When the Child of Loam Speaks Back to Empire and Other Wells of Remembrance
In this talk, psychic and epistemic colonization gives way to figurations of memory formerly consigned to the abyss of forgetting and shame by the insulting/dominating discourse of civilizational hubris and supremacy. In the slow cooking of the Indigenous Soul, memories of growing up close to soil and organic life will, in this narration, serve as the seedbed for a radically new understanding of human being (pagkatao) and well-being (ginhawa) for a Filipina Kapampangan who, though raised colonial, has found ways of coming back home to her roots in Indung Tibuan, her land of sprouting.
Lily Mendoza S. Lily Mendoza is a Kapampangan-born Filipina and currently resides in Waawiyatanong (aka Detroit), the traditional homeland of the Anishinaabe peoples, Wyandot Huron, Fox, Miami, and Sauk. She is Full Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan and is known for her pathbreaking work on the politics of indigeneity particularly within the Philippine diasporic and homeland context. She is the author of books and essays exploring questions of identity and subjectivity, cultural politics in national, post- and trans- national contexts, discourses on indigenization, ecology, and the cultural logic of modernity and civilization. Currently, she serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), a movement for decolonization and indigenization among diasporic Filipinos.