This essay was featured in issue 1 of Muntjac Magazine
In the archipelago so-called as the “Philippines,” the anarchism of the older milieu characterize their anarchism in terms of indigeneity and decoloniality. This milieu, represented by their foremost theorist Bas Umali, appropriate indigeneity and combine it with primitivism and deep ecology. As Umali says,
> Decolonial processes do not tell you to adopt indigenous culture, but they do not stop you from doing so either. The most essential in this process is awareness. If someone takes action it should be their decision. (*Pangayaw and Decolonizing Resistance*, 2020)
As such, this milieu believes that they are entitled to Indigenous culture by virtue of having descended from indigenous ancestors. This is not without controversy. A comrade of mine criticizes this line of thinking saying that this appropriation of indigeneity is unjust, especially given that Umali’s book profited off Indigenous culture without bringing it back to Indigenous communities. In this I agree, but what was more thought-provoking was how they initially characterized Bas Umali as a settler.
Now wait a minute, Bas Umali, like myself and many others, are Manileño, that is, we live in Metro Manila. The Philippines *does* have settler colonies in many places in Mindanao and the Cordilleras, but Manila *itself* has no Indigenous people on its land. Or perhaps to say it in another way, the indigenous peoples of what would become Manila were systematically colonized and have become alienated from their relationship to the land. Indigeneity is first and foremost a social relationship to land and colonization. Indigenous peoples continue to exist in the Philippines, and they exist in relation to colonization by Filipinos. But what are most Filipinos if we’re neither Indigenous nor settler? Clumsy importation of American terminology cannot do for our purposes.
Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit: Who in the Philippines are Indigenous and who are settlers? Perhaps more than fourteen million Indigenous peoples live in the Philippines subdivided into more than a hundred languages. Many of these Indigenous peoples live on their ancestral domains, have a connection to their land, and are actively still threatened by continuing colonization that threatens their lives, cultures, and lands. Many of these Indigenous peoples live alongside Filipino (Christian) settlers from elsewhere in the country. These settlers may perhaps be Ilocanos and Tagalogs gentrifying Baguio and its environs, or perhaps Ilonggo or Visayan settlers in Mindanao. These settlers are unambiguously settler-colonial, their settlement as a project of state-building to settle “Christian” Filipinos across unruly and untamed frontiers by the Spanish, American, and later post-colonial state apparatuses. Settler colonialism also played a part in defeating the first communist insurgency: rebels were offered free land to settle in Mindanao where they became the shock troops for genocide and state-building, especially against Moro (Muslim) and Lumad (neither Christian nor Muslim) peoples and tribes.
With those who have clear positions social relations of Indigeneity and settler colonialism, identifying settlers and Indigenous communities are somewhat clear. But what about me and many other Filipinos whose ancestors *were* indigenous but have become Christianized and colonized?
I posit that most of us so-called Filipinos are post-colonized subjects, specifically *post-colonized creoles*. We bear the trauma of colonization in our collective memory and even in our mixed blood. We are not wholesale colonizers like White people, but we are not Indigenous either. Although this does not mean that post-colonized creoles do not have the capacity to *become* settlers—we absolutely can when we enter in a colonizing social relation with Indigenous peoples such as being settlers in Indigenous land like with Christian settlers in Mindanao or in the Cordilleras. But the point is that we are also not colonized to the same extent as Indigenous communities. In places such as Metro Manila where there are no Indigenous communities, however, we cannot characterize ourselves as settlers without being in relation to Indigenous communities.
As post-colonized creoles, we cannot posit Indigenous anarchisms. By extension, Bas Umali cannot posit an Indigenous anarchism by virtue of a colonized ancestry. While his concept of *pangayaw* is rooted in Indigeneity, my comrade noted Bas Umali is still divorced from an Indigenous context and takes *pangayaw* from Indigenous cultures without giving back to Indigenous communities. (This, however, does not invalidate the value that Indigenous anarchists such as those in the Indigenous Anarchist Federation (IAF-FAI) find in Umali’s work.)
So then, what does it mean to be a post-colonized subject? What does it mean to be creole? What does anarchy look like in a post-colonial/creole context? What are the prospects of decolonization for the post-colonized creole? More than just a critique of Bas Umali’s appropriated indigeneity, these questions have serious implications for anarchism in the post-colonized and underdeveloped world, particularly for the so-called Philippines and Southeast Asia.
When in contact with Indigenous communities, creoles become settler colonists. In this sense, the ideas of decolonization as land-back is quite applicable. Decolonization in this regard is the creole respect of Indigenous lands, the cessation of colonial logic on Indigenous peoples and their lands, and recognizing Indigenous stewardship.
But outside these settler-colonial zones, what is creole decolonization? Historically speaking, creole decolonization was the transfer of sovereignty from a colonial overlord to a creole state. In the Philippines, this creole decolonization manifested when the United States of America formally gave the Philippines its autonomy and later independence. As anarchists and abolitionists, however, we recognize that the new creole state continued to reproduce many colonial institutions and features: the centralized state apparatus, the police, the prisons, the settler-colonies, the plantation logic.
Before colonization the state and its appendages simply did not exist. Creole decolonization was merely the replacement of a colonizer head with a creole head, all institutions of colonization still in place.
The project of decolonization is woefully incomplete as long as the state apparatus, creole settler-colonialism, and other colonizing patterns continues to exist. The archipelago so-called as the Philippines is not “decolonized” by virtue of having Filipinos in charge of the state— especially if we see colonization as an explicit process of state-building. In this sense, decolonization for the creoles of Metro Manila is the *undoing* of the state, *undoing* of wage-labor, the *undoing* of the police and prisons. Colonization imposed these things upon us, so decolonization means the doing away of these things. This does not mean that decolonization is the return to an Eden before colonization, which is impossible. We can never go back. Rather, decolonization is the recognition that the structures instituted by colonization are not permanent or inevitable features of society and thus struggle for a way out.
The national democrats and other leftists in the country still misunderstand what decolonization is—the undoing of what colonization did to us. They still want “national democracy,” therefore a state, police, prisons, wage-labor, all things instituted by colonization. They argue for “national liberation” of a Maoist type where the imperialists and their compradors are kicked out and a national-democratic state oversees national industrialization, with nationalized industry, wage-labor, police, prisons… Decolonization is not this or that group in charge of the state and capital.
But neither is decolonization for post-colonial creoles the appropriation of Indigeneity. Of course we need to reinstate our relationship and connection to the land and bring land-back for those who are Indigenous. Nor is decolonization *merely* our current society but without the state, wage-labor, police, prisons, et cetera, but keeping in place the anti-ecological political-economic extractivist apparatus and ways of living.
Nor is decolonization a vulgar romantic primitivism or localism. As creoles, our blood not only contains the marking of trauma, but also of cosmopolitanism. We have roots from China, America, Ilocos, Cagayan, Cebu, Zamboanga, and Manila. Decolonization in the context of this cosmopolitanism would also mean the reaffirmation of *interconnection*, especially as a hybridity liberated from the insular enclosure of borders and the nation-state system.
It is here that we can then sketch what a decolonial anarchism is for post-colonial creoles: not just the land-bank for Indigenous communities, but also liberation from the structures and institutions that colonialism has put in place and all that entails. Specifically for the Philippines and Southeast Asia, decolonial anarchism means restoring the cosmopolitanism of the sea-routes and opening the national enclosures.
Importantly, we do decolonial anarchy *as creoles* and *as post-colonized subjects*, not appropriative of Indigeneity. Our creolized cultures may have the traumatic scars of colonialism and Christianization, but it is not something *merely* the product of colonial state-building. It is also reflective of a cosmopolitan past as the gateway to China and the Americas and a resiliency of spirit that persists despite the weight of Empire upon it.
Anarchism and anarchy may have its roots in the European and Atlantic proletarian milieu, but it has walked around the world even before Lenin did. Creoles like José Rizal, Isabelo de los Reyes and Lope Santos engaged with and took bits and pieces from anarchism to inform their militancy against colonial authorities. Like how creolized colonial populations would indigenize Christianity, anarchism was similarly indigenized and creolized. Rizal would take point from the Proudhonist tradition, de los Reyes and Santos would take point from Malatesta (and Marx). Decolonial anarchism in the Philippines would mean continuing the indigenization and creolization of anarchism.
Furthermore, creolized colonial populations would practice marronage to leave the colony to create rebel peripheries free from the state. One such act of rebel marronage with the Dagohoy rebellion founded creole communities in the boondocks of Bohol that lived free from the Spanish colonial state for 75 years. Even the Maoists continue this tradition of marronage with their own rebel peripheries, though they are not without problems as they want “national democracy” with their own state.
However, sketching this decolonial anarchy on our own creole post-coloniality is not the same thing as Maoism’s and national democracy’s nationalism and desire for a national state. While we cannot, of course, dismiss nationalism out of hand, given nationalist decolonial struggles for common and communal dignity, we cannot also dismiss how leftists use it to justify right-opportunism with the ranks of the ruling class on the basis of nationalism against imperialism. This is how national democracy acted as the left wing of the Rodrigo Duterte’s fascism. Decolonial anarchism can and should be specific to context, but it must not be dazed by parochial illusions.
Decolonization for those neither Indigenous and settler in the Philippines, then, is an anarchy that is specific to our nature. It is one that is cognizant of our history and post-coloniality, one that moves beyond the nation-state system and restores the cosmopolitanism and hybridity and overcomes the parochialism of the nation. Decolonial anarchism is one indigenized and creolized to fit the specific circumstance and context of the people. Decolonial anarchy is one that works hand-in-hand for land-back for those with homelands and ancestral domains, and one that restores our relationship with the land without succumbing to appropriation.
But decolonial anarchism and anarchy is still a project in flux, not just in the Philippines, but across Southeast Asia and the global south. These notes are only one part in the continuing conversation on its indigenization and creolization.
