By Cynthia Addawan
“It is necessary that we need to reframe that act of decolonizing to account what was missing, and what continues to be missing.”
Even as a teacher, I must say there are many things I am not aware of.
One is the existence of NAKEM Conferences, an advocacy group that has been around for 17 years and organized in that span 17 academic conferences on several themes and two Ilokano language summits and congresses in 2014.
I know the Ilokano word “nakem” from the Ilokanized version of my iKalinga self.
Among others, I know “nakem” is a measure of one’s person, one’s capacity to do things right and just and fair.
Then I discovered that is the very source of what NAKEM Conferences really means: a National Alliance for Knowledge, Empowerment, and Meaning.
And this NAKEM Conferences organized in Honolulu was founded by Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who has his roots from Ilocos Norte.
With some 200 participants in each of these 17 conferences they had convened, organized, and held, more than 3,400 teachers, cultural workers, intellectuals, researchers, educationists, and writers have benefited from these annual exchanges of ideas, experiences, practices, and ruminations.
They also had a midterm conference on “Amianan and Ilokano Life, Language, and Literature” at the Philippine Consulate General in Honolulu in 2009, with many of the Amianan language groups participating to define and understand the notion of “Amianan” as a category to understand the more than 40 ethnolinguistic groups that make up the Northwestern Philippines.
NAKEM’s annual conferences have been held in different places, with several in Hawaii, organized and hosted by the University of Hawaii Ilokano Program.
I have scoured documents from the Internet and other platforms and interviewed those in the know, and I realized that there is so much history here that I have not known.
I want to know more. I am a teacher, and thus, I must know more.
As an iKalinga, born and raised and nurtured with that Kalinga spirit and soul and earth, I am beginning to realize that the very things I am most uncomfortable talking about are those that NAKEM Conferences has courageously confronted since its founding in 2006 in Honolulu.
I know the temporal origin: the 100th year of the arrival of the first 15 Ilokanos, the indentured plantation workers that would be the beginning of more Ilokanos going to Hawaii as plantation workers until the last batch of workers reached the shores of Hawaii in 1946.
When the flyer of the International Conference on Languages, Cultures, and Histories 2022 also called ICOLCH 2022 came out, I read through it; I was hooked.
I wanted much to take part and exchange ideas with kindred spirits.
I just finished my master’s in education with a thesis on the foundational issues of sustainability and climate change from the perspective of basic education learners and I wanted to share what I discovered in this conference.
The ICOLCH 2022 was the handiwork of Kalinga State University, but I saw other hands collaborating to put the conference together like NAKEM Conferences and the University of Hawaii Ilokano Program.
Then I saw those names that initially were unknown to me who would grace the international conference as keynote speakers: Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili of the University of Hawaii, Dr. Alma Trinidad Ouanesinouk of Portland State University, and the Rev. Dr. Shierwin Cabunilas of San Beda University Graduate School of Law and San Pablo Seminary.
I was hooked a second time.
I now realized more and more how serendipitous this turn of events had been for me as a neophyte in international conferences.
I had never been to one before despite my long years of service as a public school teacher.
This constancy of seeing the same names and organizations that, for the life of me, I have not had the chance for a real personal encounter left we with that burning desire to be part of the ICOLCH 2022 and listen to those who have something to say about the theme of the conference: about indigeneity and about the need to empower our communities by affirming their stories, languages, histories, and cultures.
These things have become so familiar to me. But they remained distant, too.
I wanted to exchange ideas with these three speakers too.
For the first time, I reviewed how to put together an abstract the conference required.
The abstract selection committee saw the potential of my research and assigned me a slot in the parallel session.
The multitude of research—and the fecundity of brilliant ideas in the exchanges—made me more driven to embark on more research projects so that I can continue to join the NAKEM Conferences.
But the first day—at the first speech of Dr. Agcaoili—I could not believe I have not been aware of the systemic injustice that resulted in the impoverishment of our indigenous languages, cultures, and histories.
He argued that our focus – on decolonization, that act of purging from our collective memories the evils of our layered experience of colonization by the Spaniards, the Americans, and the Japanese – is insufficient.
It is not enough that we decolonize, he said.
It is necessary that we need to reframe that act of decolonizing to account what was missing, and what continues to be missing.
He offers a theory: a post-decolonialization strategy that assesses the errors of decolonization alone including the surreptitious advocacy for just one and only one language from the center of power.
This is all wrong, Dr. Agcaoili continued, and I remember why our iKalinga people have been forced to speak the Tagalog of a people so far away from our people’s mountains.
I continue to ruminate on his “post-decolonialization” theory and strategy.
I now see why, of all the people I have known, he had been personally involved in this fight for linguistic justice in the Philippines and elsewhere.
I still have a lot to learn.
But I will keep my eyes and mind open because I must serve my iKalinga people.
(The author, a public schools basic education teacher of Tabuk, Kalinga and mother of three daughters, holds a master’s degree whose thesis tackled climate change and sustainability.)