Interview with Omehen

The project Omehen (which means “harvest” in Manobo Talaingod, the Indigenous language of the Mindanao region in the south of the Philippines) was conceived by Alfred Marasigan, Karl Castro, and Guelan Luarca in collaboration with the Lumad Indigenous community11A Cebuano term for “native” or “Indigenous,” Lumad refers to Indigenous groups of the Southern Philippines. in exile in Manila. The project took shape against the backdrop of Rodrigo Duterte’s violent attacks and bombings on the Lumad Bakwit Schools22Lumad Bakwit schools refers to provisional and nomadic schools run for internally displaced (“bakwit,” or to evacuate) Lumad students. (2017–onwards) during the ongoing armed conflict in Mindanao. Subsequently, the Lumad people found refuge in various academic institutions in Manila, including the Ateneo de Manila University, where the artists teach. 

Harvesting is an integral part of the cosmological practice of the Lumad communities, and therefore fundamental to their systems of education and knowledge sharing. Thus, the artists worked together with members of the Lumad community and University students to create a space of harvest within the academic institution and to facilitate the continuation of this practice and the mutual sharing of knowledges. Omehen, as its co-creators mention, aside from being a garden, was also a place to rethink pedagogy, an artistic project and residency (initially funded by the Areté Sandbox Residency at the Ateneo), and a space of activism and resistance. Omehen as a platform brings together conversations operating at the intersection of Indigenous knowledges, university pedagogy, food security, forms of precarity and labour, and addresses questions that are central to imagining new worlds to come. Omehen was conceived and set into operation by late 2019, and while halted and disrupted during the pandemic, and even thrown into disarray by recent typhoons in the Philippines, the project lives on as podcasts and images, 3-D printed vegetables, and stories from the garden and the classroom. 

The following interview was conducted between the co-directors of the Forest Curriculum, Abhijan Toto and Pujita Guha, and Karl Castro and Alfred Marasigan, co-initiators of the Omehen project at Ateneo De Manila University. The conversation touches upon the historical context against which Omehen emerged, knowledge formation in the university, Indigenous sovereignty and activism, and the material, pedagogic, and even bureaucratic practices in which Omehen negotiated its lifeworlds. 

The interview was conducted in late January 2022. Whilst in the process of transcribing and editing, on February 28, 2022, Chad Booc, teacher and educator at Lumad Bakwit Schools, his fellow Lumad school volunteer teacher Gelejurain Ngujo II, community health worker Elegyn Balonga, and their accompanying drivers Tirso Añar and Robert Aragon, collectively known as the New Bataan 5, were brutally murdered by the Philippine Army (10th Infantry Division in Brgy. Andap, New Bataan, Davao de Oro). The New Bataan 5 were returning from conducting fieldwork in Davao, when they were killed by the state; even their autopsies while claiming death from multiple wounds and gunshots remain shrouded in opacity. Members of both the Omehen Project and Forest Curriculum express their solidarity with the New Bataan 5, and dedicate the interview to their work with Lumad Bakwit schools. May their souls rage in peace. 

Abhijan Toto: I think the beginning is always a good place to begin, isn’t it? So maybe Karl, I was wondering if you could set up a little bit of the context within which Omehen emerged from, about what was happening in the Philippines at that time and how did this group of people come together in this university space? 

Karl Castro: So, when we conceptualized Omehen I think it was in a very interesting moment in the Indigenous struggle in the Philippines. I guess the context of this was the Duterte regime. And while there was a camaraderie between Duterte and the Lumads early on, this was quickly overturned when Duterte started bombing Lumad schools, displacing them, siding with mining companies, sending more troops to Lumad territories, etc. Then in 2015, and 2017, there was an Indigenous people’s caravan called the Lakbayan ng Pambansang Minorya, where representatives of many Indigenous groups would come to Manila and hold camps, protests, solidarity activities, etc. In particular, my experience as a volunteer in the 2017 Lakbayan, hosted by the University of the Philippines, was very interesting, especially to see how the university actually welcomed the Lumads, not just as visitors, but as guests who they can learn from. Which you know is quite different from previous decades when Indigenous people were treated like savages, people who had to abide by universities, be civilized, educated, etc. 

The Lumads on their own were also establishing the Bakwit schools where they would continue schooling in evacuation camps, making the school a protest site as well. And since various universities had hosted the Bakwit schools, we thought why not formalize it and make this part of the curriculum [at the Ateneo de Manila University]? How do we intersect these two things in such a way that the academy would formally recognize these very different modes of learning? To have a curriculum vetted and recognized, and students actually be able to get a grade for participating in things like that, and at the same time to have Lumad students coming to the university as students, as co-learners. I think the goal of Omehen was not merely to decolonize, because there have been attempts to decolonize from within the university, but it was also an attempt to de-regionalize and de-class the university. Even with the attempts to Filipinize the curriculum, there was still an exclusion of the Indigenous worldviews, and Indigenous students as well. So, I think Omehen was very interesting in that sense. It was trying to break several glass ceilings at the same time. 

AT: Thank you so much for that, because I think that’s also giving us so much to sit through and unpack. You mentioned a little bit of this entire question about the Filipinization of education, which we would argue is a wider question of internal colonization as well. And Omehen, we believe, is beyond just the formal idea of Indigenous curriculum that has been in practice for a long time in the Philippines, which in a way it intersects with, but also builds upon and creates different kinds of space for. It speaks both to larger concerns of decolonization, but also perhaps to the micro-habits with which we inhabit a space, here of the university. 

Alfred Marasigan: I think in a way Omehen attempts to localize the struggles of the Lumads. A big part of the coverage of their struggles is always second-hand, that is mediated, and the idea of using a garden or a plot of land was to make that experience and their stories a little bit more tangible. And I think that’s also why they journey to the capital, to not only have their voices heard, but [to have] their struggles co-participated in. Omehen also challenged the idea of outreach because it made pedagogy, or the act of imparting knowledge, a two-way process. Sir John,33Names have been altered to protect privacy. the agriculture and math teacher of Lumad Bakwit schools was able to teach us a lot about the project we initiated, which is not exactly the plan we had in mind but was a great outcome of it. 

KC: Indigenous culture is not always that distant, so that's also why even before Omehen, I also tried to introduce my students to the Lumad Bakwit School. It would be a weird exchange. I’d ask a student and a teacher from the Lumad to visit my class and then, in the next session, my class would be visiting their evacuation camp or wherever they are. This was very interesting because many of my students have never met an Indigenous person before, so that was making it real; they were not just pictures that you see in books but real people. And for the Lumad student it was important to not be seen as a victim, but a real person. Not a marginalized entity, but an entity. In some classes, the Lumad kids would teach beadwork and in the process of doing it, the university students would find out how their classmates were being shot, how their parents have been arrested, their schools being bombed. So they were learning from these much smaller kids very complex beadwork that even they, college students, would have difficulty with. So, it was quite inspiring, for my students, to have a deeper appreciation of the mental and physical skills involved in making these “what they thought were just trinkets.” But also, it gave the Lumad students a bit of dignity; that they have mathematical excellence, they have very fine hands, they were able to comprehend these processes way better than my students. 

And you know, I think Omehen was an interesting space where that would happen and made for an interesting question as to what a university space should be, and who participates in it. In looking for the garden plot, we discovered that actually we were not allowed to have vegetable gardens or fruit trees in the campus, because students might climb trees and get into an accident and the school doesn't want to be responsible; or employees are discouraged from having these gardens because it might be distracting from their work. We really had difficulty in just finding a plot of land to use. 

AM: It’s all very tangible, actually, to get your hands dirty, literally. It’s also a lot of nitty-gritty. Like, you can’t put the garden in here, because the kids might fall off into the river. Again I think there’s something so simple as growing a vegetable that hits so many things about developmental learning. So, that kind of compels us to keep going even if it’s also very difficult for us, because there’s still so much to share with these students and the Lumads also have a lot to tell. 

Pujita Guha: Building off of stories to tell, there has been a lot of conversation especially in the present on questions of Indigenous design, especially this sort of primitive environmentalism, right, Indigenous communities have some sort of innate access to cosmological and environmental knowledge. That’s one thing: living, building, crafting things like that, things that anthropology knows really at the back of it. And there’s a separate conversation on Indigenous activism that comes from a different set of spheres like fighting for climate justice, extractive economies, infrastructural building and resistance. So I was just wondering if you thought of Omehen as weaving or braiding questions of Indigenous design with Indigenous activism? And because for me, for example, the quilt, was some sort of exemplar or condensation of that idea within the university. 

KC: I guess I will talk a little about the quilt. The quilt [“Weaving our Unity”] was a project we made in 2018. It was a way to show support for the Indigenous struggle, for the Lumad struggle. So we invited anyone to contribute a fabric-based work or print. At the same time we also invited Lumad kids to do it. It became a huge quilt—I never imagined it would grow that big, although I hoped that it would. The real question was, what do they do with the art? When we launched the quilt in a protest rally, people were just handling it, which is very different from how a similar tapestry would be handled in a museum or gallery setting. And then, over time we had the problem: where do we store this enormous thing, because we don’t have art storage? At the evacuation camps, it acted as a kind of curtain, suspended and separating the girls from the boys, the visitors’ area from the private area. It was a backdrop for certain events like graduations and other programs. It just traveled much more than I have, and I find that also interesting: what can an artwork mean in this situation, when it is not some kind of sacred object, the way we’ve been treating them in the art setting? What is the function of an object that is also not too precious? Or does its preciousness come from the fact that you can touch it, that you can actually dirty it and use it as a curtain? 

AM: It’s really not that compartmentalized. Actually, I like the mess, personally. With the students, we are able to impart the idea that in the design process, output-orientedness is given more primacy than process, and I think that somehow people feel that if they don’t have their output, they don’t seem successful in a specific design project. I think it was important not just in design classes, but also in art classes, to sit with the complexity and actually decide what you would end up with because I think that encourages a lot of care that is very much absent in the ways people proceed and are part of the systemic pressure that put these Lumad people [in the margins] in the first place. I’m always surprised when students are given an open-ended requirement of creating, like “make anything you want,” and if it’s translated mentally it’s almost as if the student is saying “wowww, do I have agency?” So it’s no surprise that Lumad people are very adamant on this system for self-determination, because for teenagers—developing citizens—they are already conditioned, they do not have a choice in… Not just in creativity, but also in moving forward with whatever life they want to shape. So I think it’s a kind of lesson that extends also from Omehen.

PG: I think we’ve been seeing into the tune of not being output-oriented, but there is the garden that very much changes the temporality and labour of doing an output-oriented material practice. So we were just wondering if you could circle us back into the materiality of the garden and the process of reorienting us to a different idea of doing output-oriented work. 

AM: I’ve thought a lot about it. And I think that there are three levels—the garden, the farm, and the forest—that intersect and form the ecology of Omehen. Several exciting moments from our garden came around when we were preparing the land. I think you have to aerate the soil and then we were just looking at the other creatures that were getting out of the soil, like this frog, that insect… And so, everyone was making jokes about the termites: “that is like Duterte” [we said]. I remember that exchange between all of us within the class, and I think there is a tangibility that land lends to this kind of knowledge format. And the funny thing is that it deals with extremes, because after being 100% tangible, it was literally in a cloud, like swept away by a typhoon in the middle of a pandemic. Now it’s just a podcast. So I think, the theme of maintenance is also something that permeates this project, because it is an ethos that people want to nurture something, like a vegetable, and have to practice a lot. 

KC: For me the garden was an interesting way to create a problematic for everyone involved. For the art students it was like, where does art happen, does it have to be in a studio or in an atelier? What are art students doing in a garden? What are we doing in this plot of land? Why do we have to step out of our air-conditioned classrooms with our shovels and be in this weird and undefined part of the campus that was not actually allowed, because no one wants to administratively take responsibility for it? 

AM: And I also like that a while ago they talked to me about cosmology, all of this mysticism, like verbatim, and later said that they wanted a scientific approach to education. Which is then again also complicated by the panubadtubad, or the land-clearing ritual that they conducted. They could still ask for permission from the natural forces before they get to plant, and still be scientific about it. It’s also very ecological, because when you say asking permission it’s almost like acknowledging the collaborative aspect of tilling land; you would think it’s common sense, but sometimes in land-grabbing, it’s not common sense because it’s not collaborative, it’s coercive. I think this is where the good fight is: to handle that complexity and to somehow surrender our understanding of it. With Omehen I was made aware to think of what solidarity even means, because it also gets thrown around sometimes, but the difficulties are not very much highlighted. So I think that even in our classes, I always highlight that just because you align with a specific cause, doesn’t mean that it will be easy or straightforward, because you have to manage many different things: [it is] in this management, where you learn how to actually belong, support each other. 

KC: Solidarity is very messy. And it’s also very exhausting, but that is how it is. Beyond parroting a slogan, what one can actually do—I think it’s something that we touched on here. I wonder, if the pandemic ends in the Philippines, whenever that may be, will this class even happen again? Will the university go out of its way to invite and host Indigenous students within the campus? Will they open the grounds of the university to non-classroom activities? We don’t know, but I think that’s the achievement here in Omehen, even if, again, it didn't fly quite as we thought: the fact that there’s a precedent, something that people can look back on and understand, that other universities can take as an example. That’s already a big thing for me, and even for them. 

AT: On that note of being unfinished, I think that’s a great note to end this conversation. Thank you so much Alfred and Karl. May our gardens and resistances continue to flourish.