Babaylan Bruha Book Club Podcast

“We were voyagers!”. Ate Judy couldn’t have affirmed this better with all the historical references in this chapter. Citing Disney’s famous Moana as the latest character, (& probably closest indigenous resemblance on a media screen to inspire us to connect to our ancestral ways) to portray a deeper dive into the history of our ancestor’s journeyings and what that pathway created for their posterities to come. 

This chapter is all about the mindful intricacy Filipinos efforted into handcrafting wooden outrigger boats (barangays, etc), that supported their rather comfortable-sounding expeditions, expanding civilization and developing communities around the islands. In addition, lots of Austronesian connections, which can further lead Filipinos to trace further back into our lineage origins. We know this because according to historians, Filipinos would land and leave traces of their wreck fragments, and chicken DNA - yes, chicken DNA. Through carbon dating back to 320 CE, science journalists and historians have been able to envision thoughts on how these island-hopping boats would yield such diverse populations of Filipinos through the years, containing major linguistic groups of Austronesians who traveled from far-flung lands passing from China into the Pacific, settling as far east as Easter Island and as far west as Madagascar. It’s no wonder the Philippines has more than 111 dialects! 

Join your favorite Bruha Ates as we discuss the evolution of the barangay and hypothesize about the origin of our love for karaoke. 

Follow us on Instagram:

Podcast - @babaylanbruhabookclub

Stephanie - @st3ph.inrising

Imee - @themayarimoon

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpjbGCP5WwlB2vPmaQUWjA

End music written, produced and recorded by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:11

2. Bruha Tings! @ 2:57

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 9:50

4. Vocabulary Words @ 13:03

5. Quotes @ 30:00

6. Closing Prayer @ 41:47

This chapter is all about receipts! What was the parchment curtain and what does it have to do with pre-hispanic history? We also talk about our revolutionary crush Jose Rizal and decolonization as soul retrieval. Take a listen and join in on the conversation.

Follow us on Instagram:

Podcast - @babaylanbruhabookclub

Stephanie - @st3ph.inrising

Imee - @themayarimoon

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpjbGCP5WwlB2vPmaQUWjA

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:00

2. Bruha Tings! @ 3:14

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 15:00

4. Vocabulary Words @ 17:18

5. Quotes @ 34:04

6. Closing Prayer @ 50:36

Season 3, Episode 1!! New season means new book. 1521: Rediscovering the History of the Philippines (by Judy Robinson) was inspired by the 500 year anniversary of Ferdinand Magellan’s arrival in the Philippine islands. Ate Judy, who was born and raised in the Philippines, but now lives in the Washington D.C. area, having an innate curiosity and love for learning, did a little digging and pieced together stories that she and even friends who grew up in the Philippines but now live in the US were unaware of. Stories such as that of Enrique de Malacca, Magellan’s slave, who was probably the first to circumnaviate the globe even before Magellan, and stories that told of a literate people and a thriving trade and commerce even before the Spaniards arrived.

Ate Judy right off the bat clarifies that she is not a historian, and that this book is not a history textbook. Rather, it is a collection of forgotten stories related to the history of the Philippines and the advent of Spanish colonization. Because with the 500 year anniversary of Magellan’s arrival in 1521, it is time to share an update perspective. In rediscovering these stories, we learn who we were, who we are, and who we can be.

Follow us on Instagram:

Podcast - @babaylanbruhabookclub

Stephanie - @st3ph.inrising

Imee - @themayarimoon

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpjbGCP5WwlB2vPmaQUWjA

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:00

2. Bruha Check @ 3:08

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 11:11

4. Vocabulary Words @ 22:16

5. Quotes @ 30:41

6. Closing Prayer @ 45:05

What a chapter to round out the ending of this book! Episode 34, chapter 13, closing out by Ate Perla Paredes Daly, a multimedia artist and activist who collaborates with various artists, healers, and activists around the world. Her story stems from the transition of actually starting in California, and at the age of 10 years old, moved back to the island of Negros Occidental, Philippines with her widowed mother. Growing up around educated, “aristokrato/a”s like her Lola who went to Assumption College, she eventually connected the dots in college and recognized and reconciled her colonial mentalities from her upbringings.

Follow us on Instagram:

Podcast - @babaylanbruhabookclub

Stephanie - @st3ph.inrising

Imee - @themayarimoon

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpjbGCP5WwlB2vPmaQUWjA

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 2:00

2. "90 second DECOLONIZING" Heart Check-in @ 3:03

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 13:58

4. Vocabulary Words @ 18:23

5. Quotes @ 32:17

6. Closing Prayer @ 53:45

In this chapter, Ate Ethelyn tells her heartbreaking story of growing up in a valley community in Nothern Philippines, then having to move to Metro Manila where she saw the kapwa bliss of her childhood end as she tried to get used to the crowded city who she says “robbed her parents of their smiles and nurturing touch, turning them into silenced automatons.” Growing up in Manila meant a rejection of everything that Ate Ethelyn held dear during her childhood years, including the nature spirits and guardians that connected all of creation. She was able to find love in the midst of martial law under the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. During this time she had a few kids of her own and started her own community funded school and children’s theater. This bright spot in her life was short lived when her husband passed away, and circumstances forced her, like millions of other Filipinos to swallow the pain of leaving her children and homeland for America. Settling here, she eventually married an African American-Native American man who petitioned her children. She experience verbal abuse and also witnessed first hand the deep suffering of people of color in America. Despite all of the heart ache and racial disparities, Ate Ethelyn continued her community work, bringing Filipino elders together once a week to participate in storytelling or myth weaving, which we will talk about more in a bit. She also began a dissertation on the expressive arts therapies and fought her college advisor in order to include autoethnography in her paper.

Follow us on Instagram:

Podcast - @babaylanbruhabookclub

Stephanie - @st3ph.inrising

Imee - @themayarimoon

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:04

2. "90 second DECOLONIZING" Heart Check-in @ 3:00

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 10:10

4. Vocabulary Words @ 16:54

5. Quotes @ 31:13

6. Closing Prayer @ 50:26

Written by the vibrant and scholarly S. Lily Mendoza (Manang Leny’s sister), who graduated with expertise in studying Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Liberation Psychology), Manang Lily takes us through her lovely dissertation on the work of indigenization among scholars in the Philippine academy - one of her life self-actualized “romances & adventure”. Having survived supporting and unconditionally loving her ex-husband who suffered from addiction, Manang Lily speaks of her experiences being able to sit and learn from the founder of the term Sikolohiyang Pilipino & elder, Virgilio “Ver” Enriquez, up until his last moments of life, at the Philippine Psychology Research and Training House. She mentions also learning from other elders & seed planters for the next generations of decolonization work and conversation including but not limited to Zeus Salazar, Popeng Cover, and Felipe de Leon Jr. Manang Lily’s call to action for the generations ahead feels quite urgent at the end of this chapter. She discusses the message relayed from the Kogi indigenous tribe in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Columbia in South America. How they recruited a news team to document and release a miraculous and perhaps begrudgingly urgent message to the world in 1990. The Kogi warns ALL of us, that WE “Younger Brother” was not listening to the Earth, referencing the sea & respecting them/Earth/beyond “Elder Brother”/geological boundaries. It seems that her hope is for all of us resonating with this chapter to continue building the bridges between the masses in the world who are corrupted, plagued by greed, and dismantle those systems, ideally before it’s too late.

Follow us on Instagram:

Podcast - @babaylanbruhabookclub

Stephanie - @st3ph.inrising

Imee - @themayarimoon

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:04

2. "90 second DECOLONIZING" Heart Check-in @ 3:00

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 10:27

4. Vocabulary Words @ 14:13

5. Quotes @ 26:12

6. Closing Prayer @ 39:47

(TW: mention of suicide, sexual abuse)

Here we are! Part TATLO of the book, “Back from the Crocodile’s Belly”! In this chapter, written by Tera Maxwell, a scholar and energy healer, Ate Te proses her Filipino studies dissertation, challenging us to think about and/or remember how the Philippine-American War + Spanish & American imperialism has affected generations of Filipinos across the world. Tera seems to ask us to recall what private, individual memories we have as part of the collective memory - could be brought up to challenge the dominant versions of U.S. history, where Filipinos are literally forgotten. Introducing terms such as “imperial trauma + racial/imperial melancholia”, two terms we cover in this episode and how they intertwine in the fabric of what it means to be a Filipino in today’s society, existing consciously or unconsciously, affectively, as Tera mentions, RESURRECTED, and on our own healing journeys to self-actualize and mourn-to-heal what our ancestors could not.

Follow us on Instagram:

Podcast - @babaylanbruhabookclub

Stephanie - @st3ph.inrising

Imee - @themayarimoon

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:04

2. "90 second DECOLONIZING" Heart Check-in @ 3:23

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 13:14

4. Vocabulary Words @ 16:54

5. Quotes @ 31:27

6. Closing Prayer @ 46:56

The author of this chapter is James W. Perkinson, a spoken word poet and adjunct professor of things spiritual in an urban college. He describes himself in the chapter as a “repentant Euro-colonizer” who unlearned some of his privilege as a “white male North American and an unwitting beneficiary of the entire history of colonial relations between my ancestors and the Philippine Islands since 1898…”

So, you may be asking just what is it that James W. Perkinson is doing in exploring Filipino Babaylanism? And that’s actually a specific question that he answers, while also confessing that he knows his contribution is minor. And as a participant in a shared dialogue on spirituality, babaylanism, for James, is a question about an entire way of life, not just spirituality.

He then goes on to talk about DJ Qbert’s, a Filipino-American DJ Qbert emerged in the early 1990’s as hip-hop’s premier turntablist on the forefront of the sonic improvisation known as “scratching”, and compare his scratching to something more cosmic and spiritual akin to shamanic journeying via indigenous plants, because DJs like Qbert regularly reflect that they “see” far beyond what they can produce. And to the degree babaylanism can be grasped as an upwelling of animate energy, Qbert’s scratching also brings an upwelling of vital memory, channeling ancestral wisdom, combining a kapwa sensibility within his turntables and synthesizers.

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022 

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Time Stamps:

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:04

2. "90 second DECOLONIZING" Heart Check-in @ 3:10

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 10:40

4. Vocabulary Words @ 21:04

5. Quotes @ 31:57

6. Closing Prayer @ 48:11

Listen in as we discuss Kapwa and art! In this chapter, artist Ate Margarita walks us through her take on “Kapwa”, and how its concept of “a way of being-at-home-in-the-world”, guided and influenced her decolonization journey, as well as her art journey. Ate Mar was working multiple jobs and art/activism projects while living in NYC, and the workload eventually exhausted and injured her body. For her, that was the wake up call that essentially led her to travel and spend some time living in Batanes, Philippines. Arriving, she was overwhelmed with the way the community embraced her upon day one of arrival and made her feel so interconnected as a Filipina American who spent more time “living in Brazil than the Philippines”. Herr artistic skills and expressiveness eventually allowed her to connect with the Pacita Abad Center for the Arts, which created multiple opportunities for her to facilitate art spaces, create community works, and eventually produce and public projects as she eventually made her way to end up in Germany. Ate Mar’s art practices included in this chapter cited an array of performative, engaging, and displayable art that aimed to nurture the spirit by exploration via food, ritual, and healing.    

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022 _______________________________________________________________________ 

Time Stamps:  

1. Grounding Prayer & Opening @ 1:04

2. "90 second DECOLONIZING" Heart Check-in @ 3:21

3. BROWN GIRL CLIFF NOTES / Chapter Overview @ 12:11

4. Vocabulary Words @ 18:16

5. Quotes @ 31:09

6. Closing Prayer @ 51:21

In this chapter, Maria J. Ferrara seeks to give an answer to what is probably the most common question of those of us in the Filipinx diaspora, and that is “What does it mean to be Filipinx/a/o?”  She discusses why we need to be conscious of challenges among second generation Filipino Americans (SGFA’s), and how scholars have conceptualized colonial mentality and ethnic identity development. She then goes into the results of her research study on ethnic edentity development among SGFA’s. Maria utilizes an indigneous perspective in understanding the experiences of SGFA’s, and how decolonization education and perspectives seem to be particularly warranted within this group. She describes ethnic identity development concepts and models, which we define in this episode. Through her academic research, what she learn is that despite a long history of colonization, SGFA’s long to understand what it means to be Filipino, because along with the erasure and colonization of indigenous history, as well as forced enculturation,  SGFA’s now live in the country of their most recent colonizer. With that complication in mind, SGFA’s have sought to access their indigenous identity through a concept that emerged from the findings of Maria’s study, called “Cultural Portals”, which we also discuss in this episode. Boiled down, the whole chapter describes the nuanced and complicated history (or lack thereof ) for SGFA’s and the psychological effect it can have.

End music by Dayana Capulong. (C) Dayana Capulong, 2022

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