Kuwentong Pamamahay

Contents: Acknowledgment of Indigenous Territory and Sovereignty | Kuwentuhan as method

Acknowledgment of Indigenous Territory and Sovereignty

The work of the Kuwentong Pamamahay project was conceived in and is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of various First Nations, including the q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), máthxwi (Matsqui), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), se’mya’me (Semiahmoo), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), sc̓əwaθən məsteyəxʷ (Tsawwassen), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Members of the project team, as well as project participants, have various relationships to these lands through our families, communities and workplaces. Many of us also have past and ongoing relationships – as residents and students and as members of diasporic and migrant communities – to other Indigenous territories on and beyond Turtle Island, including in the so-called Philippines. In addition, some members of our project team conducted remote work for this project while in Tkaronto, the traditional lands of many Indigenous communities, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.

We recognize Indigenous sovereignty at the same time that we acknowledge that immigrant efforts to make home on Indigenous territories are, at best, complicated and fraught. At worst, these practices can be modes of active participation in settler colonial violence. As international students, migrant workers, new arrivals, permanent residents, naturalized citizens or second or Third generation Canadians, Filipinxs in Canada are entangled, in various ways, in the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands. At different moments in its history, for example, Canada has enrolled racialized immigrants in the project of settler nation-building. For Filipinxs in Canada, this have taken the form of shoring up Canadian resource and service economies as workers; helping secure the future of settler families as caregivers; or providing evidence of national multiculturalism as racialized citizens. Many Filipinxs in Canada also benefit from settler colonialism through access Canadian citizenship and its benefits.

The stories shared by our project participants give us a sense of how we came to be here on these lands and why. They thus invite us to consider the larger historical and political contexts for our arrival and presence on these Indigenous lands. For example, many of our participants reflect on their desire for better lives through migration to the West. As we engage narratives such as these, we might ask how the West has come to be desired as a site of future prosperity and progress for Filipinxs and others in the Global South. We might consider how, in the case of Filipinxs, long histories of Spanish and American imperialism in the Philippines, condition of presence on these Indigenous lands and shape our desire for the West as a site of opportunity.

As members of the project team, we acknowledge ongoing Indigenous sovereignty with the hope that stories shared by our participants provide opportunities for frank future discussions about what it means for us and our communities to make home on Indigenous territories. They invite us to ask: What are our responsibilities, especially to Indigenous communities on whose lands we live and work? What might it mean to orient our efforts to make home towards Indigenous sovereignty? What might it look like to be in right relations with Indigenous people on these lands?

Kuwentuhan as method

“Kuwento” is the Tagalog word for story, and “kuwentuhan” is the act of gathering with other people to hang out and share stories with each other. Kuwentuhan is thus a key means of learning about and learning from each other. The “Kuwentong Pamamahay” project aims to channel this collective ethos of “kuwentuhan” as a means of creating and sustaining community and as a means of engaging in collective conversation about what it means for Filipinxs in Canada to make a home here, in so-called Greater Vancouver.

A word on terms we use on this website and in our research process: We refer to participants as “storytellers” as a way of honouring the stories they have shared as a contribution to our larger effort to make community and to examine our acts of making home on these lands. These stories were elicited by members of our project team who are themselves members of the Filipinx Canadian community. We call them “storymakers” in recognition of the ways that they create and hold space for storytellers to share their stories.