“the future is ritual”

I suggest this as a revision to “the future is vegan,” a sign I spotted in a café in Puerto Princesa, Palawan, with my soul sister Andrea in mid-February just before the COVID-19 crisis emerges in the Philippines.

For five weeks, I journey with five pilipinx sisters under divinely appointed numerological exactitudes with Ate J, a ritualist-healer. What initially brought me to her a month before was my own “sickness,” an autoimmune disorder that I had been diagnosed with in my late teens and which, over the past several years, has blessed me with the enlightenment that can sometimes only come from suffering and the divinely ordained task of healing ourselves by remembering our inner medicines. I met her after asking my dear friend Maria to connect me to a healer working with herbs and cosmologies indigenous to our ancestral archipelago.

Ate J is ordained to be of service through embodying teachings received from a lineage of Indigenous teachers in Pilipinas and directly from her diwatas, or spirit guides. The baylan is one Visayan name for this role, which also has many other names within the more than 171 languages that exist across the several thousand islands of the Philippines, bordered and named after King Philip of Spain. It happened to be that at the time I met Ate J, she was guided to share teachings in particular astrological and arithmetical conditions—five women, five weeks, starting on the new moon.

In my own journey of recognizing my body’s biodynamic relations as a microcosm of earthly and cosmological cycles, a teaching continues to surface: healing individually and collectively inevitably entails returning to and respecting natural law, the “original instructions” still articulated in Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing) that honour divinely perfect patterns—constellation systems—of balance. Adrienne Maree Brown articulates these divine patterns of self-organization in Emergent Strategy.11Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press), 2017. Observing these patterns in our natural world, we devise strategies to survive and thrive in relation to our natural ecosystems. If every cell and organism operates in inherently harmonious and perfect ways in relation to one another, why do we get sick?

As an immunocompromised pilipinx woman of working-class upbringing navigating political science at McGill University, through seven years of both thriving and almost dropping out, there became no question for me that the imbalances, sicknesses, and inequities woven into our institutions and systems—whether political, academic, socio-political, racial, hetero-patriarchal, governmental, or spiritual—will surface in our bodies if we do not address them.

What crystallized for me while in Palawan is how many—or perhaps most—of us not born into Indigenous communities have forgotten the rituals that preserve divine harmony in all our relations. Rituals—in planting, harvesting, or sacrificing animals for nourishment, for example—create the time and space required to consummate the divine covenants we have made with creator and spirit worlds to honour balance and reciprocity with all our relations on the earthly and other dimensional planes. They are the vessels through which harmony, balance, and reciprocity are embodied. Rituals not only ensure harmony and balance between creation and consumption, but also serve as a placeholder for relationships to the creative sources that nourish us.

Institutionalizing the forgetting of these rituals, through demonizing them and dispossessing peoples from the land and Indigeneity, is necessary for capitalist-colonialist systems of accumulation to thrive. These systems of extractivism, where the Earth is treated as a laboratory for the purpose of endless accumulation, depend on industrializing ritualless consumption. The rituals of baylans, and many other Indigenous ritualists throughout time and space, have been castigated as demonic savagery in order to justify stealing land from uncivilized peoples who need to be brought into modernity. As ritual-centred land traditions are threatened under capitalist-colonialist industrialization, so become locality, intimacy, equity, vitality, and reciprocity within our food systems.

During our time in Palawan, we visited mountain forests that have been significantly impacted by palm tree extraction; connected with a katutubo (Indigenous) Palaw’an community in the south; and had the honour of experiencing rituals of connection to the spirits of the land, waters, and elements that were still being maintained, allowing for humans to honour our covenants to the spirit world, and to embody gratitude and reciprocity in the way we harvest, hunt, live, and connect with medicines when we are sick.

As Taj Vitales, a member of the Facebook group “Anito: The Precolonial, Polytheistic Beliefs & Practices of the Philippines,” describes:

Currently, Indigenous groups in the Cordillera region of northern Luzon alongside other groups across the archipelago are invoking traditional rituals to protect their communities against COVID-19.33In a Philippine indigenous stronghold, traditions keep COVID-19 at bay,” Mongabay, April 21, 2020, https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/in-a-philippine-indigenous-stronghold-traditions-keep-covid-19-at-bay/.

Levi Sucre Romero, a BriBri Indigenous person from Costa Rica and co-coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, notes, “In our communities, we have respected a certain biodiversity that protects us today. We plant what we eat, and we have the resources and knowledge needed to get through times like this, and this is what we are trying to tell the rest of the world.”

Says Romero, “The coronavirus reminds us that the balance of the Earth is in danger, and we need to maintain our delicate balance of diversity.” He adds, “More than 25 per cent of medicine comes from forests. If we lose our forests, we lose our medicines, too.”44Emilee Gilpin, “COVID-19 crisis tells world what Indigenous Peoples have been saying for thousands of years,” National Observer, March 25, 2020. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/03/24/news/covid-19-crisis-tells-world-what-indigenous-peoples-have-been-saying-thousands-years.

the branch of medicine that deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.

When I began reflecting more holistically on my autoimmune disorder, it dawned on me that my body was gifting me with teachings about what was happening on mama Earth. Within biomedical understandings of autoimmune disorders, immune cells attack the very tissues they are meant to protect. They are unable to discern between healthy cells and foreign invaders such as pathogens, bacteria, or viruses, creating a reactionary coping response that treats all cells as invaders.

The traumas enfolded in my flesh surfacing as autoimmune disorder were birthed in the racialized, working-class, industrialized conditions of food access that colonialism and capitalism thrive on—that is, access to food without connection to the food’s rituals, stories, and lands. As I began to understand how traumatized my body was from ingesting foods carrying soul wounds from dispirited growing and harvesting practices, I also began to understand why, at times, almost anything I put in my body was causing me inflammation. I was experiencing even the most “clean” foods as triggering foreign invaders.

All life carries sacred genealogies encoded with memories of ritual and reciprocity governed by systems of natural law. In Indigenous traditions, foods such as dairy and corn are harvested with specific rituals to honour the spirits of the food and the land. This nurtures their inherent medicine. Cows are sacred in Ayurveda, wherein rituals of care in preparing ghee and milk can make them medicinal. Mayan and Haudenosaunee traditions and relations with corn are rooted in ancestral wisdoms and processes of stewardship that are inherently intertwined with spirit. Tobacco is a sacred medicine in numerous Indigenous traditions. Yet these sacred beings are often inflammatory for the immunocompromised after generations of their preparation and usage shifting away from original instructions of reciprocity, thus creating the conditions for them to become sources of sickness and addiction. In industrialized food systems, ritualistic care is forgotten and systemically erased. With COVID-19, it is being made evident how mass-industrialized and colonized food systems enable habitat destruction and erase Indigenous knowledges and relations with traditional foods in the race to prioritize profit over respect for biodiversity, health, and well-being.

Reflecting on my own temporalities during this COVID-19 isolation, I am awed by the reminders of sacred cycles of seven. Ushering in my twenty-eighth year on this earth, I have been gifted with teachings by my sister Krysta and elder Nati on seven-year life cycles of the spirit. Many of us have received Indigenous teachings from the Haudenosaunee on honouring seven generations. Of particular salience to my healing journey are teachings gifted in relation to our seven bodies, some of whom we can lose under certain conditions that cause the weakening of our immune systems. I had the honour of partaking in a ritual held by Ate J to call back my wholeness and alignment with all my selves and ancestors in a good way, thus strengthening the body’s immunity and capacity to be protected against illness and harm. This ritual has and continues to support my healing journey.

As we move forward with our hearts open toward the next seven generations and the countless sevens of generations whose shoulders we stand on, I hope we can envision a cosmology of care rooted in the original instructions that honour spiritual integrity through remembrance of all our covenants with the spirit world. Remembering these covenants will be absolutely vital as we continue to experience pandemics and the inequitable biopolitical distribution of power, life, and death that they reveal so rawly within “the broader virus of empire,” as named by pilipinx sister JL Umipig.

May we be good death doulas to this era of genocide and masculine colonial domination. As these paradigms rot and collapse, I pray that we revitalize the rituals to call our whole selves back to reciprocal relations with the Earth, creator, and one another. May we remember all our relations in all directions of time and space in divine ritual.