Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Environmental Analysis

Reader 1

Meranda Roberts

Reader 2

Todd Honma

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©2024 Sydney K Nemetz

Abstract

Geographically located in Mindanao, the Philippines, this thesis explores the red-tagging of Lumad schools as a form of colonial violence and harm. The Lumad, a group of Indigenous tribes of Mindanao, are subject to high levels of militarization and violence via military and state-sponsored paramilitary. The Lumad are often forced to evacuate their communities in response to these extreme levels of violence and harassment. This manifests through violence via the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and AFP-supported paramilitaries, who target the Lumad and their schools for their supposed affiliation with the New People’s Army (NPA), a communist insurgency group. Lumad individuals and organizations are “red-tagged,” or baselessly accused of being a communist and then harassed, arrested on trumped-up charges, or murdered extrajudicially. This is legitimized under a state-run anti-communist counter-insurgency project. In order to understand this dynamic, I argue that the Lumad have a colonial relationship with the Philippine government through a distinct form of colonialism known as internal colonialism. I ground this theory by tracing how Indigenous Filipinos have become differentiated from the majority of Filipinos since the Spanish colonial period until present day along narratives of incivility and wildness. Focusing on the Lumad schools as a site of analysis, I argue that the schools provide a critical-place-based pedagogy that directly threatens the state's colonial project, necessitating their closure. I contend that the counter-insurgency campaign has been weaponized as a means of committing colonial violence with the aim of dispossessing the Lumad of land, autonomy, and sovereignty.

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