Kapuluan: For Our Archipelago
BY GAB MEJIA
In the Filipino language, KAPULUAN means the Archipelago, inscribed with the root-word ‘APU’, meaning ancestor, descendent, and spirits. Grounded by this shared and reciprocal understanding of the diversity of the seven thousand islands and indigenous cultures of the Philippine archipelago, KAPULUAN emerged as a co-created educational multimedia short film to serve as a guide and a symbol of determination for and by young Filipinos to navigate the looming climate crisis; to remember as an act of resistance against colonization and the climate collapse. As the world warms, the mountains ravaged, cultures displaced, and seas enraged, KAPULUAN calls and invites us to remember the embodied multiplicities of ecological wisdom and traditional knowledge from our seafaring ancestors, and indigenous people through the art of wayfinding amid a rapidly changing society, asking each other and ourselves— What are the threads that weave our islands together? What spirit flows through all our land and water? What can we become when we remember?
To answer this, we asked and worked with 700 indigenous and frontline community members from across 18 regions in the Philippines, and to ultimately co-create this 25-minute 4-part educational short-film series to redefine and reimagine Filipino ecology, community, and culture amid a changing climate, each part touching deeply on a different aspect of Filipino cultural values as represented and co-created by indigenous women and queer youth leaders and local artists. Each part of the 4-part series would have a duration of 5-7-minutes, each featuring a Filipino cultural indigenous woman leader who embodies and explains each Filipino cultural value through a mix of narrative-driven oral traditions, poetry, and traditional dances, where they all come together to represent the living spirit and soul of the Philippines, an archipelago, KAPULUAN. Our vision and idea is to instill these important and forgotten values to the Filipino people and the world beyond, to weave the diversity of our archipelagic culture, histories, myths for a renewed imagination of the Philippines through the lens and ecological poetics of emerging indigenous women and queer cultural leaders across the Philippines, to remember who we truly are.
WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES AND FEARS AS A YOUNG PERSON IN A TIME OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS?
I am a Filipino, and throughout the 29 years of my existence, I have lived and will forever live surrounded by water. Through the ocean, wetlands, and the 7641 islands in the Philippines, my country is considered as one of the few mega biodiverse countries on our planet, where about 110 indigenous tribes and groups share their home with nature. Despite our rich natural and cultural heritage, we are currently caught in a political fraught between conservation and development wherein our oceans and reefs are being destroyed and threatened by the climate crisis like deadly typhoons and floods, adding to the fact that our country is one of the most at risk to climate change , the deadliest country for environmental defenders and activists in Asia according to the Global Witness Report, and the top third contributor of plastic pollution in the ocean. I am living at the forefront of climate change— caught in between understanding the perspective of how I can integrate development of the socio-economic welfare of my own people, at the same time conserving nature and protecting our climate. My life rests on the important decisions and actions being made by policy-makers, where all I hope is the lives of our marginalized communities and the most vulnerable people will be given justice to this climate crisis through the stories we tell and hold the people of power accountable to this disproportionate reality we face. If we are not going to be protected, at least we will be remembered.