A few years ago, a friend from college climbed to the mountains of the North and settled in the bosom of the tribes who were nestling in the hinterlands as an activist cultural worker. She fled the metropolitan life in Manila with the desire and ambition that indigenous peoples will find liberation in the knowledges she will impart, along with the promise of a future progress given what she was about to implement in the community which she understood to be radical politics. She went to the mountains with the vision of teaching indigenous peoples to defy the impending invasion of mining corporations, real estate businesses, and other investors who wanted to turn the vast greenery into private investment. She thought the conflict would be just between the local communities and these local investors who were penetrating their sanctuaries.
But when her days yielded into months, and those turned into years, her messianic views dissipated. At every house she knocked on, across the breakfast and dinner tables she shared, the local liquor she passed around with the town’s doctor, elder, singer, and hero—day-by-day she witnessed how their lives, which had been traditionally reared in the ways of the folk, were diminished by the appeal and promise of Western modernity.