The Bodong of the Kalinga People in the Cordillera Region of the Philippines: Indigenous Persistence, Self-Determination, and Sovereignty

In the province of Kalinga, Cordillera Region, Philippines, the bodong remains strong. The bodong is an indigenous legal-judicial institution through which a bilateral peace pact between communities is forged and maintained. Notwithstanding the presence in the region of the court system of the Philippine state, most inter-community conflicts, offenses, and crimes are negotiated, managed, and settled through the bodong. Virtually all the autonomous Indigenous ili (communities) in Kalinga are governed by the laws of the bodong. And whenever Indigenous elders swear by the authority of this institution as a mechanism of dispensing justice and restoring broken relations, they also assert that the indigenous Kalinga legal system “predates” the Philippine state, a political structure which, to them, “arrived only yesterday.”

Informed by the Indigenous relational ontology of the Kalinga people and drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, I set out to understand why certain indigenous political systems like the bodong endure, even in the context of the state’s increasing assimilative efforts. I take the persistence of the bodong as an instantiation of what Gerald Vizenor calls Indigenous survivance and as an evidence of the incompleteness of the colonial project of domination embodied by the modern state. The bodong constitutes Indigenous sovereignty within—but also simultaneously alongside and beyond—state sovereignty. But it is also a self-reproducing and self-determining system of governance, law-making, and adjudication, which has evolved through time into a complex and complexity-managing institution. As such, the bodong puts into question the notion of the state as the ultimate sovereign. I propose that the relational ontology of the bodong opens up the possibility of prefiguring nonstate ways of governing and politically organizing societies. Finally, through this same ontology, I reflect on my positionality as a non-Indigenous researcher confronted by unsettling questions about the coloniality of doing research on an Indigenous Land.