The Lumad Bakwit School is a mobile & temporary school for the Lumad Bakwit, the vernacular term for the indigenous peoples in Mindanao who were forced to evacuate from their ancestral land and travel to the Philippines’ capital (Metro Manila) due to the human rights violations and militarization fueled by development aggression in their ancestral land.
Different various universities and religious institutions in Metro Manila including the University of Santo Tomas accommodated the Lumad Bakwit to show their support and solidarity.
Lumad Bakwit hoped to raise awareness about their situation and to gain support from the broader public. Inside the Bakwit School, Lumad conducted story telling sessions with the empathetic visitors. They shared their testimonials about the struggles of their communities, stories of violence and abuses they have experienced at the hands of state forces and paramilitary groups and their stories of their resistance.
Using the ‘anthropology of the good’(Robbins, 2013), and ‘life projects’, (Ortner, 2016) as the theoretical guide, the presentation analyzes how this Lumad Bakwit School ‘event’ created a space where the Lumad Bakwit are actively imagining, negotiating and investing on the best ways to live, actualizing the values for empathy learning, solidarity & partnership, resistance, well-being, care, hope in the midst of harsh and tragic situations(Robbins, ibid), manifested in the different interactions and ‘life projects’ of social actors(Ortner, ibid).
In conclusion, I will reflect on this development in the history of the University of Santo Tomas and the different limitations of the engagement that arose due to the recent Philippine political climate.
