Filipino spirituality that was rooted from our ancestors helps us to find our center. In Malidoma Patrice Some’s (1994) book Of Water and the Spirit explains the essence of having a center that “without the center we cannot tell who we are, where we come from, and where we are going” (p. 198). However, we have been exposed to the spirit of the West and “the spirits that animates the whites is extremely restless-and powerful…where he goes he brings a new order, the order of unrest…always tense and uneasy” (p. 177). And the only way to be cleansed is to go back to our own spirituality. This spirit has no stain from the West. In so doing, we find ourselves at peace.
Writing and re-writing life story and history
The colonial system is constantly confusing us. It continues to disorient and break us into pieces. Thus it is difficult to write our story. However, the journey of decolonizing teaches us to find ways to put our story together. Through re-writing our story we will reach the point where we can write our real story. According to Smith (1999) “the past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, languages and social practices-all may be spaces of marginalization, but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope” (p. 4). She further notes that “these counter-stories are powerful forms of resistance which are repeated and shared across diverse indigenous communities” (p.2). Smith (1999) goes on to explain that the importance of understanding history may lead to recognizing Indigenous knowledge and viewpoints:
History is important for understanding the present and that reclaiming history is a critical and essential aspect of decolonization…Coming to know the past has been part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledge…Transforming our colonized views of our own history (as written by the West), however, requires us to revisit, site by site, our history under Western eyes.” (pp. 30-35)
Documenting and embracing own culture
This strategy is difficult especially that colonizers distorted the history of our ancestors. However, it is not impossible to go back and document our own culture. We owe from our ancestors this responsibility. This responsibility should no be taken for granted because when we do so, then we allow the Western researchers do our job and the danger of doing this “appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of or ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations” (Smith, 1999: 1). For example, the history of the Philippines was mostly written by the perspective of either the Spanish and the Americans, thus the work of our ancestors are ignored.
why do you need to embrace our own culture? What are the different benefits that an Indigenous knowledge can offer us? First of all we need to understand that “as a result of colonial, patriarchal, corporate, exploitative, and often ecologically destructive development models, indigenous knowledge has been underestimated and undervalued” (Dei et al., 2002:8). Dei at al. continues to explain that “knowledge production has been socially constructed so as to become a near monopoly from which ordinary people are excluded” (pp. 8-9). These are the dangers that we have been facing in terms of knowledge production, it is then time to interrogate this by breaking through any invisibility, marginalization, domination and so forth. This is the time to assert and affirm that indigenous knowledge needs to be recognized and valued in the academy and the whole of society. We need to expose the taken –for-granted with regards to indigenous knowledge.
