Anxious negotiations of a second-generation Igorot in diaspora
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Abigail Ruth Banisa Mier
12th Igorot Cordillera BIMAAK-Europe (ICBE) Conference
Salle Dupréel, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Solbosch Campus
Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050 Ixelles, Belgium
May 29-June 1, 2025
Colonial past, diasporic present:
Anxious negotiations of a second-generation Igorot in diaspora
INTRODUCTION –
Good morning, everyone. I thank you all for this opportunity to share and commune with you. For the next few minutes, I would like to share this presentation – Colonial Past, Diasporic Present: Anxious negotiations of a second-generation Igorot in diaspora. This wasn’t just an academic study I undertook a couple of years ago during my master's program, it is also a story of reflection and reconnection.
This journey began with a question – as a student of anthropology, I rely on my body as an instrument of research. I use my body to observe, to experience, and document and analyze. But what does it mean to be a body that is an instrument of research if I come from a community of peoples – we who are collectively called Igorots – whose bodies, cultures and practices have historically been the objects of research?
Being of indigenous descent, I have always been ambivalent about my Igorot identity. While I am indigenous by descent, my self-identification as is less straightforward: I often find myself in moments of discomfort or anxiousness about being Igorot, as well as studying indigenous peoples and cultures.
(For those who want to keep note of the methodology which was used for my research, these are critical autoethnography and affective methodology).
What I share in this presentation are stories, conversations, and reflections. I then use these personal vignettes and incorporate them into wider discussion of history and scholarship.
To put it simply, what I aim to do today is share my stories… personal stories, but also our collective stories. And in the process, may we reflect on what it means to belong, and the relationships we nurture, the histories we carry, and the futures we imagine together.
CHAPTER 1 – Diasporic Trajectories: Personal and Collective Histories
My maternal grandfather, whom I call Lolo Banisa, was young Kankanaey boy who tended a small farm in Kibungan, Benguet. The story of my grandfather’s movement from the ili (homeland) to the urban city began when my great-grandmother fell ill. Community healers were unable to cure her. While worried and unable to do anything for her, my grandfather
comes across a travelling priest. Although my grandfather did not speak the same language as this priest, he recounts that the he seemed to understand the situation. After providing the medicine he happened to bring with him, the priest left soon after. According to my grandfather, my great-grandmother was cured immediately.
A few years would pass, and my grandfather would still look towards the return of the travelling priest, wanting to thank him. He and the priest would never cross paths again, but this encounter piqued my grandfather’s interest in travelling to Baguio – which, back then, was a hill station established during the American colonial period.
My grandfather travels to Baguio, and this decision eventually led to his choice to stay and establish a life there. My grandfather would end up working at the Baguio Cathedral, first as a bell ringer. He would come to learn practical skills such as electrical and mechanical skills that would serve useful as he continued to work and reside at the Patria de Baguio, a Catholic community service center. He would also come to learn about American pop culture. He enjoyed movies, particularly movies that were musicals (so much so that he named his son after a song from the 1966 film The Singing Nun). My grandfather learned how to operate a film projector in order to hold movie screenings. My mother and her five siblings would come to know this place as their earliest home.
My grandfather’s diasporic trajectories set the stage of my own diasporic journey. It is through these trajectories and local migrations of two generations that I come to be born in Quezon city, Metro Manila.
I came to learn of my being an Igorot slowly, through observations that my mother would speak in different languages. I would come to learn through other people identifying me as an Igorot, as well as being around other Igorots in certain contexts. Being around people who were confident about being Igorot often led me to question my “Igorot-ness”. They were, in my view, those who have remained strong connections to their ili. They were rooted, unlike myself who was unrooted.
Still, I would be identified as Igorot by others, and with it, came the usual comments:
“Where’s your tail?”
“You don’t look like an Igorot”
“Wow, you speak such good English for an Igorot!”
Hearing these statements caused personal discomfort. It signaled a deeply colonial perspective, one that can be traced back to the Spanish Colonial Period.
The Spanish waged a propaganda war through missionary and bureaucratic reports that equated the ‘Igorot’ with “barbarism”. Although Igorots and lowland Filipinos had trade relations and cultural exchanges prior to Spanish colonization, the hispanized lowland Filipinos would come to imbibe the meaning of Igorot according to this negative image. (Finin 2005) This is best captured in a statement from a statesman in 1943 who described the Igorot as “primitive black people [who] are no more Filipino than the American Indian is representative of the United States citizen. They hold exactly the same position – they are our aborigines... The fact remains that the Igorot is not Filipino.” (Romulo 1943, 53)
CHAPTER 2 – “Half-baked”: On authenticity, and romanticizing the Igorot In the words of my sister, “I feel like I am a half-baked Igorot.”
While I ponder upon the fact that I grew outside of the ili, I trace other avenues by which my discomforts and anxieties flow. This belief that I am ‘half-baked’ and ‘not indigenous enough’ signals that I have presuppositions about what an Igorot is. What is an Igorot?
This line of questioning would often lead one to discussions of authenticity. Smith (2012, 77) states that authentic appeals to “an idealized past when there was no colonizer” and that at the heart of such a view, “authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous.” It is the sense that Igorots remain as objects of history. However, this is far from the realities of my family and all of the other
Igorots that have moved from place to place across generations. Igorots are not bounded profoundly in one place, as Clifford (2013, 70) would state, indigenous peoples’ have “diasporic identifications” and “experiences that originate in, are constituted by, physical displacements, uprootings.”
Yet the allure of an authentic Igorot identity continued to trouble me. I reflect that I, too, held a notion of a ‘fully baked’ Igorot, as opposed to what I was. I held a romanticized ideal of an Igorot too, an ideal that would render myself ‘inauthentic’. Reframing an ‘Igorot identity’ requires the recognition that ‘authenticity’ can be an oppressive and disrupting ideal. I looked at how much I was different from who I viewed as ‘more authentic’ Igorots, failing to recognize the similarities I could have with many others who have lived diasporic lives as me. We, who are fragmented and entangled – ours is an identity that exists, as we live in states of movement and unsettling.
CHAPTER 3 – Colonial Legacies: Obscured Representations of the Indigenous
I think about the history of research and indigenous peoples. I recall the opening paragraph of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book, Decolonizing Methodologies (2012 [1999], 1). That “‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.”
Of course, there is and has been resistance to this long and convoluted history of research on, wherein indigenous peoples themselves are reclaiming their voices. There have been calls to challenge colonial pasts of certain disciplines (anthropology, foremost being one of them). Still, the impact of research which began during colonization still affects marginalized communities today. Ethnological and anthropological studies on the indigenous groups in the Philippines played into social classifications, and colonial projects like human zoos. All of this perpetuating the image of the ‘primitive’.
This kind of research that obscures indigenous experiences into a single category or a single story, produces limited “frames of reference” – a term I borrow from Frantz Fanon.
Colonialism had already brought with it complete disorder to colonized peoples, divorcing them from their histories and their languages, their ways of knowing and interacting with the world. Research on indigenous peoples, deepens this rupture by writing and representing the indigenous as essentialized and homogenized resulting in obscured “frames of reference” by which indigenous peoples can identify.
These obscured frames of reference, one that paints indigenous peoples as “coherent, unified, and fixed” (Sarup 1996, 14) – as opposed to what I was, living in diasporic states of movement and uprooting. I had grown up learning about my people through these limited “frames of reference”, and as such I experienced anxiety, at times even distrust, when foregrounding my Igorot identity.
Indigenous peoples need diverse “frames of reference”, frames that reflect the many social and cultural realities that people have. There is a danger in similar kinds of knowledge
produced in the same privileged spaces. There needs to be many other voices, diverse voices that lend themselves to the larger goals of decolonizing. Making various narratives of Igorots known, creating more “frames of reference” allows us to rebuild and reconstruct our individual and collective indigenous identities.
CHAPTER 4 – ‘This is who I am, this is who you are, this is who we are in relation to each other.’
Ten years ago, a close friend of mine lets me know that her grandfather Lolo Matias passed away, asking if I wanted to go with her family when they return to their ili in Mayoyao, Ifugao, for his funeral. I’ve known this family since I was very young, they called me one of their own and I shared in their mourning. I went on an eight-hour land trip through winding mountain roads, roads that would often have no barrier protecting the vehicle from the cliffside. This trip involved a caravan of vehicles going through the mountain paths. As much as it was a funeral, it was also a gathering of families, all returning from different cities and municipalities to travel to the place that Lolo Matias called his ancestral home.
The funeral lasted several days, leading up to the eve of the burial. An eventful part of the whole evening was the communal declaration of introductions and relations. Each head of the family would address the community, introduce who they were in relation to the deceased. They would share where they were born, where they grew up, and where they now live. They would then introduce their spouse, where their spouse was born, where they grew up. The spouse’s family history may also be mentioned. The children then go next. Each child is introduced and described. If they were named after a certain elder in the family, this would be announced too. At times, children would have an Igorot name by which their family calls them, which is different from their Hispanized or Anglicized name. If they do have an Igorot name, its meaning and relevance will be announced too. This whole process goes on, while people in the crowd would associate themselves with the speakers. These introductions are necessary and expected, as a way to ‘meet’ each other, acknowledging (perhaps even celebrating) their diasporic lives.
It is in this sense that identity is articulated foremost as relational. ‘This is who I am in relation to you.’ It didn’t matter if they met before, where they grew up, or how they were raised. It is a communal recognition. Through these introductions, our connections and identities are articulated. It is this relational identity that I find enduring, even if there are limited or obscured “frames of reference” of what being an Igorot is.
CLOSING –
I think about how my diasporic journey began when my grandfather decided to go travel from his hometown to a city all on his own, without any sure prospects, due to a chance encounter with a travelling priest. In moments wherein I sincerely doubt my own indigeneity, my ‘lacking’ indigenous identity, of being ‘half-baked’, I think about my grandfather. While he was alive, I did not have the vocabulary to express these discomforts and anxieties to him. But now there is comfort in remembering “This is who I am, this is who you are, this is who we are in relation to each other.” It celebrates familial ties and affinity kinship, as well as diasporic trajectories and returns. While colonial legacies have endured and have shaped the realities of the Igorot, we carry with us the recognition of how we are connected to each other, whether it be in the homeland or wherever we may be in diaspora.
References
Boylorn, Robin M., and Mark P. Orbe, eds. 2014. Critical Autoethnogyaphy: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Eeryday Life. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coase Press.
Chadwick, Rachelle. 2021. “On the Politics of Discomfort.” Feminist Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120987379.
Clifford, James. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Finin, Gerard. 2005. The Making of the Igorot: Contours of Cordillera Consciousness. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.
Romulo, Carlos Pena. 1943. Mother America: A Living Story of Democracy. New York: Country Life Press.
Sarup, Madan. 1996. Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Second. London & New York: Zed Books.