8.10.06 kulturnatib

Our Indians

Most of us know about Indians. Not the ones who live near the Indian Ocean, although we would also know about them and probably with the same degree of familiarity or ignorance as we do with those other Indians.

These Indians were the Reds who fought and were always clobbered by the Whites, the cowboys. Both were the antipodal pair who, when I was growing up, were part of the repertoire of shoot-up games boys played.

Two weeks ago I wanted to write about Indians. Not the Indians of the mostly American Plains that inspired those boyhood games but the other Indians whom we know even less about. These are Indians who live north of the United States, now part of Canadian territory.

I met some of them on two visits. The first was at a protest activity a group of them staged in front of the government building where the Canadian Department of Northern and Indian Affairs have their main offices. The second was at a reservation of the Huron-Wendat tribe near Quebec City. The tribe was also represented in the protest activity; I realized that upon seeing their flag, which was among the flags I remember seeing at the protest.

These visits gave me a glimpse of how these people are faring among themselves and within the greater, more dominant “national” group. These, admittedly, were very small and short glimpses that provided not much more than anecdotal experiences and insights.

Yet, they were enough to trigger an unease over my almost complete loss of updated knowledge about, and concern for, our own “Indians,” the indigenous tribes, mostly in Mindanao, that are struggling for survival as a distinct group, which, most immediately and most contentiously, center around recognition and return of ancestral land, domain or territory.

So, I held off writing about those visits. Why would anyone, least of all myself, want to read about these Indians when I know next to nothing about how our own indigenous groups are faring?

But, as serendipity would have it, I was led to a visit to what I was embarrassed to not knowing much or not keeping a tab on: the struggle of our own indigenous peoples.

At the National Gallery of Canada, I visited the exhibit of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. This year’s awardees included Peter Wintonick, an internationally known documentarist and filmmaker.

In this exhibit, clips representative of his works were on show. One of these was “Seeing is Believing: Human Rights, Handicams and the News.” The excerpt from this film that was shown was of the Nakamata Coalition, a coalition of ten small indigenous tribes who are legally and peacefully struggling to reclaim their land under the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act.

The short clip features Joey Lozano, a journalist and human rights activist, turning over a Handycam to the coalition in a ritual that was common among the member tribes when presented with an important gift. This included the slaughter of a white cock and the smearing of its blood on the camera and its peripheral equipment.

The clip also features interviews of some of the tribal chiefs present and of Joey Lozano. The interview is in Bisaya, music to my ears, as the cliché goes. The accompanying English subtitles, though, make some minor mistake – major among them is identifying the place of the interview and the ritual as taking place in Bukinon. It is Bukidnon, of course.

This led me to a further visit, as many visits now take place, to cyberspace. And, as happens with many things in the Philippines, it led to both good and bad news.

The Nakamata Coalition continues with their struggle with the help and support of local and international groups and individuals who have armed them with the technological capacity to further their claims, which includes that Handycam and some GPS (Global Positioning System) instruments that can map out their territorial claims more accurately.

Unfortunately or inevitably, rather, this led to the death of two of its members, gunned while on a GPS survey, the case of which is part of the film, and which, when shown to the NBI, led to the slow grind of justice.

Lozano, likewise, couldn’t dodge bad news. After years of eluding death threats for his investigative reports against the powerful, he succumbed last year to cancer.

Still, his struggle continues, as does the struggle of many indigenous populations fighting discrimination, loss of land, and their ways of living that many now recognize as significantly more harmonious with nature at this time when nature is under siege.