“Founders and Settlers: Unpacking Indigeneity Among the Higaunon Lumad in Mindanao”

Oona Paredes
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures,
University of California, Los Angeles

For the past decade, a small group of Higaunon men have been working hard on transcribing their core oral tradition, known as the Panud, into book form. The Higaunon are an Indigenous or Lumad minority community on the island of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, and the Panud is the story of their becoming and remaining people since the earliest ancestors. While it can be described loosely as a genealogy, the Panud also contains, among other things, their creation story and a detailed history of their migrations, land claims, wars, rules of etiquette, and last but not least, their religious doctrines and customary laws. The first complete draft was finally presented to the community in November 2022, with a goal of publishing it for distribution in 2023. This book, written entirely in Higaunon, is also being shared with the local Department of Education’s Indigenous Peoples Education Program, towards the shared goal of language preservation. Additional small-scale publications geared towards children are planned for the future to complement the Panud. This talk will present the history of the Panud project, and the challenges (logistical, political, and epistemic) we faced in transforming this unique oral tradition into written form. The process thus far has taught us much about the problems inherent to “preserving tradition” and heritage making, and the complexities of being a ‘culture bearer’ in a modern Indigenous minority community in the Philippines.

Noon
Friday, November 3
Peters Campus Life Building 100 and online (registration required for online attendance: https://niu-edu.zoom.us/.../tZAudu2qqTgsHd2Hn...)

Contact the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at cseas@niu.edu

Sponsored by NIU’s Graduate Colloquium Program and NIU’s Department of Anthropology