Countering Capitalism: How the Aytas Answered Their Prayers to the Philippines’ Problems

EPOCH
Mar 1
8 min read

Emmanuel Adeyemi-Abere │Lancaster University

‘Please send me back to my home. It doesn’t matter if Pinatubo erupts. If Pinatubo erupts, I will be buried in my land along with our crops. I will die at Pinatubo if that is to be my fate’.

These were the words of Lakay Latundan, a despondent Ayta, as he requested to be reunited with his home before the devastation of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption ended his life among many others.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Latundan was a tragic hero: an isolated individual committed to a life immersed in nature who would rather embrace death than abandon his calling. But death and destruction had been afflicting his people long before that explosive incident.

The Aytas are mixed group of communities that are indigenous to the Philippines. They were the first settlers in the country more than 20,000 years ago, and their history has been characterised by a series of retreats to the mountainous terrains of the Luzon islands. In these regions, they have developed lifestyles centred around agriculture and shifting patterns of cultivation.

However, histories have also bundled the Aytas into a broader ethnic group of ‘Negritos’: Southeast Asian people of short stature with kinky hair and dark skin. This classification comes out of the legacy of Spanish colonialists, whose worldview would reconfigure the country.

To the left of the picture, two well-dressed men engage in conversation. One of them is covered with a parasol that is held by another man, his servant. To the right of the picture, two more men, also well-dressed, are kneeling and touching birds. In the background are two figures that are standing on a hill. One is holding a bow and arrow. The other has a case of arrows on his back. — An illustration of Spanish colonialists on the Filipino islands. A Spaniard stands with his servant to his side, protecting him from the shade with a parasol. He is greeted by a Criollo, a person of pure Spanish heritage, while two Filipinos participate in a cockfight. Behind them are the Aytas, who are described as ‘wild men of the mountains’. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

These colonialists were also early exponents of the capitalist enterprise, attracted to the wealth of minerals across the Filipino archipelago. In the Western world where economies were expanding, constant surplus value was in demand to produce profits for merchants.

So how would the West define value? Cash flows and ‘capital’ keep capitalist systems going, but these objects have no intrinsic, quantifiable worth. For the Spanish and other early capitalists, their project would not be complete without the ideological impulse of the ‘Cartesian dualism.’

This philosophical proposition presents a paradigm where ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ are completely separated. The natural world is external to the human relations that bind societies together, and the material environment in which people live could be subjected to the will of humans.

This early modern paradigm did not only mark the historical moment when global resources were appropriated at increasing rates for economic gain. It also allows us to map the injustices exacted against indigenous people. Capitalism and colonialism essentially articulated an ethico-political position about what human beings should look like: ‘sovereign’ actors who exploited their environments. Those who did not conform were a problem to be eliminated.

Spanish administrators attempted to introduce reducciones across the Filipino colony, displacing indigenous ways of life with urban settlements that replicated social structures in the West. Some Aytas worked with lowland people at the foot of Mount Pinatubo to exchange forest products and were entitled conquestados. But most of the Aytas, called the non-conquestados, wished to hold onto independent lifestyles, and they occasionally attacked lowlander villages.

Through the centuries of Spanish, then American colonisation, and finally national independence, the Aytas were usually perceived as ‘savages’ in the modernising Filipino nation. At the same time, they retained their social autonomy, finding ways to evolve through changing times in the country. But these indigenous groups could not escape the clutches of capitalism forever.

Five figures (four men and one youth) are standing with traditional items. Four are standing with sharply tipped, long staffs and the figure in the middle is carrying a shield. Behind the five male figures is a tree and a village house. — *A twentieth century image of the T*inguianes, Ayta, and Igorotes. The members of all these indigenous groups are wearing traditional clothing, carrying weapons. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

The Philippines followed the path of many nations in the Global South that have tried to make capitalism work on its own two feet. Mined for its mineral resources of nickel, gold, and copper, the colonial economy had relied on primary commodity exports. Once the country became independent, it undertook a project of developmentalism to strengthen the state.

President Ferdinand Marcos leaned on loans to construct new infrastructure, but the nation’s foreign debt had increased from $60 million USD in 1962 to $2.3 billion USD by 1970. Surging inflation and social unrest accompanied this rising debt, and a ‘crisis of capitalism’ had emerged.

In 1973, the Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC) was established as a government corporation to respond to the oil crisis in the country. But over time, its charter has been amended to explore and exploit alternative energy resources from ‘public lands’ across the archipelagos.

Capitalism’s relentless desire for ‘cheap’ material to replace exhausted resources has produced this crisis across many countries. In the case of the Philippines, this demand eventually put the government in a conflict of interest with the Aytas. PNOC performed exploratory drilling and well testing on Mount Pinatubo from 1988 until 1990 in the search for sources of geothermal heating. It was a decision that did not sit well with the people who called that land their home.

Indeed, ‘pinatubo’ in the native tongue of the Ayta means ‘nurtured with care’ and the indigenous people knew that no outside influences had been able to disturb their terrain. The elders of these communities claimed their god and creator, Apo Namalyari, was highly displeased with the lack of respect to the mountain. The eventual eruption would be their punishment.

Pinatubo started to emit smoke in April 1991, and the mountain most violently erupted from 12-15 June. A total of 80,000 houses were destroyed and 80,000 more were damaged. Damage to crops, infrastructure, and personal property exceeded $374 million USD, while over 100,000 people were forced to relocate to temporary evacuation centres or resettlements.

The Aytas were proven right to question the authority of the Filipino government in drilling the mountain: the project revealed no signs of oil to replenish resources. But those who had worshipped the mountain had felt its wrath in full force and their lives would not be the same.

A map to depict the impact of the Pinatubo eruption. A black star marks the positioning of Mount Pinatubo, found at Luzon in the north of the Filipino archipelago. The black line marks the territory that the tephra reached in the atmosphere. — *Geographic image that captures the path of tephra (ash and debris) left by the eruption.*

These indigenous people did not always live in the reserved terrain of Mount Pinatubo, but they had preserved the right to maintain territory for themselves. Now that they had been cast out from their homes, with no timeline of return, and forced to assimilate with wider Philippine society.

Unsanitary, inhumane conditions accompanied the evacuation centres that many of the Aytas would populate. If they chose to move to resettlement sites, they were encroaching on redeployed plots of private land that they could not cultivate as freely as they did on the mountains. While the government promised the Aytas approximately 1400 hectares of resettlement land in June 1992, it would not be enough to sustain all the communities displaced from Pinatubo.

By October 1997, the Filipino government had implemented Republic Act No. 8371 to recognise and promote the ancestral domains and traditions of indigenous people like the Aytas. Yet this legislation barely shifted the needle for indigenous communities. This law would enforce the right of indigenous people to ‘develop, extract, harvest and exploit’ the natural resources in their ancestral domain, but it did not give them right to sovereign, private ownership of territory.

The Aytas found themselves in a paradoxical position: both a community deemed external to ‘modern’ Filipino society with essentialised, primitive qualities, and an endangered group in grave need of security. Stewardship of their lands and protection of their people was framed in relation to the needs of a capitalist, marketized social order, and they sat at the bottom of the ladder.

Several scholars have marked the eruption of Mount Pinatubo as a moment of mourning for the Aytas on two counts. Not only did the natural disaster devastate their environment and enforce shirt-term displacement, but it also produced a ‘cultural disaster’ that destroyed their social order.

Capitalism certainly changed the contours of Aytas communities. Across the lowlands, more people would sell fruits, vegetables, root crops, and souvenir items to local and foreign tourists as part of the country’s informal economic sector. Others, who were denied access to manual labour of construction work or carpentry, engaged in acts of petition, begging for money to survive.

Most significant was the emergence of ethnic solidarity among the ‘Aytas’. Though the term ‘Aytas’ has historically represented a wide set of communities, a collective consciousness across these groups never existed before the eruption. Indigenous people had organised themselves in loose family groupings rather than bounded social units, never needing a mythic legend or past that allowed them to lay authority to particular territories or legitimise sovereign rule.

However, once the Aytas became conscious of their place in Filipino society and the inadequacies of Non-Governmental Organisations’ (NGO) funding after the eruption, they began to mobilise in more ‘modern’ political factions. The Central Luzon Ayta Association (CLAA) and PINATUBO were two key organisations created after the eruption. Their work primarily involved fighting for the recovery of ancestral land, but it quickly extended into bids for communal cooperatives and literacy programs.

Moreover, the Aytas accepted that they had to strategize better to strengthen their negotiating position in the bid for territory. Representatives of popular organisations often employed discourse about a collective, hunter-gatherer tradition that required the return of indigenous land to the people to be sustained. These exact historical practices, captured by kultura, varied from narrative to narrative, but the importance of mythic past was widely being acknowledged.

Yet, while change was occurring, it would be too hasty to suggest that Aytas tradition was obliterated by capitalism. Belief systems are not static structures that exist abstractly outside of space and time. They are sense-making practices that allow people to navigate the world around them. Survivalist strategies allowed the Aytas to adapt to the circumstances that they faced, but their behaviour did not mean that they completely abandoned the value of their old ways of living.

Five children are smiling in the foreground of the picture. All five are wearing red clothing around their waists. In their hands, they are holding small yellow bows and also carrying arrows. — *Aytas children pose with bows and arrows, embracing their culture. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons).*

Within the cracks of the capitalist system, Aytas hung onto many elements of bayanihan (communal spirit). Political mobilisation meant these communities could use the privileges of their oppressed position to bargain for collective survival. Marriages allowed the Aytas to access the social structures of lowlanders and attempt to offer provisions of food to their people. And a culture of shared sustenance persisted through the constraints of local administration.

Above all, the Aytas never gave up on the dream of going back to their homeland. Several survived the eruption, successfully hiding in caves before beginning to rebuild their lives. Others were disillusioned with the attempts to integrate into Filipino society, and they retreated to the mountains. Whether they aligned with the Christian God, animist spirits, or both, indigenous people articulated the belief that this test of their faith in the divinities would not last forever.

Eventually, their prayers were answered. In May 2009, 454 Ayta families were granted clean ancestral land ownership on Mount Pinatubo with the Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title, gaining 7,440 hectares of land. In January 2010, 7,000 more families received the same honour.

The struggle for social justice did not stop here. Society still excludes the Aytas, denying them the profits from tourism taking place on the mountain. But these communities have learned their lesson. The 1991 eruption stoked the fires of protest politics among Aytas, who will no longer be silenced, and Pinatubo can patiently await her next call to action, proud of her protectors.