"Lupa Ay Buhay": Remapping Urban Geographies of Indigenous Struggles in the Philippines

“Lupa ay buhay “ (“Land is life”) is an indigenous adage that emphasizes the centrality and sacredness of land to indigenous life. More recently, it has become a call for solidarity and struggle to defend ancestral lands from destruction, which concomitantly suggests indigenous death. How does the indigenous struggle for land situated in the production of postcolonial cities? Veering away from tendencies to consign indigenous struggles as rural concerns, this paper advocates for indigenous urbanism as an analytic to problematize urban accumulation and transformations. Based on several years of fieldwork with Indigenous communities and organizations in the Philippines, I re-map Indigenous place-making in the production of urban spaces in Manila’s sprawling landscapes, considered to be the political and economic heart of the Philippines. Drawing from anti-racist, decolonial, and Black geographic framings, I argue that indigenous spatialities in Manila emerge through uneven biopolitical and necropolitical processes. In particular, I map and examine three interrelated spatial expressions of indigenous struggles and place-making across the restlessly shifting mega-urban region (1) necropolitical geographies of dispossessions in the peri-urban; (2) spatial commodification of indigeneity in new cities; and (3) indigenous camp-outs in the metropolis. Within a Philippine context that pushes for postcolonial desires to globalize, the urban manifestations of indigenous struggles serve as vital grounds in forging ties of solidarity towards decolonized urban futures.