SURPRISING but important news was posted on social media this week, when for the first time, an indigenous wedding ceremony was conducted between a same-sex couple in a Lumad community in Lianga, Surigao del Sur. Jasmin and Bing are both teachers of progressive and alternative Lumad school ALCADEV that has been attacked and threatened with closure by government and paramilitary forces in the recent years for being supposed fronts of the New People’s Army.
Based on the posted account, Jas is a member of the Manobo tribe whose father, Eddie, is a Baylan or spiritual leader of their community. The father was against the union of the two because, according to him, the marriage of same-sex couples was prohibited in their indigenous beliefs. At some point, he even threatened to have the partner of his daughter killed.
But because they are also members of a larger progressive Lumad organization in the area, MAPASU, and given the teachings brought in by alternative Lumad school ALCADEV to their community, Baylan Eddie gained an understanding about the need to respect the rights of his daughter and her partner as members of the LGBT community. He was interviewed and documented to have said, “I can’t fully accept the fate of my daughter since it is against our tribe’s culture but I recognize their rights.”
And so a wedding ceremony was held last September 24, 2018 with Baylan Eddie officiating the indigenous ritual with the entire tribal community, family members, and friends in attendance. The “Pangapong” indigenous ritual was held that not only sanctified the union before “Magbabaya” or the Creator but also introduced the couple to the rest of the community as partners for life.
Apart from being a victory over the spate of evacuations and harassment that the school and the Manobo community underwent in the last months, the ceremony was also a momentous event for a number of reasons. It reveals an approach and understanding towards indigeneity that only living and breathing progressive indigenous people’s organizations can make possible in the course of their practice.
The openness towards same-sex union adopted by ALCADEV and MAPASU may seem sacrilegious acts to other Lumad formations with different political affiliations. To these groups, Lumad culture is akin to an archaeological artifact that must be preserved and suspended in time, even as they freely concede their ancestral lands to big business. Supporters of this disposition decry the undue influence of supposed outsiders that modify Lumad beliefs and practices as if the urgent task is to place Lumad communities in an impossible social bubble.
For progressive indigenous organizations like ALCADEV and MAPASU, however, defending Lumad culture from outside influence does not mean tolerating what they have determined to be “backward indigenous thoughts and practices” but also mean the adoption of new beliefs and ways that enhance their indigeneity in a changing and challenging even brutal violent context.
The critique that the Lumad have become seemingly modern and how they have suspiciously assumed certain radical inclinations stem from this divergence of understanding of where Lumad identity and culture came from and where it is headed.
It has been argued in the book “Wars of Extinction” that the Lumad identity is not an essential category but rather the result of historical, political, and economic forces. It is a product of their struggle as a minority group during the Marcos dictatorship and the state-backed wars they endured in order to appropriate their ancestral lands in favor of extractive enterprises. The protection of their ancestral domains therefore cannot be separated from the preservation of a genuine and collective Lumad identity.
If the Lumad has learned that resistance is the only recourse to preserve themselves and their ways of life, that is but the natural course and dynamics of a kind of progressive political praxis. If they are able to adopt and live out emancipatory practices such as the recognition of LGBT rights and unions in the course of doing so, then it shows the potential and promise of such radical praxis. All these provide evidences of how there is still much to learn about the learned practices of freedom born from the historical struggles of our Lumad brothers and sisters.