 So, welcome to the second day of the annual Philippine Studies Conference. And today we are doing our second keynote. Dr. Una Paredes is a native of Misamis Oriental province. And she just moved to the U.S. to take up, move back to the U.S. to take up an assistant professorship at UCLA with the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. She's an anthropologist by training her field research focuses on Higaunan Lumads of Northern Mindanao. So, welcome. She's Visaya. Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah. Can you read the description? Oh. Okay. Hi, good morning, everyone. I'm kind of hoping that you haven't completely sobered up from last night, so this might be a little more fun. Yeah, so I wanted to begin by greeting you Madagwaya Adel, which is the greeting from the Higaunan Lumad people with whom I do my research in Northern Mindanao. I wanted to thank the organizers, especially Christina Juan and Soas for conducting this annual Philippine Studies conference, and thanks especially for the memo to, you know, make sure the keynote speakers have the same haircut and glasses. So it's not here, though, so that joke falls back. So I'm really honored to be part of this conference, especially considering the quality and diversity of scholarship being presented while also breaking out of what I consider the clickish tendencies of any area studies endeavor, especially Philippine studies, where you see the same faces over and over again. There are many people here I never met before, which to me is just a hallmark of a really, you know, great, potentially great conference. This morning, I'd like to talk a bit about the ways in which we construct and deconstruct Mindanao and Mindanaoans through our research and discuss some of the myriad possible directions and other considerations for future research that I hope you will agree are worthwhile. My comments will reflect issues that I've encountered in the process of my own research and teaching and in previous conferences, as well as some of the issues raised in yesterday's presentations and Q&As, as well as the exciting presentations lined up for today. When I was asked initially to give a title for my keynote, I gave the title Becoming Mindanao, Becoming Mindanao, Narratives of Placemaking and People Making Over the Centuries. And I came up with that in part because of the title of the conference, the Cartographies of History, Identity and Representation. In pluralizing cartographies, the conference title embodies a fundamental reality of historical, political, anthropological, and other types of academic research, not just on Mindanao but on any place, that there can be multiple ways of representing and interpreting something. In Mindanao's case, we can say based on yesterday's papers alone that there are many ways of imagining Mindanao as a place and conceptualizing it within different contexts of study, whether it's viewed through an anthropological, historical, political, or other lens. And this same imagining applies to its people as well, its peoples. And I speak of all people of Mindanao, not just its Indigenous, Lumad, and Moro peoples, as we refer to them broadly today. So as we here in this room have studied this particular special spot in the world over the decades, it behooves us to approach several questions like what is Mindanao and who is Mindanao. But beyond this, what about where is Mindanao? And perhaps even more provocatively, when is Mindanao? We already know that our answers depend on where we are standing and the direction from which we're gazing at this particular subject across time and space. This is the part we as scholars contribute to what I like to call placemaking and people making. The other part is of course contributed by the places and peoples relative to Mindanao that are the subjects of our study. The Lumads, for example, have their own distinct ways of placemaking and people making, as do colonial functionaries, religious missionaries, and others. When people hear the word Mindanao, it can call up any number of mental images, some of which were presented yesterday. So today it's anywhere from a violent, lawless dystopia from which a strong man like Duterte emerged. It could be a hotbed of terrorism and armed rebellion with or without links to international networks. It's also the underdeveloped political and civilizational frontier of Filipino national consciousness or a land of unfulfilled promise as it was called in the edited volume by Mark Turner, RJ May, and Lulu Respal Turner from some decades ago. But historically Mindanao was also many places. It was a trade entrepôt or tributary of China and the land below the winds. It was a far eastern outpost of the Islamic Ummah at the periphery of Nusantara. It's several distinct leaves or branches in the larger tree of the Malay world with reference to a Leonard and Dias work. Its people in turn belong to not just the Malay world, but also to the broader Austronesian linguistic and cultural family to which most peoples of Ireland, Southeast Asia belong. Much later in history Mindanao represented the outer limits of Spanish colonial authority and political influence, what I refer to in my book as a pericolonial space. That is to say it was still affected by the colonial experience, by the colonial presence, though it was not under much direct colonial governance, except for certain slivers of the coastline to use Spain's own regretful description of their political reach with regard to the island. As such it was casually excluded from serious consideration in the authoritative 1959 book on the hispanization of the Philippines by the American historian John Leddy Phelan. Because in his view nothing of note really happened there as far as hispanization is concerned. Though from my more recent ethno-historical research we now know that this characterization is not accurate and that there was a cultural and political impact on the indigenous peoples of Mindanao. Just that its outcome looked quite different from what happened in the northern islands of the archipelago that were more closely incorporated by the colonial powers. And from more nuanced studies of missionization Mindanao becomes one of the bright lines demarcating the Christian and Muslim worlds within the Catholic imagination of the colonial Spanish and Portuguese. And one might argue also post-colonially in the Filipino and Western imagination that it's a dividing line. But one thing that seems most consistent in all these images we have of Mindanao is its placement at the periphery of different cultural, religious and political cores. In this sense studying Mindanao is can feel very much like studying what Anna Singh refers to with regard to central Borneo as marginality in and out of the way place. Interestingly enough in contrast to that almost all the papers here in this conference are about how connected and embedded Mindanao actually and its people actually are especially historically with the rest of the region and the rest of the world. In fact this was the thrust of a recent panel at the AAS in Asia conference in Bangkok the other day led by scholars from Davao such as Anderson Villia and John Harvey Gamas and where the Ateneo people here. Anyway so what I'd like to do then is think about re-centering Mindanao and place it as a core for a change instead of a periphery and there's much we can we can do here because from where I stand there's much more to Mindanao than most people currently imagine and definitely much more than the vagaries of national and nationalist politics of so-called Islamic terrorism and the illicit and illegal movement of guns drugs and people and other sexy topics. Okay so there's more there's more my concern here is in representing Mindanao more completely and more holistically in terms of dedicated academic scholarship. In large part this is because I'm I'm from there and to me personally it's it's the most beautiful fascinating place in the world warts and all. It's it's home to me and it's the place where my heart always feels like returning to whenever I get sick and tired of this world which lately is with Trump is you know quite often. So one can say I take scholarship on Mindanao somewhat personally and I don't want it misrepresented romanticized or dystopianized at least not in in terms of serious scholarship. Yesterday the keynote showed that Mindanao cannot be seen in black and white terms and that there are a lot of gray areas and in fact maybe all of it is gray and that is a fair representation it would be true of any pretty much any place in the world and not just Mindanao and it's perhaps the essence of true scholarship to be able to portray the many different grays about a place about a people about a situation but at the risk of going a bit overboard with the color spectrum metaphor here I would argue that we can go further and study Mindanao in Technicolor because in reality acknowledging the nuances or gray areas of a thing is but the first step in producing solid verifiable scholarship and achieving some form of empiricism seeing the grays is only the beginning and I think we can definitely do more. So centering Mindanao for me is an argument for studying it as productively as possible in terms of scholarly output for individual scholars but also in terms of groundbreaking scholarship. We cannot break new ground if we remain caught up in the same old arguments over and over with regard to Mindanao's place within the Philippines. We can break out of that and center Mindanao and among the many contexts of when and where we could center Mindanao include centering it in pre-colonial or early modern Southeast Asia and the Malay world and dispensing with the idea of the inevitability of the Philippines historically it was never inevitable that there would be a Philippines and we could center it in the prehistoric Austronesian world in the Islamic world possibly even in the earlier Indian Hindu Buddhist world and today in post-colonial Southeast Asia of course and in the Spanish colonial period and Christian missionization which in my reckoning extends to the construction of Filipino national identity its evolution up to today and there's also much we could contribute when we center Mindanao in its own right to within both Southeast Asian studies where I come from and Asian studies as distinct bodies of area scholarship as well as within the disciplinary boundaries of social sciences and humanities and their respective theoretical frameworks on a global scale. We can globalize Mindanao very easily. Last but not least we should also ask ourselves as scholars of the Philippines whether it is most productive to study Mindanao within Philippine studies or outside of it. Personally part of what appealed to me so strongly about this particular conference is that we could talk about Mindanao here largely free of the national and nationalist concerns of Philippine studies which I think bog us down as Mindanao scholars. I've seen one too many conferences been to one too many conferences where all the papers pertaining to Mindanao despite being unrelated to each other are stuffed into one lump together into a peripheral panel labeled something like Mindanao issues while panel after panel of all sorts of papers on national politics are arrayed in the schedule and I'm frankly tired of that I think it's unproductive for us who study Mindanao. In terms of possible narratives since that's the title of my keynote there are also multiple perspectives and positionalities to consider here as well as the interactions over time between these various perspectives and positionalities. For example we have those we call Lumads today and their maps of their maps of Mindanao since we're talking cartographies here right their maps of Mindanao consist of rivers of history as I like to call it they have place linked genealogies oral histories of colonial contact experiences of postcolonial incursion and shared expressions of political resistance today through environmentalism indigeneity and the active assertion of Filipino citizenship and this is the population I study and I can talk more about this if anyone is interested I could talk for hours about this. For those we now call morals including those who do not wish to be labeled morals they have comparable histories of early forms of statehood international relations conquest both as conquerors and conquered different fights over sovereignty and autonomy and their modern struggle over identity and citizenship as well and this includes those with a strong Muslim identity as well as those moral groups are based in for example maritime environments and don't strongly identify as Muslims you also have other Filipinos you have settlers both early and more recent including those who now regard themselves as Mindanao even though their ancestors might not be indigenous to Mindanao you also have the foreigners who have visited or migrated to Mindanao over the centuries Chinese Japanese Americans Spaniards various missionaries Indonesians Arabs I hear that Indians are the largest immigrant population in Davao city today what does their narrative of Mindanao look like what will it look like 50 years from now as to my perspective and my positionality as someone from Mindanao for those of you who don't know me most of you don't know me so I grew up in a Visayan family whose ancestors have been in Mindanao since the late 1700s based on missionary baptismal records possibly earlier as one of our family names Awitan is according to my Higaonan Lumad informants an indigenous or Lumad name but I think they're just sort of trying to be nice to me and make me feel like making me feel like I belong but I also have significant ancestry from migrant foreigners Chinese and American in Spanish and from Filipinos in the north for example one well one ancestor of mine was killed by pirates in a coastal raid in the mid 1800s and that ancestor's daughter vividly remembered hearing the eruption of Krakatoa and hearing about the execution of Husserizal as a child when when she was a child now when Husserizal was a child obviously another ancestor left his first family in behind in southern China and migrated to Mindanao converted to Catholicism and became a trader of goods with various mountain folk yet another ancestor escaped a Japanese POW camp and helped coordinate MacArthur's return to the Philippines from a mountainside in Kamigin while my story my narrative is not as potentially a representative of the Mindanao experience as the theoretical Muslim woman with the surname Tan from yesterday's keynote it is nonetheless a narrative of Mindanao one that is equally true and equally colorful and equally informative in terms of what we can know about Mindanao as a place and as a maker of people after all it is our task as scholars I believe scholars of this out of the way place not to simplify our understanding of Mindanao but to instead complicate it now how do we do this besides pressing on of course with the interesting and innovative scholarship we already are engaged in undertaking as evidenced by the papers in this conference well I'm an anthropologist and ethno historian so I will focus here primarily on our cultural understanding of the past since many of us here study the past in various capacities I figured it would be the most pertinent approach to address so get drink first our studies of the past I think should not just be about an understanding of our history but also about grasping more fully the for lack of a better word texture of this history and its respective landscape beyond constructing the where and when of Mindanao there's much more texture that we can bring to light here and what do I mean by texture I mean the details that make the history real and not just imagined you know and and to some extent also the pastness of this past you know drawing from what T.S. Eliot first came up with and come which comes into social sciences through Trio so some parenthent parenthetical examples from my research some of you might find kind of silly or not but just as my own personal experience as a researcher when I first started doing archival research I read several Spanish accounts of morals repeatedly burning down the forts Spanish forts at Tamantaka as well as Karaga in the early 1600s and this always puzzled me although it did not surprise me because you also read a lot of references to forts being burned down in novels of early America like the Last of the Mohicans types of novels and so but it took a while for me to get that my concept of fort was limited to my own experience of say Fort Santiago Intramuros and other stone forts that have survived the centuries and have become museums essentially today naturally that was my understanding of forts but Spanish forts back in the early colonial period were ostensibly made of wood not stone and it took me a really long time to get this years okay and and thus they could be set on fire and burned to the ground by raiding raiding natives why is something like this relevant because it influences radically our understanding of the materiality of this history and how certain things could have been possible it demythologizes it it demystifies it and helps us understand how for one how the morals were able to keep the Spaniards at bay for so long and as well as the limits the material limits of Spanish power at the time in another example I mean there's do you have also the landscape of interaction in both coastal and interior areas of Mindanao that for centuries did not correspond in any way to the current transportation infrastructure that structures our experience of Mindanao today it becomes crucial to understanding to understand this historical landscape in order for us to understand how for example Luma populations in the interiors of Agusan Mesames and Caraga were subject to the influence and political control of Magindanaos and Maranaos and not the coastal Spaniards when if you look at the map of Mindanao today it seems impossible to imagine how a raiding party from Magindanao or even Lanao could be a realistic war threat when when it seems like it would take surely take days to get from the western half of Mindanao to the eastern half crossing all those mountains but but not back then as Lanao is I mean it learned from field research just a few hours brisk hike to Cagayan in Misames through the interior and somebody coming from Caraga could cross in to the interior and make it all the way to Lanao so you know there's there's that we think of Lumads today as being upland peoples but some of their oral histories are about their migration from the coastal areas which again changes radically our understanding of these peoples at the same time their histories and genealogies are written all across the landscape of Mindanao in terms of the burials of traceable ancestors and in terms of legendary ancestors it's this history is traced across the landscape in the mountains from which these ancestors emerged and into which they were raptured into into the heavens speaking of legendary ancestors there are references in Higaonon and Manobo oral traditions of what they describe as upturned saucers called the salimbal in Higaonon narratives that some ancestors used for travel in some cases they traveled to Manila on these upturned saucers or shields in some cases they traveled to heaven in these in these legendary the legendary ancestors did in the epic of Aguio for example studied most extensively by the late Elena Machizo and which is shared across the all the Manobo language groups almost all the Manobo language groups Aguio Aguio and his magical relatives are lifted into a gigantic salimbal or saucer by a chain pulled by a shiny deity now let's just start thinking of spaceships and flying saucers here this is likely what a Spanish ship on the northern coast of Mindanao would have looked like to a Higaonon or Manobo viewing it from the mountains at a great distance does that does that not alter our understanding of these people and their pastness to me it does one more thing about oral histories and oral traditions we tend to conceptualize orality and literacy as mutually exclusive and it makes intuitive sense to do so um after all they're completely different modes of memory preservation and recall completely different modes of interacting with the past as described skillfully by the folklorist Herminia Coben who's based um in UCLA as well um but we know from fleeting mentions of Spanish accounts of the Karagatavolt in 1631 as well as from fleeting references in oral traditions um uh that there were uh that they have references to books and writing and that the presence of one um of of of orality in a culture does not preclude um the presence of literacy in a culture so there's a lot more to to to this than than than maybe we're currently appreciating such details may seem quaint but to me they add more than just nuance to our understanding of the past um they also add texture that makes it real and humanizes the figures that we study and makes it all so much more interesting to study um i would like to uh mention a few more examples uh and this time focusing on unpacking some very basic concepts that we tend to uh take for granted and and erroneously project backwards sometimes erroneously often erroneously project backwards into into the past um words don't necessarily mean the same thing today that they did in the past and in translation of course it becomes even more problematic um one such concept that is problematic to apply to the past from to project onto the past from today is land when we study Mindanao land is of course a major issue in Mindanao um so again with reference to Lumans that i study uh despite the territorial autonomy that's uh sought by indigenous peoples with current legislation and i am referring specifically to the IPRA legislation on ancestral domains those laws um their sense of place and territory and more specifically their uh their sense of belonging and identity that that links up to the to these places can be more accurately traced along river systems and and um rate actually radiates out from these rivers uh rather than in terms of bounded plots of land as land tenure is conceptualized and enforced today okay so that's not that's true not only of of these uh culture groups today although they're forced to to reckon with the philippine system of land titling of course but also how territoriality and how belonging and identity was reckoned in the past so another problematic uh concept uh related of course is identity or ethnicity um as evidenced in some of the comments yesterday um we know that identity um and ethnicity can be highly problematic to apply um i mean the modern ideas that we have about ethnicity and um identity um can be highly highly problematic to apply uh to the past when we try to apply these modern ideas including the modern um ethnic groupings and categories to past populations they don't necessarily harmonize or match up how people in Mindanao reckoned identity in the past as well as how people in Southeast Asia wider Southeast Asia uh reckoned identity in the past was quite different to the essentialist manner in which we tend to reckon it in the modern western context it was more flexible than it is in the present where in the present if you are for example a bisaya or a bogobo um that's not only who you are but it's also who your ancestors had to have been as well as who your descendants will be okay whereas in the past there was more room for performative and locative constructions of identity um and ethnicity including the absorption of captives into new ethnic groups uh and the existence of populations that for example had a cultural and political affinity with the morals and were even identified by Spaniards as morals but who did not identify as Muslim like the Karagas of the early colonial period um we also have concepts of leadership that can be highly problematic I'm currently studying the evolution of Datu ship over time among Higaonan Lumads and one thing that definitely stands out is that the English translation of the term Datu into chief or chieftain does not correspond in any way to the indigenous concept of Datu ship um or to mainstream Filipino notions of legitimate political authority for that matter and again I can talk at length about this topic if anybody's interested um we have borders and boundaries that are also problematic in terms of how we understand the illicit movement of people and goods in the present um one of my recent PhD students at my former department at the national university of Singapore um Vilashini Somaya uh she's Malaysian from Sabah she studied what she calls irregular migrants from Mindanao in Sulu who are routinely and repeatedly detained and deported over and over again for violating Malaysian borders as they travel to Sabah and individuals such as this travel to Sabah multiple times over a lifetime it's been a major security issue for Malaysia to say the least however what what she found was that these migrants did not consider themselves to be transgressive in any way to them they're not violating any borders or international boundaries to them their place of belonging was the war and has always been the water and in other words in other words into the title of Vilashini Somaya's dissertation was the sea is their country um and they in fact consider themselves as indigenous to Sabah and the surrounding waters it is their homeland as such they are compelled in terms of culture and identity to keep going home to keep trying to go home and in their view it is Malaysia that is transgressive with its artificial modern borders so you have here as well an eye-opening example of indigeneity vis-a-vis an entity the sea that probably none of us would associate with the idea of ancestral land okay so there's there's that as well we have maritime communities are are just hardly explored in their proper context in the in academia to date and so and this this idea of the boundaries and borders it also relates in a way to the phenomenon of smuggling which was mentioned yesterday several times you know the movement of goods across borders illegally illicitly because well okay ask yourself this if because if this is how some people view the sea and international borders what does this mean for our understanding of why people do what they do just because acts may seem transgressive or dangerous or irrational to us or illegal to us in the modern in modern times it does not follow that the people performing these acts are being lawless or irrational or illicit even um and last but not least um a word about religion and both christianity and islam broadly construed um in a lot of references to such religions as practiced in Mindanao just over the years i've heard and read both in the past and in the present there's been a tendency to label them as syncretistic um because their practice does not necessarily resemble or match the hegemonic european or arabic practices of these religions um syncretism in turn turn has many negative connotations um of impurity and corruption um and and so forth and i would i would like to caution against labeling um or dismissing either the islamization of Mindanao and Sulu or the christianization of the same um as somehow less serious or meaningful than elsewhere in the philippines okay um or the region or the world as i've found in my research on christian missionization and conversion among lumads as well as the work of others on islam in the southern philippines uh just because the end result does not look like what you expect or resemble their mainstream forms it does not follow that these terms of religiosity should be subject to more questioning or doubt than any that of any other population again as with other concepts the indigenous understanding of their own religious identity and practices should be privileged over the external supposedly objective understanding of the same and when we center our research in terms of Mindanao when we center Mindanao and and the people of Mindanao okay this is the the one of the ways in which we can appreciate it by not talking about how well transgressive these people are but but but but but treating them as legitimate treating their practices as legitimate under trying to understand and portray their practices and their cultures as they understand it as they understand those those practices and cultures um so you know the the fact is that when we laugh we laugh at or frown at the seemingly incongruous incongruous or transgressive acts um or purportedly misguided understandings of people we study we actually betray our own misunderstanding and perhaps our own chauvinism for expecting others to conform to what we consider proper which in turn is typically limited by our own biographies and our own intellectual genealogies and so of course this is i've sound totally like an anthropologist when i say stuff like that i know um anyway so i could go on and on here but uh to close i'd like to make three additional recommendations for future scholarship on Mindanao separate from the concerns i've already raised um first i'd like to encourage scholarship i'd like to encourage scholarship and i'd like us to encourage scholarship by a diverse collection of scholars especially those from Mindanao itself there's great value in developing scholars who come from a wide range of perspectives across gender across religion um and from the indigenous minority groups um among the different lumads and and moral ethnic groups um while the pursuit of excellence in scholarship uh requires us to transcend our own biographies in our own work we should also cultivate a true diversity of scholarly scholarly perspectives um especially as we grapple with issues of representation and identity and and making you know uh making a narrative and making multiple narratives of Mindanao for the future um you see any such individuals showing an interest in how scholarship is produced please jump at the chance of training mentoring and perhaps sponsoring them in their in their formation as future scholars of Mindanao in my own experience in the field uh training um Higaonan Lumads to how in in terms of how to write their own oral histories to produce them as text um it it's so fascinating i can talk about this um at length as well because what they're producing now goes beyond what i ever could have conceptualized in terms of what these oral traditions the forms that these oral traditions could take and how they could do it and how they could how they could actually transfer them from oral forms to to um literate forms um anyway so i could go on and on about that um it's very exciting for me personally and so i'd really encourage you even the people who you never think you know like an an an illiterate elder of an indigenous group you know is is totally capable of phd level discourse and discussion about epistemology and the production about the production of knowledge and and this has taught me a lot and helped me grow as a scholar as well so and second um i would like to caution all of us against politicizing our own work or embedding too much political ideology in our research okay and this is not about disregarding our own deeply held religious beliefs or moral convictions as individuals but a caution against imposing our own political agendas on the people we work with um who may very well have their own ideas and their own needs that don't that don't that we might not even be able to fathom worse if we aren't careful they will hold us responsible for damage when our agendas fall apart or we otherwise fail them this is a perpetual complaint among the luma communities i've been in um not because of me um but but they've had the years and years of experiences with scholars both scholars and NGO types who do scholarly work to come in and do studies and collect data cultural data and then abandon them or otherwise don't fulfill the promises that they've made it's a delicate balance because we all have our own political convictions but we can also be blinded by them prioritizing informed consent and fulfilling our ethical obligations to our informants as well as privileging the political concerns of these communities that we study rather than our own okay together they allow us to avoid unintended damage while at the same time doing good solid scholarship that will be meaningful and relevant to those communities um finally recalling a very important point made by brother Carl Gaspar yesterday morning um about making our work accessible to not just other scholars but specifically to local scholars based in Mindanao I would like to echo this and I would like to especially encourage all of us to make sure we return our scholarship to our communities to the communities that helped us produce this scholarship of course this is more relevant to anthropologists um than then historians um but there are historians who work with living populations as well so you know these are communities to help that helped us produce our scholarship and we can think of this as a reimbursement for the great contribution they are making to our individual careers that's how I've always seen it for without these communities without these informants without the time that they spend with us and and the the the the extent to which they tolerate our presence in their communities we would not be able to produce the work we would not have a livelihood we would be nothing okay we would be nothing um so for those who don't work with living populations there are so many ways to make our work accessible as uh Elsa and I were talking about yesterday um and and I think we should probably talk about this at length I would like to make a push for providing accessibility to to local Mindanao based scholars but not only to them not only to the local scholars we know but also to emerging scholars um and even proto scholars in high school or early in college every now and then I get inquiries from such kids through my academia.edu webpage or somebody contacts me randomly on my university email asking about this and that if whether I have any sources whether I have any references can I get a copy of my book and that kind of thing or articles and and um I always accommodate these requests and I try to encourage them in their research because you never know where the next groundbreaking ideas will come from okay and you never know what what scholarship this could lead to you know in the future so all of these are pathways to centering Mindanao and Mindanaoans in terms of future scholarship um and so uh I'd like to end abruptly here um and maybe just sort of hope that you have questions uh ended the Higa Onan way which which they just say yanda that that's it um so anyway uh I hope you have questions everybody awake now yeah yeah of course really okay I always assumed he was Filipino I just the Spaniards have found them entering Mindanao because they saw them as arrogant speakers as being me with the Muslims and so their presence is a bit late in her desire to sort of dissolve my capital of my wording but they they they did in the American period become quite an important community and they were known as Syrians oh okay to what extent do they remember that the current ambassador for instance has Syrians in his own calendar from July so I mean individuals remember but what extent is there any kind of collecting memory pieces to question them? Well I can't really answer that at this point because I it's I don't address that in my research in any way but that's a good thing to study I would say and I mean just sort of speaking personally uh in my I lived in Davao when I was grade three and four uh and my best friend uh my mom's best friends family um they were Lebanese Christians uh for those of you from Davao who wants to own Borgaili store yeah yeah those are you know the daughter was my my best friend in in um in elementary school um and yeah so so you do have yeah that that's a good thing to point out I mean when I was saying Arabs I was thinking of maybe you know further back in history and maybe more recent um migration uh specifically of Muslim Arabs but but yeah that's a good point um yeah there are many um narratives of of Mindanao uh from different different perspectives I guess this is really the bottom line here yes Yorchi okay well thanks for loving that softball at me yeah now I um it's something I'm still grappling to understand basically it's translated that too is just translated into the English term chieftain but the problem lies in how we then use the English term and all the connotations of the English term chieftain from the western context um in and and apply it to um the Lumad context uh and so you don't have a kind of a centralized power in uh with Higa Onondatus you have uh an idea of political authority um a legitimate political authority that aims for the dispersion of power rather than the centralization of power and so this is something I'm trying to work on um and then hopefully produce a book um in in a couple of years but I have an article um sorry a chapter in an edited volume um uh on um uh I can't even remember what it's called it's in the description it's called custom and citizenship in the Philippine uplands um a title I did not title of the book the title of the book is something about so many citizenship in the Philippine islands in sorry yeah the title citizenship and democratization in post-colonial Southeast Asia yeah it's a journal yeah no no no it's a book a bro a bro book um and uh yeah so I kind of outlined there what I know so far but yeah it's it's basically about the dispersion of power and so in any given community like the main community that I've been um going back to for uh the last two and a half decades um they have I mean in any community you don't have just one tattoo you have multiple tattoos and you really have a sort of representation of different families in different family lines and you have ideas that are very austronesian that you find all over including in east Timor and elsewhere in islands southeast asia of first families founding families and so those from those families who uh seek to exercise authority or take a leadership role then become tattoos or buys you know the women of the female um leaders and and um you don't really have like a one central chieftain like you do in other um in in other contexts where you use the word chieftain and so one way in which that's that's kind of that's really interesting in terms of um this sort of uh mismatch is when you have uh the philippine government telling these communities you have to create a tribal council and you elect a chieftain and you know and and other officers of the tribal council this is the form that the government uh thinks should um apply to these indigenous communities based on a very kind of westernized understanding of tribal peoples and chieftains and so what happens then in these communities in in many luman communities now is they have the tattoos and then they will pick one or two people to become what they call the sipton okay they use their pronunciation of the english term chieftain they say oh this is we have a sipton these are the tattoos but we have a sipton and the sipton is the one who interacts with the government because the other guys don't want to okay but that's not necessarily the person who leads the community it's just the person who's on paper as the head of the tribal council they use the english word sipton okay and then the person who manages and says the ancestral domain who's in charge uh administratively is the chairman or what they call the sirman these are not indigenous concepts or terms and so that to me kind of really illustrates the how foreign the idea english idea of the english word chieftain is to to these particular contexts now that might not be the case with other um communities with more hierarchical communities with some moral communities that have more sort of maybe standardized more familiar forms of political authority but uh with higa onans and other lumads they tend to be quite acephalus it's about the dispersion of power and of course that's that's a paradox in itself how can you have leadership when the aim is the dispersion of power not the not the not the capture of it yeah so it's it's it's a paradox and it's hard to try to to actually write about it accurately yeah go ahead yeah um what's what's um happening now and has been happening for the past couple of decades is that as these communities interact more and more are forced to interact more and more um with the philippine um governmental uh apparatus okay um political apparatus with the local government system um is that you then start having little kind of um conflicts uh internal to these communities about who should really be leading them and so you have um this sort of very interesting internal political conflict playing out slowly across the landscape in different communities where ideas about political authority and legitimate political authority are being challenged because you have the indigenous notions of political authority and then you have the sort of Filipino notions of political authority or what's required by the government what's required um in in in terms of modern citizenship and and these people are all very very keen to exercise their citizen citizenship and their rights as Filipinos okay it's not like they're trying to not be filled they're like no no we damn it we have rights and that they see that they're uh they're um you know gaining more control over their own lives and their land by asserting their Filipino citizenship so so they are also eager to interact with the the the Philippine um um government bureaucracy it's not like they're avoiding it and so but that costs us little kind of um shall we say ideas about tradition and ideas about identity are slowly being transformed because the all of this the the political authority um modern identity education public culture religion a lot of these these groups are Christian now a evangelical Christian even um there are their ideas about who they are and how to be Higa on and how to be indigenous people um they're slowly changing and um these ideas are um being contested across generations and so it's it's it's something that I'm still trying to parse out so in addition to those kinds of ideas you also have ideas about indigenous peoples and indigeneity the sort of universalized ideas about what indigenous people um what being indigenous means also infiltrating these communities in terms of their ideas about themselves and and ideas about themselves as indigenous peoples in the Philippines so all of these are all all kind of kind of swirling around I'm still not sure how it's going to how it's going to to play out so I don't know if that made any sense at all would there would there be like a collective like an indigenous term for a like a collective unit a useful one we can use like instead of tribe they call well they call themselves lumads right um um as far as the groups that I'm directly familiar with they refer to for example with Higa on this is a very large um population spread out across Misamis or Intel, Bukidno, Nagusan, Del Sur and Del Norte um and they refer to themselves as Higaonuns but then their individual communities are what they refer to as their tribu do they do see yeah they used the English word tribe tribu or Tagalog word tribe tribu and um yeah so it it kind of and and sometimes they they they talk about themselves as indigenous or indigenous right but so this is another kind of area where these these things kind of don't match up indigeneity uh and I just actually published an article in JC's about it uh journal Southeast Asian studies um as far as indigeneity is concerned um with Higaonuns their idea of indigeneity has to do with uh who's a member of the founding families of a particular area it doesn't have to do with whether you're a Higaonun or not and so uh indigeneity is specific to particular communities not to the tribe as a whole so if somebody who's a Visayan moves to a particular community they have to get the permission of the the founding families if a Higaonun from another community wishes to move to that area they must also get the permission of the indigeneity and even though a Higaonun person and a Visayan person are quite different to us okay one being a member of an indigenous group another being a settler okay um it could even have like an american for example okay uh coming in and seeking permission to stay in that in that territory seek permission from the founding families but to the founding families all those people are the same they are not indigenous to their land only the founding families are indigenous so you have this sort of really different idea about indigeneity as well that clashes with the sort of more universal um national ideas about you know what's legal definitions of indigenous peoples so yeah there's a lot of stuff going on um and by privileging how people actually understand these things i think we can you know there's so much more we can get out of um in terms of studying Mindanao about the hair yeah oh personally i feel more afraid of violence when i'm in Manila i always feel like i'm going to get robbed or attacked or something um Mindanao you can walk around for me at least you know in the so-called rough areas um but um yeah it depends on your perspective i would say that just as a personal opinion as based on my own experience Mindanao is no more violent than the rest of the Philippines um i think that maybe the Philippines could be considered a violent place but again it depends on where you're standing and what time period you're talking about what population you're with and all of that stuff it's hard to answer that question um in an objective manner i think there are many different kinds of violence and what kind of violence are we fearing here there's there's violence that we perhaps consider legitimate and don't have a problem with and there's violence that we consider illegitimate and have a problem with um with regard to for example the the extra judicial killings um now that everybody's all agog about from the perspective of the upland communities that i've studied they don't have a problem with it you know why because in from their perspective we have been getting killed and attacked over the decades and no one said anything about it no one tried to stop it we went to human rights the human rights commission and we were told no you go to the police and they're like well it's the police that's doing it to us that that's not a human rights issue so to them it's like well finally the drug dealers are getting you know i mean of course if you kind of dig deeper they are aware that there are problems with it you know uh they're not stupid okay they can be deep thinkers just like the rest of us but for them you know uh the they they have had a problem with violence against their communities for many decades and no one in terms of you know in terms of people in manila or journalists or i mean there's journalists in mindanao who raised um who wrote about it and and and and raised questions about it and tried to sound the alarm but as far as people in in manila for example or the international press nobody gave a damn about them and so to them it's like no actually now no one's getting killed in their communities okay no one's getting killed in their communities now as far as the people that i have directly worked with but in the past you know there would always be these stories oh did you see who got you know the son of this guy got murdered you know by somebody driving by in a motorcycle know that and and and you could argue with them extensively about how this is a problematic human rights issue an extra judicial killing is wrong they're like okay fine but as far as our own experience you know so there's this more much more complicated it's much more complicated and it's not a perspective that i particularly like or agree with but i have to appreciate where they're coming from yeah so for them since duterte and marshal law in mindanao mindanao has become a less violent place for them but from the outside perspective mindanao is you know maybe even more violent so it's yeah it just depends on where you're coming from depends on where you're coming from uh one more question it's okay um sorry uh can you get me dory first