Conundrums of Indigenous Reclamation in Today’s World:

Lessons from Ethnoautobiography

S. Lily Mendoza

What does it mean to do “Indigenous” work in the diaspora within a context where we find ourselves living on other native peoples’ lands, enveloped in urban infrastructure, colonized by high technology, and reduced in our capacity to live in creative reciprocity with our local ecologies? How do we become the sort of beings who recover a “rootedness in place,” in collaboration with, and accountable to, original peoples, learning respect for land and wise about our history of abuse of other kind? How do we responsibly navigate the waters of remembering in our attempts to recover our Indigenous Soul?

I put forward the foregoing problematic to constitute our central thematic for a conference that the organization I’m currently heading as Executive Director (the Center for Babaylan¹ Studies), co-organized together with an affiliate partner organization (the Kapwa² Collective) in Wahta Mohawk Territory, Torrance, Canada in Fall of 2019. Embraced as part of our shared mission and vision, both organizations deemed “Indigenous reclamation” as the indispensable correlate to the task of decolonization, serving both as portal and crucible for facilitating deep personal and cultural transformation specifically for Filipinos in the diaspora. The following essay was originally prepared for the 2018 Indigenous Wisdom and Shamanism Conference,³ a gathering of Indigenous elders, scholars, and shamanic practitioners from all over the world. Although my posture, whenever invited to gatherings of Indigenous elders, has always been that of a learner and student (being neither a shamanic practitioner nor an Indigenous person), in the presentation, I dared offer some learnings and insights into the aforementioned problematic, realizing I did have something to share from my own decades-long work as a bridge-builder: on the one hand, helping urbanized diasporic Filipinos reconnect with their Indigenous roots, and, on the other, helping bring decolonizing perspectives to urbanized folk in the Philippine homeland through bi-coastal collaborations with likeminded local partners. It is from this position of straddling worlds that I offer whatever understandings I have gained over the years in regard to doing Indigenous reclamation work both in the homeland and in the diaspora.

In this writing, I also specifically reference an important resource I have been gifted with in this kind of endeavor: the framework of Ethnoautobiography as designed by Jürgen Kremer and R. Jackson-Paton (2014) with the substantial assistance of Leny Mendoza Strobel⁴ who co-piloted the framework in her multicultural classes, thus, helping midwife the book project. An indigenously-grounded framework for “unlearning whiteness,” “decolonization,” and “uncovering ethnicities” as the workbook title states, it uses storytelling as the primary mode of engagement with others on a similar path of activating Indigenous awareness. In keeping with this mode of engagement, I begin this writing with a telling of my own personal itinerary.

My Personal Story

To say a bit about myself, I am an academic by profession, an author of books and of many scholarly writings, but, more recently, I have been learning to be a storyteller. As they say, we humans are primarily homo narrans, narrators of stories, which is how we make sense of our world. (One Indigenous teacher remarked that this is why our screens are so compelling and powerful—be they television, movie, iPhone, iPad, etc., screens—because they mimic a very old communal practice of sitting around the fire and telling stories which all our Indigenous ancestors did and still do, except that, in the case of our screens, we don’t really know who all are telling the stories that we consume so voraciously through our various gadgets). There is power in being able to reclaim and tell our own stories, in being able to piece together the broken fragments and restore honor to those stories that have been mangled and distorted by the prejudice of the ruling narrative of our time. In recovering our power to be creators of our own stories, we keep ourselves from being drawn into settling for merely consuming stories told by others. We also need to be able to listen to the stories of others, stories that might implicate us in ways that bring pain or that might uncover wounds we don’t even realize we have.

So, let me begin this writing with my own personal story and trace the roots of my inspiration for doing this fraught work of Indigenous reclamation. My full name is Susanah Lily Luna Mendoza (friends call me Lily). It’s interesting to me to realize, in writing this piece, how much more there is to know simply from researching my homeplace one more time. I’m not referring to the Philippines, which is already a constructed political entity—but the particular piece of land where my ancestors had originally settled and that my family ended up inhabiting. That place is called Pampanga, its native place name originating from the word, pampang ilug, meaning, “banks of the river,” an incredibly fertile land that grew almost anything planted in it—rice, sugar cane, corn, all kinds of vegetables and fruit trees, its rivers and streams teeming with fish, shrimp, crabs and other riparian beings, that is, before full-on urbanization took over.

We Kapampangans (natives of Pampanga) are told that we are mostly descended from the Chinese who came from Taiwan, but oral traditions passed down through generations say we actually descend from a much older people—from the Malays migrating from the Malay Peninsula and Singarak Lake in what is now West Sumatra who settled by the riverbanks as early as 300 to 400 A.D. with many more arriving in the 11^th to the 12^th century. Interestingly, what is not mentioned in this story of my people’s origins is that prior to our Malay ancestors’ arrival, there was a much older people, known as the Ayta tribes, dark-skinned, kinky-haired, skilled hunters and gatherers, who were already in the area 20 to 30 thousand years ago, having migrated from Borneo using land bridges that began to be submerged only around 10-15,000 years later. I will come back to the significance of this history for my own personal journey to healing and decolonization later.

My father told me that he took my name, Susanah, from Susanna Wesley, the virtuous mother of the Anglican minister John Wesley, the founder of Methodism (my father being one of the early converts to Methodism when the American Protestant missionaries came to our shores as part of America’s colonizing mission at the turn of the 20^th century, while my mom was Roman Catholic). Lily, my second name ostensibly came from the Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company that produced the drug that was mistakenly administered to my mother as she was giving birth to me, one that was supposed to induce contractions, but instead, did exactly the opposite, stopping the contractions and nearly costing my mother’s life (a rather strange thing to be named after, if you ask me).

Both “Luna” (my mom’s maiden name) and “Mendoza” (my dad’s surname) were Spanish surnames, adopted when the Spanish colonial government that ruled the Philippines (from 1521 to 1898) decreed the systematization of the selection and registration of names of Filipinos by having them adopt first and last names instead of having only one name as was customary among our Indigenous peoples prior to colonization.

So, how is it that a native Kapampangan person (like myself), born and raised in an island across the Pacific, comes to have a name that references Anglo, American, and Spanish sources, but nothing of anything Indigenous to her birthplace? And how is it that she is here today on Turtle Island living thousands of miles from her homeland while on a journey to recover a sense of her native self and spirituality?

I begin with this fragment of my story to signal that often there are shadows that emerge when we begin to excavate our histories and truly investigate how we came to be where we are, who our ancestors are, and what places shaped our way of being.

Within the framework of Ethnoautobiography, the term “shadow” is referenced as that which typically pertains to the unflattering parts of ourselves—things about us individually or as a people that we would just as soon keep buried since they threaten our ideal view of ourselves (it is a term that comes from the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung). These shadows often retain their long cast upon our lives if left repressed and unexplored. Relegated to the unconscious, such shadows have a way of getting projected outward. The very thing we have kept hidden in ourselves (e.g., a sense of inferiority), we perceive as a moral failure in others. Thus, we encounter the shadow in projection—in our repulsed view of others. One author notes that “the challenge comes when we discover that it is a tremendous drain on our energy to keep this aspect of ourselves hidden. [But] [o]nce we get to know the shadow self, it can become an invaluable source of wisdom, compassion, and insight” (Hal Zina Bennett).

Like many Filipinos in our homeland and in the diaspora, I grew up alienated from much of our Indigenous traditions, having been run through the projects of Western colonial education and Christian missionization that were supposed to turn us, Filipinos, into modern civilized humans. For much of my growing up years, the world of our ancestors entered my conscious awareness only as something to be overcome or transcended—a world of anachronisms and superstitious beliefs now made superfluous by science and/or Christian enlightenment. (Thus, we say: “We modern Filipinos don’t believe in ghosts, we’re just afraid of them”). My own cultural awakening happened serendipitously in a graduate seminar in the university, when a course titled, “The Image of the Filipino in the Arts,” taught by an ethnomusicology professor exposed us for the first time to the various works of art of our ethnolinguistic communities (those least penetrated by Christian missionization and modern influences)—their intricate weaving designs, the wild vibrant colors of their textiles, their basketry, dances, songs, chants and epic oral narrations and what they expressed in terms of a different way of being in the world.

That first-time encounter with the beauty of the soul and cultures of our Indigenous peoples, apprehended not through a pathologizing and primitivizing lens, but in recognition of the indi-genius⁵ that gave birth to such amazing creations, broke me open, initiating a deep healing dynamic in my life not unlike that of falling in love and being changed by the experience forever. From my singular desire to be a Christian missionary in my former life, my world would be totally upended. From there on, this newly opened-up world of my ancestors would become an all-consuming passion, and combating the relentless misinformation campaign of the dominant culture about what that world is like became my new vocation. Today, I am part of the Center for Babaylan Studies, a movement among diasporic Filipinos in the US, Canada, and Hawaii, committed to this work of ancestral and Indigenous reclamation.

It’s Shadow Work All the Way Down

But this work, I’m coming to realize, is not as straightforward and simple as it seemed in that initial moment of romance when everything about the Beloved seemed beautiful and whole, evoking unalloyed joy. For one, in my own process of Indigenous reclamation, I was to learn, as I’ve intimated earlier, that I come from a settler Malay people who were likely responsible for the displacement, and, today, the continuing marginalization and oppression, of an earlier group of aboriginal tribes, the Ayta people—dark-skinned, kinky-haired, skilled hunter-gatherers who have inhabited my home province for thousands of years before my straight-haired and lighter-skinned farming ancestors arrived on the scene. In facing into this historical shadow, I have had opportunity to work with a state university campus located in the very homeland of this now displaced and dispossessed people. But my own agenda has not been primarily to come up with a program, as an intercultural communication scholar, for “helping” the Ayta people (the task expected of me), but rather to help my kind (urbanized, modern-educated Malay-descended Kapampangan kin and other fellow Filipinos) comprehend our complicity in our Indigenous People’s continuing dispossession. In other words, it is to ferret out the ways our very educational objectives—i.e., the commitment to upward mobility, material accumulation, unrelenting growth, “progress,” and technological advancement without regard for the cost to the Earth and other beings—sanction such projects of land theft that invariably result in cultural genocide, if not outright extinction, of Indigenous Peoples.

Indeed, all over the Philippines today, the same interlocking histories between urbanized, educated Filipinos and rural-based Indigenous peoples could be similarly tracked. The former typically serve as the beneficiaries of development aggression that alone makes possible and that sustains their comfortable middle-class lifestyles, unaware of the ways Indigenous Peoples, in the process, are forced off their homelands, or else, hired as menial workers in the places that formerly belonged to them. All too often, the latter end up being forbidden access to their sacred sites, compelled to perform and commodify their lifeways and cultures for tourist consumption and entertainment, offering divinations for an extra buck on the side while their children, growing up under such miserable and racialized conditions, come to despise the traditions of old in the unrelenting pressure to assimilate and conform to an urbanized and massively commercialized culture. Unable to resist the cultural assault, they lose interest in learning from elders whose wisdom is rendered worthless and anachronistic in the modern world.

Across the Philippines today, corporate real estate developers are falling all over themselves to turn the entire archipelago into a playground for the rich, some even catching on to the fashionability of so-called “green eco-villages” and “green” cities, which are anything but—built as they are on top of the stolen homelands and blood of Indigenous peoples (the Philippines now topping the list of countries with the highest rates of murder of Indigenous practitioners, displacing Brazil⁶). These so-called “green cities” are heavily resourced, and reserved exclusively for the upwardly mobile class that can afford them. Representations of the lifestyles of the rich—like their counterparts elsewhere on the globe—populate media discourse (e.g., in Filipino movie themes, on television, and on ubiquitous billboards that now suffocate any city’s skyline), becoming normalized as the way to be a true human being. The educational institution, as another ideological state apparatus, takes for granted urban upward mobility as the default goal of schooling, precluding, in my calculus, the “possibility of nativist longing” (or the longing for a way of life still rooted in the land) as I’ve written about in an earlier essay (Mendoza, 2013).

Working to “reclaim tradition” within a colonized vision of “the good life” and within such fractured conditions of ongoing corporate-led development aggression not just in the Philippines but all over the world is demanding. It requires, first and foremost, that we make ourselves responsible to the living Indigenous communities who are being steamrolled relentlessly by these processes—processes that ultimately benefit the likes of us who live modern, comfortable lifestyles, albeit decolonizing and indigenizing “wannabes.” We get to live the way we do—full-bellied, in high-tech comfort and convenience, because they (Indigenous peoples) are forced to live the way they do—impoverished, their lands taken over by corporate and government entities that serve the likes of us consumers. Unearthing the thinking that renders urban life supreme and the only one worth aspiring for is crucial for dispelling the myth. So does interrogating the white racial discourse undergirding its vision of who’s who and why in a vastly hierarchized world order.

In the work we do in the Center for Babaylan Studies, we recognize the fraught conditions under which we have to take up the task of Indigenous reclamation: a context where we are acutely aware of the jeopardy that our Indigenous Peoples in the homeland (that we seek tutelage from) confront daily, constantly living under duress, threatened with dispossession and harassment, no longer able to have intact communities, needing to grapple constantly with the youth’s disenchantment with traditional culture once sent to modern schools, with elders forced to find subsistence in a dehumanizing market economy that precludes their taking up their role as teachers and wisdom keepers. The conundrums presented by such tenuous conditions multiply when those of us longing to be tutored by our remaining Indigenous Peoples attempt to find avenues of encounter for the worthy purpose of deep listening and apprenticeship. Often well-intentioned and careful to position ourselves as learners, we find ourselves nonetheless confronting dilemmas that both challenge and stretch us in our capacity to respond with justice and integrity.

A few (but huge!) examples of such conundrums that have arisen for us from the projects I have had opportunity to be involved in—whether in conferences we’ve organized here on Turtle Island or in the homeland where we have sought to bring together decolonizing urbanized Filipinos, on the one hand, and Indigenous elders and healers, on the other—are as follow (and here I can only pose them as questions that, for my money, are, in fact, the needed pedagogy), as I noted in a larger piece I wrote on the subject (Mendoza, 2021):

1. 1. Given the fraught economic relations between those of us coming from the diaspora and the participating Indigenous Peoples, what happens when enterprising shamanic practitioners, who are otherwise amazingly gifted and generous in sharing their gifts, see an opportunity to enlist their spirit guides to “target” those of us they perceive to be “with means” to enter into transactions, with the corresponding subtle threat of something calamitous befalling us if the wrangled financial contribution (e.g., for a designated ritual) is not delivered in a timely manner? How embrace, recognize, and wrestle with the very real challenge of unequal economic, material, and spiritual authority power positioning without fleeing or bailing and without reductively placing sole responsibility (and blame) on the “erring” shamanic practitioner/elder? How might such situations be made to serve as schoolhouses for creating awareness and praxis that takes into account the larger historic, economic, and material structures that constrain our relations notwithstanding our mutually good intentions?
   2. Relatedly, can genuine relationships of parity be cultivated in the encounter between non-Indigenous and Indigenous groups? If so, what would true reciprocity look like? How not replicate, one more time, the extractive operations of the “civilized” mining the territories and resources of the “uncivilized,” this time, for intangible spiritual and cultural knowledge or “capital”? How create sustainable relationships beyond the limited physical encounter in space and time?
   3. What happens when Indigenous practitioners from differing regions with varying ritual protocols, shamanic traditions, and histories of relations with outsiders, brought together for the first time through our organizing initiative, report receiving differing guidance or directives from their spirit guides? Or when some aspiring apprentices automatically attribute authority to those they regard as having power to transact with spirits, thereby abdicating their own responsibility to exercise discernment or work on a very human plane to resolve misunderstandings without immediately transposing such to the realm of spirit demand?
   4. Or when in the cross-cultural setting of, say, a conference, spirits show up through the well-meaning but naïve calling of ancestors in ritual space by uninitiated participants who don’t know enough of the protocols to establish boundaries and close the circle in the end? How do we gain perspective and wisdom in the face of deep colonial trauma that so many of us carry that gets intermixed with spirit expression in possession in the form of rage?
   5. How do we, in the absence of place-based communities, care for earnest seekers who are opened up to the spectacle of spirit manifestation but who are otherwise unable to ground such experience in a holistic and deep understanding of decolonized practice and responsible communal relations? What sorts of training and nurturance are necessary and adequate to build cultures capable of hosting shamanic practice? And how do we develop spiritual muscle adequate for wrestling with the complexities of doing such work in our severely fractured world and wherein the spirit world itself might mirror some of the trauma and chaos of our living world? (Pp. 27-277)

Ethnoautobiography as Grounding for Indigenous Reclamation Work

The foregoing dilemmas are but a few of the thorny issues that arise in Indigenous reclamation work as pathway to decolonization. Thorny because, within the framework of decolonization, colonized subjects are often positioned primarily vis-à-vis their dominating Other, locked in an agonistic struggle that disallows self- (and community-) recuperation in a space of freedom rather than reaction. Within this power relation, decolonization tends to be primarily about self-legitimation in the face of erasure by one’s dominant Other and the challenging task is for a people to liberate themselves from the psychic, cultural, and material impositions of the oppressor and to find some other autonomous grounding on which to reconstitute the newly-liberated self. Such was the project of the world-wide decolonization movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, with nationalism becoming the main vehicle of the anti-colonialist struggle for independence and self-determination for colonized peoples, in the words of Fanon (1963), referring to what he calls “the passionate search for national culture:”

The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of the psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. (P. 210)

Almost in the same breath, however, Fanon warns against the “pitfalls of national consciousness,” where nationalism leads merely to a replacement of the foreign bourgeoisie with a native one. Although lacking in vision of native life apart from conjurations of “vulgar” or “primitive” tribalism purportedly creating conditions of what he repeatedly calls the “under-development” of colonized peoples (e.g., with images in his mind of the “peasant who goes on scratching out a living from the soil, and the unemployed man who never finds employment” [Fanon, 1963, p. 169), Fanon’s warning in regard to the danger of replicating the domination dynamic in our own search for identity and collective self-empowerment is nonetheless a point well taken. What seems imperative in light of this warning is the need to position ourselves as decolonizing subjects not only in relation to the colonizing West but, simultaneously—and perhaps more importantly—in relation to native/Indigenous folk wherever we are (whether in the diaspora or in the homeland), i.e., the native/Indigenous folk of the lands we are on whose very dispossession and near total genocidal elimination served as the precondition for the possibility of modern life in the first place.

Mohawk Indigenous scholar Alfred Taiaiake’s remark to me (in response to a question I posed to him at a conference) is instructive in this regard. He said, “It doesn’t matter whether your people were brought here to North America through historic colonization, as far as native peoples are concerned, you are still settlers.” Said without hostility or recrimination but only matter-of-factly, I knew there was truth in what he had spoken. What does it mean for me, a diasporic Filipina, and for our people, to take seriously my/our relationship to the land of our exile and her original peoples? Indeed, how often have our strivings as urbanized, educated, resource-accumulating, and upwardly mobile, folk been experienced by native/Indigenous peoples—again, whether in the diaspora or in the homeland—as no different than the dominating dynamic of colonialism that has been the cause of their oppression and dispossession in the first place?

Tuck & Yang (2012) note that “what is unsettling about decolonization,” if it were about “bring[ing] about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” is that it is not simply a metaphor for all the things we want to do to improve and empower our lives and our communities. They note:

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. (P. 1)

The question is deep and probing. How differently understand our relationship as immigrant/diasporic/exiled Filipino American/Filipino Canadian communities to the violently stolen land known as Turtle Island and her Indigenous peoples? How engage the multi-layered shadows of the past in ways that bring awareness, fierce (and fearless) understanding, and radical justice? In what ways might we similarly understand the material and cultural advantage attained by us urbanized, educated, and upwardly mobile Filipinos vis-à-vis our own Indigenous Peoples in the homeland as, in effect, also a case of settler colonialist spoils, albeit normalized in mainstream discourse as singular “achievement” and a sign of “having arrived”?

This is where I find the framework and process of Ethnoautobiography, as designed by Kremer and Jackson-Paton (2014), useful not only in calling European-descent folk to account for the shadow histories of genocide, racism, slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism that granted their ancestors illegitimate land, wealth, and power in the first place (beginning in 1492); it is also useful in compelling historically colonized peoples (such as diasporic Filipinos and other communities of color) no longer living on the land, likewise to face into their own acquired/inherited privilege as “settlers” on other native peoples’ native lands. What might such reckoning mean for the integrity of their own ancestral journeying?

In Ethnoautobiography, this reckoning is known as ethno-accounting, a process of coming into full awareness of the histories of the places we inhabit, of who lived there before us, what all are the untold stories of care and stewardship of the original inhabitants (including the community of other beings native to the place) and what happened to them in the course of colonial settlement. And how is it that we (and our ancestors before us), have now come to “own” or occupy the lands we currently live in while the lands’ original inhabitants are nowhere to be seen or glimpsed only as mendicant shadows ghosting our cities and other urbanized, well-resourced spaces? It is through such process of accounting that the “prize winning story” of settlement and occupation (Kremer & Jackson-Paton, 2014, p, 215), largely told from the point of view of the settler-victors, can finally get relativized and interrogated, and our places of habitation, perhaps re-inhabited in new, non-colonizing, ways. Only when we are fully cognizant of the hidden histories of forcible relocation and transfer occupations that transpired could we fully account for the price it took to convert native territories into modern spaces and the work of redress and restoration that needs to be done to bring about true healing, justice, and repair.

In this there can be no “spiritual bypassing,” defined by American clinical psychologist and scholar of transpersonal psychology, John Welwood (Spring 2011), as “the widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks,” and, I would add, concrete justice work. A rather common hazard for those seeking reconnection with ancestors and spirit guides, Westwood’s admonition bears underscoring. He notes:

When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to try to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. We may also use our notion of absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as a basic hazard of the spiritual path….

Ethnoautobiography as a framework for doing Indigenous reclamation safeguards precisely against this pitfall (of spiritual bypassing). It does this by demanding that we do the hard work of taking up our collective shadow work both in regard to the colonizer’s imperial projections (and our own internalized versions of them) and in regard to our relationship with native/Indigenous folk and other non-human kin in our respective dwelling places. This is not a mere objective process of learning historical facts and information and rationally making ethical choices as a result; rather, it is being willing to undergo a deeply disruptive transformative process that implicates us in our very being, in our subjective experience as well as in our concrete walk in the world henceforth. It is being hailed into an altogether different stance from that of the masterful but empty self⁷ of the dissociated modern self that we have had to morph into in order to be deemed “worthwhile” as individuals within the civilizing discourse of modernity.

Alas, the claim to mastery and supremacy is nothing more than a compensatory substitute for the grief of loss, the modern world’s substitute dream of technological wonder and commodity fetishism becoming nothing more than a cheap substitute, unable to fill the hollow at the heart of our uprooted modern culture, proliferating instead all kinds of maladies that Cree people like to collectively call “wetiko”—a serious disease of the soul.

The loss of our moorings in all that makes the Earth our original home requires recognition as such. It calls for restoration of our lost connection to dreams, mythic stories, the wisdom of our ancestors, the intimate knowledge of our land bases, and our kinship relationship with all living beings. Tzutujil Mayan-inspired Indigenous teacher and author, Martin Prechtel, calls it a return to our true home in Wild Earth, “the Holy in Nature.” Mythologist Martin Shaw (n.d.), for his part, speaks of learning to bow the head again, to come in the spirit of participation, “not as a conqueror, not in the spirit of devouring, but of relatedness.” Ethnoautobiography speaks of it as the need for critical humility, with the encouragement for us to slow down, to embrace the partiality of the answers we are given at any point of our journeying even while honoring the precious leads that such shards of memory allow us when, in all earnestness, we learn to listen and hear at last the stirrings in us of the awakening Indigenous Soul.

This is the gift of Ethnoautobiography as a framework for doing the work of ancestral reclamation in severely fractured settings. It is the gentle gift of coming to awareness, of overcoming resistance to radical transformation, the provision of a big-enough container for the grief of historical shadow work, and the joy and hope of return to our Indigenous inheritance. I end with the words of Worldwide Indigenous Science Network founder, Apela Colorado (in Kremer & Jackson-Paton, 2014 (P. xxi), who refers to the process of ethnoautobiography as a ceremony:

Once we know who we are we can contribute to the ceremony of life. Through the process of ethnoautobiography we can become full participants around the sacred fire of Indigenous spirituality. Thus we are able not only to fulfill the responsibilities to ourselves, our loved ones, our people, Earth and life past and present—we find reality.

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Endnotes

¹ A Visayan term for the healing or shamanic tradition among Indigenous communities in the Philippines.

² A Tagalog term for a distinctive Filipino Indigenous concept of self as “shared being”

³ Held in Sonoma State University, California on October 6, 2018.

⁴ Who happens to be this author’s sister.

⁵ A term coined by the “cosmic slip of the tongue” of Lopes Nauyac (friend of Filipino independent filmmaker, Kidlat Tahimik). https://www.facebook.com/lissa.romero/posts/10157185182719553. Last accessed 11/20/2021.

⁶ “Enemies of the State? How Governments and Businesses Silence Land and Environmental Defenders,” Global Witness, July 30, 2019, https://www.readkong.com/page/state-enemies-of-6346678. Last accessed 11/20/2021; see also De Guzman (July 30, 2019).

⁷ “Masterful” because acknowledging no indebtedness to anyone but oneself for who one has become, at the same time “empty” because disconnected from all that makes life whole.

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References

de Guzman, C. (July 30, 2019). Philippines is the deadliest country for environment activists, report says. CNN Philippines. https://cnnphilippines.com/news/2019/7/30/Philippines-environmental-defenders-killed-2018.html. Last accessed: 11/20/2021.

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.

Kremer, J & Jackson-Paton, R. (2014). Ethnoautobiography: Stories and practices or unlearning whiteness, decolonization, uncovering ethnicities. Sebastopol, CA: ReVision.

Mendoza, S. L. (2021). Transdiasporic indigeneity and decolonizing faith: Recovering earth spirituality in a settler colonial context. In S. L. Mendoza & G. Zachariah (Eds.). Decolonizing ecotheology: Indigenous and subaltern challenges (pp. 259-279).. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.

Shaw, M. (n.d.). Small gods. https://drmartinshaw.com/essays/. Last accessed 11/20/2021.

Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 1 (1), 1-40.

Welwood, J. (Spring 2011). Human nature, Buddha nature. An interview by T. Fossella. Tricycle, the Buddhist review. https://tricycle.org/magazine/human-nature-buddha-nature/. Last accessed 11/20/2021.