enslaved Chitimachas, Choctaw, Natchez,

Chaoüachas, Natchez, Westo, Yamasee, Euchee, Yazoo and Tawasa peoples, then later replaced

by enslaved West Africans. Literally, worked to death. This “most Southern on earth”(Cobb,

1992) was a place of ultimate terror for Black people even under slavery (the worst place to be

sold off too, the place of no return, the place of premature death). Black and Native people alike

were induced to raid and enslave Native tribes, as a bargain for their own freedom or to defer

their own enslavibility by the British, French, and then American settlers. Abolition has its

incommensurabilities.

The Delta is now more segregated than it was during Jim Crow in 1950 (Aiken, 1990).

The rising number of impoverished, all black townships is the result of mechanization of

25 Source: Chang (2012).

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agriculture and a fundamental settler covenant that keeps black people landless. When black

labor is unlabored, the Black person underneath is the excess.

Angola Farm is perhaps the more notorious of the two State Penitentiaries along the

Mississippi River. Three hundred miles upriver in the upper Delta region is Parchment Farm.

Both State Penitentiaries (Mississippi and Louisana, respectively), both former slave plantations,

both turned convict-leasing farms almost immediately after the Civil War by genius land

speculators-cum-prison wardens. After the Union victory in the Civil War ‘abolished’ slavery,

former Confederate Major, Samuel Lawrence James, obtained the lease to the Louisiana State

Penn in 1869, and then bought Angola Farm in 1880 as land to put his chattel to work.

Figure 1.4. “The Cage: where convicts are herded like beasts of the jungle. The pan under it is

the toilet receptacle. The stench from it hangs like a pall over the whole area” John Spivak,

Georgia N_____, 1932.

Cages on wheels. To mobilize labor on land by landless people whose crime was mobility

on land they did not own. The largest human trafficker in the world is the carceral state within

Decolonization

not

metaphor

the United States, not some secret Thai triad or Russian mafia or Chinese smuggler. The U.S.

carceral state is properly called neo-slavery, precisely because it is legal. It is not simply a

product of exceptional racism in the U.S.; its racism is a direct function of the settler colonial

mandate of land and people as property.

Black Codes made vagrancy - i.e. landlessness - illegal in the Antebellum South, making

the self-possessed yet dispossessed Black body a crime (similar logic allowed for the seizure,

imprisonment and indenture of any Indian by any person in California until 1937, based on the

ideology that Indians are simultaneously landless and land-like). Dennis Childs writes “the slave

ship and the plantation” and not Bentham’s panopticon as presented by Foucault, “operated as

spatial, racial, and economic templates for subsequent models of coerced labor and human

warehousing - as America’s original prison industrial complex” (2009, p.288). Geopolitics and

biopolitics are completely knotted together in a settler colonial context.

Despite the rise of publicly traded prisons, Farms are not fundamentally capitalist

ventures; at their core, they are colonial contract institutions much like Spanish Missions, Indian

Boarding Schools, and ghetto school systems26. The labor to cage black bodies is paid for by the

state and then land is granted, worked by convict labor, to generate additional profits for the

prison proprietors. However, it is the management of excess presence on the land, not the forced

labor, that is the main object of slavery under settler colonialism.

Today, 85% of people incarcerated at Angola, die there.

Conclusion

An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast

to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about

rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with

questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be

the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these

questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a

framework.

We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions -

decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to

Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary

participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will

require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization

remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and

indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics -

moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the

26 As we write today, Louisiana has moved to privatize all of its public schools

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/01/louisiana-makes-bold-bid-_n_1563900.html

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exact measure that we can discern the movements which give [decolonization] historical form

and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36).

To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity,

abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means

removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional

clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the

lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made

possible by an ethic of incommensurability.

when you take away the punctuation

he says of

lines lifted from the documents about

military-occupied land

its acreage and location

you take away its finality

opening the possibility of other futures

-Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet

(as quoted by Voeltz, 2012)

Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to

justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is

an elsewhere.

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E. San Juan on Filipinizing Cultural Studies

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:01:00 +0000

My firm conviction is that no indigenization project will fully succeed unless it includes a program of systematic decolonization, particularly an uncompromising indictment of U.S. colonialism/neocolonialism in its totality, together with its complicit transnational allies. Neither postcolonial hybridity, modernizing technocratic pragmatism, nor transnational flexibility will do; we need dialectical cunning and a bricoleur’s resourcefulness in taking advantage of what our forebears–Rizal, Recto, Agoncillo, Constantino, Hernandez, and others–have already won for us.

Review of Verbal Arts in Philippines Indigenous Communities by Herminia Coben

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 02:08:00 +0000

Herminia Meñez Coben performs multiple roles in her book. First, she is a skilled

archivist—by painstakingly recording and collecting various poetic performances

in ten indigenous communities in the Philippines, she is able to transform the

ephemeral and the verbal into permanent print. Having said this, I am not claiming

a hierarchical and antagonistic relationship between oral and print cultures.

In doing this archival function, Coben offers scholars in anthropology, folklore,

performance studies, Philippine studies, and Southeast Asian studies a virtual

repository of valuable cultural practices. Secondly, she is an excellent scholar of

culture-in-action. She is able to provide the contexts in which these verbal arts are

practiced, performed, and reproduced. Looking into the social and political organization,

history, geography, and economy, Coben properly situates each group

within its own specific collective experience. Finally, having pointed to the archival

importance of this work, I want to stress that this book is not a non-theoretical and

uncritical catalogue of practices or a list of who, what, where, and when, but rather

a very ambitious analysis of persistent Southeast Asian island cultural themes and

semantic issues that cut across particular genres, performances, and communities

such as siblingship, gender, topography and place, and shamanic power.

Coben underscores the non-fixity of the verbal arts and the ways in which these

cultural productions are active processes engaged with ongoing political, economic,

and cultural struggles, and in many cases, are important media for social transformation

and change. Indigenous poetry, which is part of oratory skills, is something

that has been seen as an important ability and integral component of political and

religious leadership. Benedict Anderson in his classic article about power in Javanese

society showed how potency is embodied in oratory or verbal arts skills and

is crucial in understanding local forms of authority. Together with Anderson and

anthropologists such as Maurice Bloch, Coben ethnographically demonstrates the

structural powers of the verbal arts. However, I would like to augment this typical

reading with a different, albeit unorthodox, one.

I would like to depart from what would be a typical appreciation of a work such

as this and go more broadly into the emotional and affective elements in the verbal

arts. While Anderson, Bloch, and to some extent Coben have hinted at the energies

propelled by the skillful deployment of verbal forms and meanings, they nevertheless

have shied away from closer inspection of the emotional and affective ecologies

and climates that precipitate from indigenous poetic productions or performances.

Herminia Meñez Coben, Verbal Arts in Philippine

Indigenous Communities: Poetics, Society, and History

Manila: The Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009. 402 pages.

Softcover, $19.50. isbn 978-971-550-583-3.

The Philippines

122 | Asian Ethnology 71/1 • 2012

Coben’s book opens up new ethnographic vistas for understanding the current

scholarly focus on affect and emotion. Affect is a fascinating analytical category

that allows for the recognition of the atmospheric effects of the sensorial—images,

scents, sounds, and haptic experiences. It also provides a way of acknowledging

bodily engagements that are not easily categorizable. Verbal poetic genres, particularly

those about love, anger, and violence, are in fact vital and vigorous vantages

for the conjuring of bodily affects and feelings. In fact, they are not literal positivist

records of “social facts” but are indirect lyrical and expressive renditions of

historical, cultural, and other social situations and are meant to persuade, entice,

and draw listeners and/or an audience into the spirals of the poetic narrative. The

reception of these indigenous poetic performances is dramatically more embodied

than everyday speech. While recent scholarly literature in the humanities and the

humanistic social sciences have pointed to the productive possibilities and potential

of bodily knowledge through affect and emotions, most if not all have focused

on Western-based media such as cinema, printed literature, and new media such

as the internet, and very little attention has been given to cultural productions in

indigenous communities. While this is not the author’s overt or explicit intention,

Coben’s analysis enables a productive alternative interpretation of the mechanics

of indigenous poetry as elements involved in the structuring of sentiments and the

conjuring of ecologies of passions, sensations, and feelings. In other words, I am

framing Coben’s book as a grounded staging of processes and practices that render

such ecologies and environments possible.

It may seem that this framework is inimical to Coben’s project, but I would

strongly argue that this appreciative though unconventional reading of her work

still remains true to her most basic intent—to demonstrate that indigenous verbal

arts are constitutive of cultural world-making. In sum, the richness of her data and

the erudition of her scholarly grasp of enduring research questions such as those of

potency and power in Southeast Asia will help in making this work an important

source and research touchstone for Asian studies scholars for years to come.

Martin F. Manalansan iv

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Indigenization Studies

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:33:00 +0000

Lily Mendoza's Theoretical Advances in Indigenization Studies for those who want to understand the discourse in the Philippine academe.

Reflections from the 2012 CFBS Planning Retreat

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:39:00 +0000

Tahanan-Aralan Para sa Babaylan (CFBS)

Our annual planning retreats began in 2010 when we planned and organized the First International Babaylan Conference. In 2011, we met to plan the August retreat/symposium, "Decolonization and Indigenization as a Path to the Sacred." In 2012, the theme of our planning retreat was "Strengthening Our Foundation"; the choice of this theme reflects our growth as a community that is now having to think about sustainability and how we want to move towards the future in this time of great turning.

This time of "great turning" refers to the transformation or shifts that we are experiencing at many levels: cosmic, planetary, climate, economic, cultural and social -- shifts that we experience in our personal lives. We believe that we are a resource-rich people as we recover and remember our connection to our ancestors and to the indigenous core values we still know and live in our bodies. As a Filipino community in the diaspora, CFBS exists to study and research Indigenous Filipino Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP) as well as to provide a container for our indigenous/babaylan-inspired projects and to participate and collaborate with other communities who share our vision. We are a community that is drawn together by our love for our Kapwa and the calling to share these gifts with our communities and the world at large. Our vision is inspired by the wisdom and power of the ancient babaylan to bring about well-being and wholeness to the communities s/he serves.

At this year's retreat, we were inspired to call forth new names for the various levels of engagements within CFBS:

Haligi ng Sinag/Pillars of Light -- refers to the seven core group members that meet regularly via conference calls to make decisions about CFBS events and projects in consultation with ...
Banaag/Ray of light -- members who have worked closely with the core group for the past three years in organizing and implementing CFBS events and projects.
Alaya/New Dawn -- members who volunteer their time and talent at various CFBS events and projects.

So we invite you, our readers, to join us at these various levels. Please talk to us.

During this weekend, we also worked on creating group norms that will guide us in our process of planning. We share them here as a work-in-progress:

We commit to uphold the beauty of Kapwa through playfulness, openness, respect, honesty, appreciation and affection, patience, and trusting.
We commit to doing shadow work constructively and responsibly in service to ourselves and to our community.
We commit to the sustainability of the organization through financial independence, resource generation, legacy planning, and alliance building.
We commit to a process of indigenous-inspired decision-making that is based on modified consensus and is scalable. We commit to the centrality and importance of ritual.
We are mindful that we are Kasinag to each other; each an expression of the individual rays of light that shine from the core of our Loob.
We commit to be discerning and wise regarding issues of information-sharing in the process of decision making that impacts our community and our projects
We commit to the research and compilation of archival materials of IKSP.

We create a strong foundation by listening to each other's ancestral stories: our roots in the Philippines and the routes we took to arrive at this continent; the stories we carry in our hearts and minds about our love for our people and our homeland; our immediate families and communities that nurture us in the present. We spent Saturday evening passing the talking bowl relishing these stories. Our cultural, personal and ritual nurturance comes from such deep work and sharing...all of which helps us translate these into our "CFBS programs."

We also set up a mural wall that we put up on our pantry door. At the center are the baybayin scripts for Tahanan-Aralan Para sa Babaylan (CFBS) . Each one was given a piece of paper that contained a phrase from our vision and mission statement. We were asked to meditate on this phrase and then the following morning to draw a visual representation on the mural. As we moved throughout the weekend, this mural was our visual reminder of why CFBS exists, why we are engaged with it, and why the calling is strong and clear in each one of us.

Some Alaya members joined us on Sunday for further planning of events for 2012-2013. Everyone was excited by the idea of having the second international babaylan conference in 2013. All roads lead to this conference from hereon. These are just some of the ideas that we are brewing together.

Music concerts: Grace Nono; Kulintang groups

Healer/s-in-Residence project

IKSP Healing Circles: Connecting to Filipino roots

Healing Grief Rituals

Kapwa Cafe and catering

Book projects

Video and media projects

   Advocacy Projects in support of IPS in the Philippines
   Weaving Threads, Weaving Tales: Indigenous Fashion and Folklore
   Supporting Kapwa 3 conference in The Philippines

Please ask us how you might participate and join us.

Filipina Sets Sail Aboard Vaka Canoe

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:49:00 +0000

Filipina Sets Sail Aboard Vaka Canoe For A Pacific Voyage To Represent Ancient Philippine Mariners
San Diego, California, U.S.A.
January, 24, 2012

Jocelyn "Joy" Ronquillo Ancheta, a Filipino American, will be sailing with the Vaka Pacific Voyagers to represent the Polynesian and Austronesia legacy of the ancestral Philippine mariners. Jocelyn Ancheta, is the sole Filipino to be selected as a crew member to join the prestigious Vaka. This will be the third leg of the Vaka Pacific Voyage. The flotilla of seven traditionally-based Polynesian deep sea canoes will be setting sail on Tuesday morning January 24, 2012 from Spanish Landing West, San Diego, California. The third leg South of the Vaka voyage will feature these destinations: Cabo San Lucas Mexico, the Cocos Islands of Costa Rica, the Galapagos islands, the Marquesas islands, and the islands of Tahiti.

"I am so proud to be able to honor and represent my ancestors and their traditional ways of sailing and navigation as part of the Vaka" says Jocelyn Ancheta regarding her first voyage aboard the Vaka canoe. Jocelyn Ancheta has been receiving instruction on the ancient Philippine healing systems of Ablon and Pranic Energy Healing, as well as the Hawaiian healing massage art of Lomi Lomi. An active community organizer, Jocelyn volunteers for the Center for Babaylan Studies, a group dedicated to the indigenous spiritual knowledge systems of the pre-colonial Philippines. Ms. Ancheta was the Babaylan Pavilion director for the 20th Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture held on September 2011 at San Pedro, California. "My hope is to inspire other Filipinos to appreciate the great legacy of the ancient Bangka boat tradition." Joy continues, "...our ancestors were able to navigate huge stretches of ocean via traditional navigation, and by the power of the spiritual energy that emanates from the islands. One of the main goals of my voyage is to bring about awareness of critical environmental conditions that the oceans are in. I hope that Filipinos take pride in their ancestral connection with the oceans, and become responsible stewards of mother dagat (ocean)" Jocelyn Ancheta will be documenting her voyage via location call in posts, and journal blog entries. Joy beams, "I would love to see the Philippines reclaim its rightful place alongside the other Polynesian sailing vessels by building a proper traditional deep sea balangay canoe."

The Vaka vessels have aboard representatives of several Polynesian peoples including, but not limited to the Cook Islands, Fiji, Maori of New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tahiti, and now the Philippines. Jocelyn will be sailing aboard the Pan-Pacific multi-national Vaka canoe. The goal of the Vaka Pacific Voyage is to bring about ecological awareness of the oceans, cultivate pride in the peoples of Austro and Polynesia, and honor the traditions of the original Pacific Voyagers. The Vaka Pacific Voyage started in Aotearoa, New Zealand on April 2011. After joining into a flotilla of seven canoes in Hawaii, the Vaka sailed all the way to North America, arriving in San Francisco, California. The Vaka proceeded down the coast of California visiting at Malibu, Cabrillo Beach, and finally docking in San Diego. After this current leg, the voyage continues from Tahiti back to their respective home islands.

Jocelyn Ancheta is extremely excited to sail aboard a traditional styled canoe aspart of this epic Pacific Voyage. "Joy" will be using traditional navigation, sea currents, stars, and animals to guide her on her journey. The Vaka Pacific Voyagers are proud to have Jocelyn "Joy" Ancheta as part of their sailing crew.

Contact info:

Jocelyn "Joy" Ronquillo Ancheta
Email: joypacificvoyager@gmail.com
Vaka Pacific Voyagers http://www.pacificvoyagers.org/

Text provided to the Babaylan Files by Letecia Layson 24 January 2012.

BUSONG: A Review by Mykelle Pacquing

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 05:44:00 +0000

Film Review of Busong

Mykelle Pacquing

Oct. 27, 2011

I recently watched Aureaus Solito’s latest film Busong (translated from Palawan as “fate”) at the ImagineNative film festival in Toronto. I have never seen any of Solito’s work prior to Busong. As well, all I knew of him was of what Katrin de Guia mentioned of him in her article contribution to Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous. I called on some of my family to attend the film and it happened that my Tita and my two cousins—her two children—came with me.

After the film, I felt overwhelmed—the film was intense. I felt that my thoughts had been catapulted into the mountains, rivers, beaches, forests of Palawan (as the north wind began to bring in the cold weather outside the theatre)—as well as the challenges, realities, beauties, and gifts that the Palawan people bring in their spirituality and worldview that is so intrinsically tied to the land. The implications of watching the film in Toronto at an Indigenous film festival which brought people of all colours to see the film had given me great comfort and hope for peace and understanding on this land. It was the first time for me that friends from my Indigenous circles and my Filipino circles had come together on equal footing—we are beginning to see the interconnections of our stories.

Oftentimes I get the sense that the Indigenous People of the land where I’ve made my home feel alienated from the peoples who arrive to their traditional lands because of the waves of colonization that have been pouring in from all over the world carrying their traumas and diseases—making them feel weary of the cultures that newcomers bring with them. On the Filipino side, I get the sense that many Filipinos that live away from the Philippines believe that they are severed from their homeland and have no choice but to assimilate to the dominant culture in order to flourish—and with that that, the assimilation of the dominant culture’s behavior of suppressing Indigenous People. It was for the first time that I felt that the two communities were open to each other.

Despite my education in Indigenous ways, I could sense at the beginning of the film—when the viewer is forced into the Palawan pace of time in long drawn-out shots of the landscape—that my impatience with this pace revealed my modern city indoctrination. At this point of the film, I had to let go of this need to process my thoughts as fast as I could simply for the sake of efficiency. I had to let go of my city-mind—needed to navigate train lines, schedules and coordinate meeting places and pick-up locations—and suspend them to immerse myself into the film. There caused a mental discomfort, but it felt like medicine afterwards. It was necessary in order to see the film at the level that Solito presented.

After the first sub-plot, it began to make sense how Solito was exposing the interconnections of the stories—the search for healing and for beauty—in the Palawan way. It became clear how the struggle for that beauty is brought about by going through forced external interferences—a chainsaw that was used to cut indiscriminately, a white foreigner who imposed alien concepts of private property, and a Manilan who finds his Palawan spirit name and takes up his role as a balian. The ending of the film encompasses all these struggles and the beauty that was borne from all the separate stories.

I was saddened that my younger cousin did not understand the film, but this reminded me that understanding Indigenous ways is a privilege. Indigenous ways are not relegated to the marginalized, the uneducated, the illiterate, and the economically disadvantaged as mainstream perception perceives it. It takes a fair amount of experiential education and literacy of nature simply to understand Solito’s film—and I think this is one of the film’s weaknesses. The reality is, if you grew up in the city in a Christian family, the richness of what Busong offers may not be accessible to you.

What concerns me now is not so much if Busong can be understood in its film context, so much as if the Indigenous Thought implicated in the movie can still be accessed by non-Palawan city dwellers in a real-world context. Can the concept of busong—as I understand it, the understanding of one’s story, which encompasses one’s fate (or what the Creator provides you), experiences, and actions—be understood and integrated into one’s worldview? Can the intrinsic connection to spirit and the land be understood as crucial in maintaining balance in one’s life? Can the innocence of a lifestyle gathering clams provide a shift in the modern consciousness that has been conditioned and industrialized to work the body full-time?

Solito’s film would say that yes, that this can be done—as depicted by the Palawan who was born and raised in Manila and became immersed in his ancestors’ ways out of his desire to go back to Palawan and hear the ending of his uncle’s song that he recorded some time ago.

It is my hope that this film fuels the desire of others to find the songs of their own busong and sing them, knowing that wherever they are, the land is listening.

Historical Markers on Filipino Women’s Sexuality During Spanish Colonial Times

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 18:13:00 +0000

Historical Markers on Filipino Women’s Sexuality During Spanish Colonial Times

By Gloria Esguerra Melencio

The intention of this research paper is to compile data about the Filipino women’s activities, rituals and customs related to sexuality and mark its historical markers along the way from the 16th up to 17th centuries.

The paper asks the following questions: What did the Spanish colonizers find out when they first saw the women? How did the Spanish colonizers view the Filipino women through time? What were the Filipino women’s activities, rituals and customs that pertain to sexuality? How did they express their sexual desires? Why were polygamy, concubinage and abortion practiced ? How did the Spanish colonizers wield the Christian Doctrine to conquer the so-called Evils that plague the Filipino women? What was the perception of the Filipino women of the Spanish colonizers?

Why sexuality? Why Historical Markers?

First, the researcher chooses the sexuality aspect of women as a topic because most of the materials gathered about womanhod focus on chastity, modesty, virginity, relationship with men and everything related to her being a woman that involves conception, childbearing, giving birth or failing to give birth. Sexuality here as the Webster’s Dictionary defines is the “possession of the structural and functional differentia of sex.”

Second, the researcher sees putting historical markers on the important events related to women’s sexuality using the historical process of Spanish colonization as a backdrop while putting forth forward the social issues that have arisen as past and present-day problems.

Third, the researcher categorizes the historical markers as nodal points in the meeting of two different peoples and cultures – the paganistic native Filipinos and the Christian Hispanics – and discovers along the way a metamorphosed culture where can be threshed out specific issues of Filipino women related to sexuality. The periodization, as the researcher discerns, is fluid. It means the event or symbolical object had begun or surfaced when the Spanish colonizers set foot on the islands in the 16th century and continued until the 17th century. Or may have been continuing up until the present time.

Further study on the periods that are marked as nodal points in women’s sexuality is a must in the future because it will provide explanations and clarifications as to what had transpired in the past that led the way to where the women are now in history.

Full Link posted 17 September 2009 on Philippine History and provided to the Babaylan Files by Letecia Layson

Curing Colonial Stupor, A booklist

noreply@blogger.com (Perla Daly) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 10:12:00 +0000

Why is decolonization and indigenization important to Filipinos today? One of the reasons is that it helps Filipinos become more integrated in their own cultural identity. It also helps them become strengthened as a collective of people who are of the archipelago called the Philippines or whose ancestry hails from there. Why do Filipinos have some sort of cultural identity crisis? Maybe this can help you find answers:

Here is the intro to a booklist called Curing Colonial Stupor, at amazon.com:

When an imperial power comes and colonizes indigenous people, takes away their culture and language and teaches native people to become eurocentric and to look down upon their own kind... a human sickness sets in that is called colonial mentality. This is a systemic and traumatic kind of educational and programming of minds. It is a set of dysfunctional human beings, with a superiority complex, teaching with brutal methods, another set of human beings how to have an inferiority complex and how to be innately dysfunctional as a human being.

This dysfunction, this colonial mentality and colonizers mentality can be cured.

How to find healing?

First, get very angry. The first book listed here will help you do that and is called The Forbidden Book for a reason. Who among the U.S. imperial forces want the little people, among those they colonized and in their own country, to understand the demented thinking they have that justifies their colonization of people who seek their own independence and ways of life?

Next, figure out that this whole Life thing and how people think is all a Game of sorts. The illusions that people project upon us, that we agree to uphold can be shattered.

Next, find ways to rid yourself of programmed thinking that you unconsciously began to subscribe to throughout your life. Aha! That's the catch---it takes years to deprogram. But a personal practice of meditation and self-reflection can help you achieve that.

Return to your roots.

Unsubscribe from belief systems that were constructed to benefit one people and take away from another.

Find healing, wholeness, Clarity.

This booklist includes titles such as:

Forbidden Book, by Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, Helen Toribio
Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change by Peter Russell
Coming Full Circle, by Leny Strobel
If Life is a Game These are the Rules by Chérie Carter-Scott
How to See Yourself as You Really Are... by by Dalai Lama

See the amazon booklist on "Curing colonial stupor" here

Towards a 'Kapwa' Theory of Art: Multiplicity in Integrative Contemporary Practices

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:20:00 +0000

Towards a 'Kapwa' Theory of Art: Multiplicity in Integrative Contemporary Practices
by Margarity Certeza Garcia
Presented at: Bahaus University Weimar
Masters in Public Arts and New Artistic Strategies
21 February 2011
Excerpt

(What)…is the large percentage of the population of the world who could be categorized as 'Other,' to do when attempting to enter the bastions of the art world, other then, at least for women who might be perceived as desirable, take off their clothes; as Guerilla Girls' sardonically suggested in a series of poster placed in the New York City arts scene in the 1980s. That question, sans the mocking response, (which is both humorous and painful in its stark reality), forms the crux of this paper. What are additional ways for an artist from the non-dominant modality to position themselves and their work? What additional examples exist for coherent practice that acknowledge the multiple possibilities and hybrid and shifting positions of contemporary life? Where do I, as a hybrid Filipino Artist studying in Europe stand in relation to this debate? This essay neither intends to establish a definitive answer to these questions nor to privilege any artistic theory as a response to them. Instead, it represents an examination of the problem itself, followed by a brief expiration of the possibility of multiplicity using alternative theories.

Full text link provided by Leny Strobel

Popular Spirituality as Cultural Energy by Albert E. Alejo, SJ

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:56:00 +0000

Popular Spirituality as Cultural Energy by Albert E. Alejo, SJ

This paper was delivered during the Spirituality Forum III on August 5,2003 at University of Sto. Tomas CME Auditorium, Manila, Philippines. This article was previously published in Lecture Series 3 on Spirituality, 2004.

Excerpt

Spirituality has always been difficult to define. At the heart of the notion of spirituality, however, is the people’s search for the sacred, for a transcendent dimension to life, for something that gives people meaning in their lives, something that ennobles them to think of and be concerned about a higher cause, something that offers them inner connection and deeper purpose in life, something that helps them celebrate life and existence.

From the data of my experience---I would not claim empirical precision here---I discern at least four spiritual dimensions of our cultural religious practices. I call them spirituality of the body, spirituality of the many, spirituality of celebration and spirituality of negotiation. There is no claim here of exhaustive listing. Let me not waste time being apologetic for my
observation.

Full text link provided by Leny Strobel

Leny writes:

This essay by Paring Bert Alejo is refreshing in the way it articulates and clarifies, for me, the language of popular spirituality among the Filipinos especially of the masa/common folks. I find it interesting that the official church (Catholic) often deems this language as mere resistance against the church's dominant practices when in fact, as Fr. Alejo says, it is cultural energy that challenges our vocabularies of power.

Full text on Leny's blog, Kathang Pinay 2.

Book Excerpt: Indigenous and Cultural Psychology Understanding People in Context

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:52:00 +0000

Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context
Uichol Kim, Kuo-Shu Yang and Kwang-Kuo Hwang, eds.
Springer, 2006, ISBN 978-0-387-28661-7 (Print) 978-0-387-28662-4 (Online)
DOI: 10.1007/0-387-28662-4

From the Preface

The development of indigenous psychology as a field has a short history. Its emergence has been stimulated by leading psychologists in various parts of the world. Virgilio Enriquez was a charismatic leader, championing Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology), which became a national movement in the Philippines (Enriquez, 1992; Pe-pua, Chapter 5, this volume). Durgan and Sinha was critical of “carbon copying” Western psychology and was a vocal advocate of indigenizing psychology. There were other scholars who stressed the importance of indigenous knowledge: Yoshi Kashima in Australia; Bame Nsamenang in Cameroon; John Berry and John Adair in Canada; Reuben Ardila in Columbia; Denise Jodelet inFrance; James Georgas in Greece; Michael Bond, Fanny Cheung, David Ho, Henry Kao, Kwok Leung, and Chung-Fang Yang in Hong Kong; R. K. Naidu, J. B. P. Sinha, R. C. Tripathi, Ramesh Mishra, and Girishwar Misra in India; Hiroshi Azuma, Akira Hoshino, and Susumu Yamaguchi in Japan; Sang-Chin Choi, Uichol Kim, and Young-Shin Park in Korea; Rogelio Diaz-Guerrero and Rolando Diaz-Loving in Mexico; Michael Durojaiye in Nigeria; Alfred Lagmay and Rogelia Pe-pua in the Philippines; Leo Marai of Papua New Guinea; Pawel Boski in Poland; Boris Lomov in Russia; Carl Martin Allwood in Sweden; Pierre Dasen in Switzerland; Kuo-Shu Yang and Kwang-Kuo Hwang in Taiwan; Cigdem Kâgitçibasi in Turkey; Padmal de Silva and Rom Harré in the United Kingdom; Fathali Moghaddam, Carolyn Pope, and Joseph Trimble in the United States; and José Miguel Salazar in Venezuela. They represented individual voices, with differing perspective and emphasis...
To bring together diverse viewpoints, approaches, and perspectives in indigenous psychology around the world, an international workshop entitled Scientific Advances in Indigenous Psychologies: Philosophical, Cultural and Empirical Contributions was held in Taipei, Taiwan, October 29-November 1, 2001. The purpose of the three-day workshop was to bring together leading scholars to document the scientific advances in indigenous psychology and to discuss possible integration of the field. The workshop provided an opportunity for participants to present their views and findings and to discuss the basis for integration and collaboration.
If we had to identify a weakness in the present volume, it is the lack of representation of psychologists representing indigenous peoples. The volume focuses on modern nations, and we could not fully represent scholarly work on indigenous peoples. We hope that a volume that focuses on the indigenous psychology of indigenous peoples will be published in the near future...

Submitted by Leny Strobel

Ancient Baybayin: Early Mother Tongue-based Education Model - History Ko

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Wed, 25 May 2011 01:14:00 +0000

Ancient Baybayin: Early Mother Tongue-based Education Model - History Ko
by Bonifacio F. Comandante, Jr. / Asia Social Institute

ABSTRACT
Miguel Lopez de Legaspi first experienced the linguistic diversity of the Philippine Archipelago on 1565. In the succeeding years, Catholic missionaries were heaping praises on the excellencies of Baybayin Language, not hesitating to compare it even to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the prestigious language of the letters and religion that time.

Fletcher Gardner in 1938 quoted Luyon wife of Yagao (Tribal Mangyan) as saying, “Our writing never changes as it is taught to the children.” Extant Baybayin scripts such as Tagalog, Ilocano, Bisaya, Bohol, Bicol, Pampanga, Pangasinan, Hinunoo, Buhid, Bangon and Tagbanwa have been found very recently to predate the birth of Christ.

While Filipinos lost the ancient art of writing in favor of the Spanish Orthography, the spoken Baybayin language fortunately enough has flourished to this very day. Long before the arrival of the Spaniards, Baybayin has been used in detailing personal and domestic interests, postal scheme, writing poems, art works, healing modalities and conducting rituals for festivities and spirituality. Higher education back then was done by teachers called “Pantas.”

Full text posted 28 May 2010 on History Ko.
Link provided by Leny Strobel and accessed 24 May 2011.

Theoretical Advances in the Discourse of Indigenization

noreply@blogger.com (Perla Daly) — Tue, 10 May 2011 11:30:00 +0000

by S. Lily L. Mendoza

Mga babasahin sa agham panlipunang Pilipino : sikolohiyang Pilipino, pilipinolohiya, at pantayong pananaw. Eds Atoy Navarro; Flordeliza Lagbao- Bolante. Quezon City : Published and distributed by C & E Pub., 2007.

Out of the initially uncoordinated and scattered moves to revamp theorizing within the Western-introduced academic disciplines in the Philippine academy, three programmatic narratives emerged from the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and history, notably, Sikolohiyang Pilipino, Pilipinolohiya, and Pantayong Pananaw, respectively. I take them here as part of a single discursive formation, each working from the same principles of valuing pagsasarili (self-determination) and pagtahak ng sariling landas tungo sa kabansaan (“charting an autonomous path toward nation- or people-hood”). Together, they offer what appears to be the first organized, comprehensive, and programmatic challenge to the long-standing hegemony of colonial theorizing in the disciplines beginning in the period of the late 1970s and reaching a fuller maturation toward the latter half of the 1980s to the present. To date, all three discourses seem to have succeeded in attaining a certain measure of hegemony, not without their share of momentary setbacks and capitulations, but overall, managing to give force and direction to what heretofore had been mostly scattered, diffused critiques of colonization within Philippine higher education.

Full PDF file here.

Dances of Hostility and Friendship

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Sat, 07 May 2011 19:53:00 +0000

Dances of Hostility and Friendship: Embodied Histories of Group Relations in the Agusanen Manobo Spirit-Possession (Yana-an) Ritual

by Jose S. Buenconsejo

Humanities Diliman, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2010)

This paper explores the complex, aesthetic embodiment of a particular history of group relations. It investigates how the form or materiality of ritual séance—constituted by dance, music, speech, and acts—reflects changes in the political economy. The paper deals with Agusanen Manobo séance (yana-an) as a channel for embodying the Agusan Manobo’s rich cultural imagination of “others.” Agusan Manobos are indigenous people,most of whom are now Christians and who live in middle Agusan Valley. Their “imaginary others” are distant outsiders with whom the Manobos owe some kind of affinity because of a more or less shared historical experience based upon concrete social exchange practices. The paper examines two kinds of social relations: (1) Manobos vis-à-vis other indigenous peoples, and (2) Manobos vis-à-vis the Visayan speaking settlers. It demonstrates that the nature of the first social relation is symmetrical or egalitarian. This contrasts with the second, which is asymmetrical. The paper shows that Agusan Manobo yana-an makes reflexive, visceral statements about these social relations, enabling ritual participants to define their social identity and reconstrue the newer asymmetrical Manobo-Visayan relations back to its original equalizing one.

Full PDF link submitted by Letecia Layson

Seclusion and Veiling of Women

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Wed, 04 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Seclusion and Veiling of Women: A Historical and Cultural Approach
by Maria Bernadette L. Abrera
Philippine Social Sciences Review

Abstract:
A very select group of women existed in indigenous Philippine society which has hardly merited any account in history. These women were daughters of datus or rulers who were kept hidden in special rooms and were not allowed to be seen by any man. They remained secluded from society but their beauty and prestige were widespread. Their seclusion contributed immensely to their near invisibility in history, except that their presence dominates the narratives of almost all the Philippine epics. In these epics, these secluded women are described in length, from their physical beauty to their abilities in the spiritual realm. The description of these young women, desired by warrior-heroes and rulers as their wives, are an uncanny guide in a closer reading of the historical texts where we find glimpses and hints of their presence once their characteristics are discovered from the epics. Even the description of the houses as well as the architecture of the Maranao house give evidence to the presence of these secluded young maidens. This paper utilizes the initial historical evidence available to show the presence of the binukot woman in indigenous society, weaving the narrative with those found in the epics and in ethnographic accounts in order to glimpse through the veil and reveal the binukot. However, it has only served to show how much she still remains secluded and veiled in history.

Full PDF link provided by Letecia Layson.

Sacred Journey exhibit by John Paul "Lakan" Olivares'

noreply@blogger.com (Perla Daly) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:00:00 +0000

For those of you in Manila, please view John Paul "Lakan" Olivares' Sacred Journey exhibit of stunning, contemplative, mind-bending, soul-baring drawings... Prof. Olivares shares drawings that reflect his spiritual journey during his 11-year hiatus.

February 28 - March 14, 2011
Galerie Y, 4th FLR SM Megamall Artwalk

Cocktails will be on March 4, 2011, 6:00PM, Galerie Y.

Click link for more details...

You might be able to get a glimpse of some of his works online here:

Meditation Mandalas

shine mentality, a cure for crab mentality by Perla Daly

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 21:14:00 +0000

If the cure to colonial mentality is a mental and spiritual decolonization then the cure to crab mentality has to be what I now call Shine Mentality.

In 2002, I remember speakiing to a group of women in the Manila at a Wowee! Workshop on women's wisdom. When I told them that there is room in this world for everyone to shine because inside all women are fabulous---I got a lot of unbelieving looks. A lot of women around the world, even in the United States, the birthplace of the term liberated woman, don't believe that they've got fabulous-ness or the ability to shine within their own selves in the first place.

I know that most of those Filipino women, like me, were raised up to be quiet and demure---keep your legs closed and your thoughts to yourself....etc, etc. Little do most of us mahinhin/lady like Filipinas realize that some of these tenets of femininity have suppressed our full expression of who we are and have prevented us from pursuing our dreams. It's how we're raised and how our environments influence us that cause us to limit ourselves, and to want to limit others too, even bring them down.

We all need to discover for ourselves how we can live life to the fullest and to also discover how we can want others to live to their fullest potential too. What keeps people from "shining"? What causes people to want others to not shine or to bring down others with their crab mentality?

Read more of the blogpost on NewFilipina.com

REFLECTIVE WEAVINGS ON MY INNER BANIG, by Mila Anguluan-Coger

noreply@blogger.com (Perla Daly) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:59:00 +0000

February 2011

The banigs or hand woven mats said it all. It was Thursday evening, January 27, 2011 and as I spread them out and looked at them, they looked back, crumpled, dirty and forlorn. I carried them, laid them on the tub and tried to scrub them clean. But as the soap and water were flowing, so flowed my tears. The banigs have been in the building basement far too long and have become moldy and badly stained from the rains. How could I have allowed this to happen? As the keeper, I have been remiss in my duty. Now, how could I ever unfold the intricate weavings and the vibrant colors that tell of my people’s tales? They who have lovingly woven these mats in the caves, where the right temperature and amount of moisture helped bring out the best colors, the soft but resilient strands? How was I to help launch Virgil and Lane’s books without the magic of the mats’ stories? I cried, blamed myself, blamed my husband, blamed myself again and cried some more.

The tears were forgotten when the books were launched two days later, on Saturday, Jan 29, at the Silver Lake Center. Three banigs were not so bad after all and were put up on the walls of the center, accompanied by a happy array of indigenous cloth from the Cordillera and Mindanao. The splash of tribal colors and images brightened the center and were reflected on the faces of those who attended. The community came joyfully together to celebrate the books’ L.A. debut. Music, dance, performance and talks flowed and filled everyone. The joy spilled over until the early hours of the morning, when we of CFBS and FilAm Arts celebrated some more – with songs, stories and games, in Roque’s home.

On Sunday, Jan. 30th, the well in my eyes spilled tears again. I heard the news of violent clashes in Egypt and the total communication blackout. My daughter was there, working as an RN and I could not reach her; there was no telephone, no internet, no Skype, nothing. It was just a few days ago that I was looking at her Facebook, how it beamed with pictures of her visit to the pyramids, her childhood dream realized at last. A week after that tour, the Sphinx seemed to have awakened and brought total chaos to the country. It was the most frustrating and stressful time, having to face this dark and ominous wall of silence in Egypt, worried sick about a daughter’s safety. I could not sleep and was glued to the TV and my laptop for news updates. I called the Dept of Foreign Affairs in Manila. Someone said the officials were still assessing the situation. I kept calling them the following days for updates, but no reassurance came. I was on a thin wire, suspended indefinitely, precariously, and the only release were my tears.

Worn out with anxiety, I remembered the last mid-January weekend retreat in Sta. Rosa, the playing like children in Sonoma, the comfort of Leny’s kitchen and couch. I remembered the warmth of bodies and hearts, all 15 of us, settled like birds in a nest, treasuring the home we found in one another. I remembered the sheer bliss of rediscovering deep friendship, the sweetness of laughter shared as a family, the passionate play of being community. We were, as Perla so aptly described it, a bowl. We contained each other, our laughter and our tears, our smiles and even our fears, our bodies, our spirits. We were a bowl yes, but at the same time, we were also a boat on the river, flowing with our dreams, rowing to the rhythm of our vision - for service to our Kapwa - rowing towards liberation, always moving towards freedom.

But what of freedom, a part of me asked, when at any given moment one is clutched by fear and anxiety that grinds unceasingly, unmercifully? If we are to look at the big picture, are we not mere pawns of those in highest authority, those who wield imperial powers and have the resources of the world at their feet, unmindful of the groveling majority, and the wanton destruction of environment and humanity? Is our rowing at CFBS merely a pathetic simulation of movement that cannot get us anywhere anyway? What of the bowl or the boat?

I checked myself and recalled that this time is the same February of our People Power Revolution in EDSA, ignited 25 years ago in 1986. It was this same bloodless revolution that inspired others to bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989, and now, the same people’s revolution that is sweeping Egypt into an unprecedented era of change in 2011.

Buoyed by these thoughts, I again confront the same fears that have shadowed me as a child, even as an adult, assailed by my own and my people’s colonial mentality and the internal oppression that made me feel how painful it was to be “The Other.” I see you, and I accept you as part of me, I tell my fears. But now, I am someone else, I add with conviction.

I am of the same spirit as my ancestors, indestructible and free. It is this same indomitable spirit that connects me to the eternal strand woven into all of creation, animated by its divine Source, regardless of time, matter and space. I am the container of the past, the present and the future. I am part of the tree of transcendence. I live with its roots embracing the earth, I am one with its branches merging with the sky. And together with the rest of my Kapwa, we shall unravel the promise of freedom, whether fighting for it in the streets of EDSA or Egypt, or realizing it in the deepest frontiers of the inner self, and in the realms beyond.

I cry with joy for this life which is a banig of exquisite weavings, of amazing dancing images, imbued with nature’s textures and fragrances, and astounding rainbow hues. I am grateful to be sharing the banig of life with my CFBS family and community, whose nurturing support sustains, and yes, contains as it moves, our personal and collective dreams.

Mabuhay tayo kailanman!

Filipino Tattoos:Ancient to Modern reviewed by Leny Strobel

noreply@blogger.com (Leny Strobel) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 02:50:00 +0000

Filipino Tattoos:Ancient to Modern

REVIEW OF LANE WILCKEN’S FILIPINO TATTOOS: ANCIENT TO MODERN

SCHIFFER BOOKS, 2010

REVIEWED BY: LENY MENDOZA STROBEL

I first took notice of young undergrads at UC Berkeley sporting baybayin tattoos in the mid-90s. Elsewhere I wrote about these tattoos as signifying a desire to reconnect with one’s Filipino indigenous roots or ethnic/cultural heritage. I also wrote that perhaps some of the young folks were just riding a wave of popular culture: the modern primitive. As I perused photography books at bookstores and television spectacles about these modern primitives, I began to wonder about the meaning of such practices.

I thought that in these postmodern times when everything is in flux and identities are hybrid, fluid, cosmopolitan and even “homeless”, the body has become the last territory that a person can still have some control over or ownership. Perhaps, I thought, if our lives are so controlled and mediated by business corporations and the corporate media, the body is trying to assert its own authority. Since tattoos are still relatively marginalized in the dominant culture, those who choose to wear them are asserting their own resistance to dominating narratives. In my head, I kept on theorizing about postmodern practices of resistance to the fetishes of capitalism. But something shifted soon after.

In 1997, as I was recovering from a car accident, I asked a henna artist to draw a “tree of life” tattoo on the six-inch scar along along my right arm. A henna temporary tattoo lasts for about 4 -6 weeks. I got this tattoo the day before I enplaned to the Philippines to recover in my Mother’s arms. Naturally, when she saw my arm she squirmed and asked “what have you done?” – thinking that this was permanent.

I loved this temporary tattoo; it was my way of marking my survival. My second life commenced with this gesture of marking my body, even if only temporarily. My mother was relieved that it was temporary. But I think for the rest of her life she wondered about this strange daughter’s surprises and musings.

Thus, today I sit with Lane Wilcken’s Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern and praising the book for filling in a lot of blanks for me about this ancient practice.

In this book, Lane provides in-depth and wide-ranging perspectives on the connections of Filipino tattoo designs with Polynesian/Pacific Islander myths and practices; what Filipino tattoos signified among specific tribal groups; designs or motifs derived from the animist worldviews of indigenous peoples; and how contemporary Filipino Americans are choosing to tattoo themselves with tribal symbols.

As we[1] attempt to articulate Filipino Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP), Lane adds to this body of knowledge with this book. How do we recuperate the relevance of these indigenous practices and why and what for? In this book, Lane documents the answers to all these questions. What comes through loud and clear for me is that these are living traditions. In indigenous communities where the belief that all is Sacred and animated by the spirits of our ancestors, these living traditions of marking the body with beauty is an extension of one’s relationship to the Sacred. Whether it is to signify the courage of the warrior, safe passage into the other life, or protection from malevolent spirits, or to beautify one’s body, or to signify kinship with other created beings, like thebuwaya/crocodile – these living traditions are kept alive and their symbolic meanings provide the power that is invoked by the chosen tattoo.

To choose to be tattooed is a decision not to be taken lightly. In their indigenous contexts, the community had a shared understanding of the rituals, the symbolic meanings of body adornment. Today, in the diaspora and in the absence of such communities, Lane writes about the meditation that is required before one chooses to be tattooed. As with Asian and Filipino practices like qi gong, acupuncture, kali – these practices require not only the acquisition of skill but the transformation of one’s world view, values, and lifestyle. It may mean a serious reckoning with colonial history, a conscious decolonization process, a shift in lifestyle choices, a shift in the way we eat or what we eat – all of which are part of the process of connecting to the timelessness and Sacredness of Life.

In this book, Lane’s connection to his great grandmother who was a mamangkit/spirit medium, and his grandmother who was a manghilot, is evident. As the receiver of this heritage he has devoted more than two decades of his life researching and documenting this Filipino living tradition. Using the earlier works of American and European anthropologists who documented Filipino tattooing, Lane is able to recontextualize these traditions in the Filipino indigenous world view. To me, this is a critical intervention that is needed for us to fully appreciate these traditions outside of the colonial gaze and outside of the construction of “modern primitives.” In doing so, Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern, returns us to our nobility, beauty, wisdom, and…a sense of magic.

Synchronistically, I have been reading about the recovery of indigenous mind (Jurgen Kremer, 1997; 2003) for white folks and for those who have been subjected to colonialism and imperialism. Kremer refers to the “original instructions” that are given to people and how these instructions need to be taken cared of through ceremony, ritual, dreams; it means to “live in the presence of the past for the future. The original instructions are from the past, we need to bring our present into them, so that creation emerges from the center of our cultures. They contain the information for sustainable living.”[2]

This is the gift of Lane Wilcken’s book; it is an offering and honoring of our Ancestors and their gifts to us. Whether you are Visayan, Ilokano, Gaddang, Kalinga, etc, male or female, modern, in the homeland or in the diaspora – you will find relevant information about your ancestors or about your Filipino history in this book. Even if you have not or will not consider getting a tattoo yourself, you can draw knowledge and wisdom about the ways of our ancestors from this book. You might learn to understand these cultural practices in terms of the validity of the indigenous worldview; for the value of honoring the past in order to honor the present; for valuing our ancestors and their legacy of Sacred Wholeness. You might learn to question the ways in which our ancestors’ practices were portrayed as primitive, barbaric, demonic, or heathen. I only say “might” because the work of doing so – of questioning, reflecting, valuing – is a process of grieving what has been lost under colonization. It is a process of painful re-membering of the stories and practices we have traded in. But if there is even a glimpse of resonance, of magic, that rises to your awareness as you read the book and look at the photographs, pay attention to that whisper. It is your indigenous soul calling you Home.

For me, I specially like this passage: “A woman’s tattooing was an affirmation of her strength and inherent spiritual power, procreative endowment, and as a form of clothing, an enhancement of beauty and a proclamation of her status. Finally, the tattoos were a form of recognition that allowed the soul of a woman to pass into the afterlife and join the glorious chain of her ancestors.” (57).

[1] “We” here refers to the Center for Babaylan Studies whose mission is to provide a container for Filipino IKSP and articulate their relevance today for Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora. Visit http://www.babaylan.net.

[2] Jurgen W. Kremer, “Recovering Indigenous Mind,” in Revision, Vol. 19. No. 4, p.33. 1997.

Babaylan Files

Contemporary Ethnography Across Disciplines

ARNIS by Rene J. Navarro

The Ancestors/Sylvia Mayuga

This article is soon to be published in a book for students of the Marine Academy ofAsia-Pacific in Zambales, Philippines." THE ANCESTORS

Babaylan – The Legend

Resources

Resources

E. San Juan on Filipinizing Cultural Studies

Review of Verbal Arts in Philippines Indigenous Communities by Herminia Coben

Indigenization Studies

Reflections from the 2012 CFBS Planning Retreat

Filipina Sets Sail Aboard Vaka Canoe

BUSONG: A Review by Mykelle Pacquing

Historical Markers on Filipino Women’s Sexuality During Spanish Colonial Times

Curing Colonial Stupor, A booklist

Towards a 'Kapwa' Theory of Art: Multiplicity in Integrative Contemporary Practices

Popular Spirituality as Cultural Energy by Albert E. Alejo, SJ

Book Excerpt: Indigenous and Cultural Psychology Understanding People in Context

Ancient Baybayin: Early Mother Tongue-based Education Model - History Ko

Theoretical Advances in the Discourse of Indigenization

Dances of Hostility and Friendship

Seclusion and Veiling of Women

Sacred Journey exhibit by John Paul "Lakan" Olivares'

For those of you in Manila, please view John Paul "Lakan" Olivares' Sacred Journey exhibit of stunning, contemplative, mind-bending, soul-baring drawings... Prof. Olivares shares drawings that reflect his spiritual journey during his 11-year hiatus.

February 28 - March 14, 2011 Galerie Y, 4th FLR SM Megamall Artwalk

Cocktails will be on March 4, 2011, 6:00PM, Galerie Y.

Click link for more details...

shine mentality, a cure for crab mentality by Perla Daly

REFLECTIVE WEAVINGS ON MY INNER BANIG, by Mila Anguluan-Coger

Filipino Tattoos:Ancient to Modern reviewed by Leny Strobel

Filipino Tattoos:Ancient to Modern

This article is soon to be published in a book for students of the Marine Academy of
Asia-Pacific in Zambales, Philippines."

THE ANCESTORS

February 28 - March 14, 2011
Galerie Y, 4th FLR SM Megamall Artwalk