Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Ever since former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “Build, Build, Build” Program (one the newly-elected President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. vowed to continue as well) Indigenous communities in the country have come under renewed attack and forced relocation from their ancestral homelands, marking the Philippines as among the countries with the highest murder rate of Indigenous land defenders in the world. With the only remaining “undeveloped” territories now being those under the feet of Indigenous peoples in the country, the discourse of “such ‘backward’ peoples being ‘in the way’ of progress and development” continues its vice-grip hold not only in the nation’s official policy but also in the public’s popular imagination. This is notwithstanding the enactment of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act in 1997, touted as one of the most progressive legislations in the world. This paper examines the challenges involved in shifting mainstream cultural perceptions of the different worth of Indigenous lifeways using her work as an invited collaborator with a University of the Philippines campus seeking to indigenize its curriculum. The impetus is in recognition of the campus’s location in the former U.S. Clark Air Base which sits on the traditional homeland of the Ayta peoples, a hunting and gathering tribe increasingly threatened with cultural genocide and extinction given that their entire territory is now being massively converted into the “New Clark City,” a metropolis purportedly “green,” “smart,” and “futuristic.” Focusing on questions of sustainability and climate change, lessons from the author’s collaborative work constitute this paper’s contribution.