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About Gone Gods

Historical Analysis

Not knowing much about the handful of islands before him, Bernardo de la Torre knew even less about the rest of the archipelago then known as the Islands to the West. The year was 1541 when he crossed the Pacific under the command of Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, and it would have been only two decades since Spain had reached these islands. Before Villalobos could send his declaration claiming the islands for Spain, it was de la Torre who would venture farther north, deeper into Asia to spread the word about the new Spanish lands. He named the islands after King Philip II of Spain, inordinately transforming the identities of islands’ inhabitants.  For centuries to come, these islands would be known as the Philippines.

Uncovering a historically colonized country’s name origin is one of the many ways to start a conversation about decolonization. It provides opportunities to rethink the current scholarly perception and to reevaluate our understanding of the formation of nation-states and national identities. Decolonization is not simply a method of deconstructing the colonial influences and oppression unto communities and nation-states, but it is also not about hypothesizing what could have been or what should have been. It can be interpreted as a process of identifying the survival of nation-states over time under an outsiders’ encroaching politics and the transformation of those nation-states’ culture and traditions under foreign power. Decolonization is an opportunity to correct misconceptions, to rewrite historical narratives, and to reclaim identities. 

 For the Philippines, the fact that it was named after someone who had never met anyone from these islands or had never visited them already presents a problematic aspect of the Filipino identity. When Spain unlawfully claimed and renamed the Islands to the West, the 1,4000 years pre-dating European contact was simply forgotten. The furtive ascent of the Philippines into the world history solidified the country’s historical role as a subject of greater, more powerful foreign entities in mainstream history – erasing a significant portion of its history that adds more to the country’s history. The fourteen pre-colonial centuries are compacted into “ancient” and “pre-historical” periods, yet the three centuries of occupation, colonization, and liberation from Spain, United States, and Japan take center stage in standard Philippine history textbooks. 

 In the current Filipino curriculum, pre-colonial Philippine society can be described as scattered animist and pagan communities who had independent system of power and diverse livelihoods depending on their geographical locations. The country is divided into three island groups: Luzon, whose native and indigenous peoples interacted with Chinese and possibly Japanese traders; Visayas, a large cluster of islands that was home of seafarers and fishermen, and that also traded with Malay and Indonesian tradesmen in addition to the Chinese, and; Mindanao, a spitting distance from Borneo (Indonesia) from which trade of goods and culture occurred more naturally because of its geographical proximity to larger island communities. These islands thrived for centuries, with recent archeological breakthroughs suggesting pre-historic men roaming Luzon at a much earlier time than previously proven.

So how does a period of vibrant social interactions, expansive trade, and rich diversity became almost inexistent? Examining the historiography of the Philippines reveals that the country’s history is often written either by western historians or by Filipino historians adhering to the long-held ideologies that western historians perpetuated. Adding to the over three hundred years of Spanish colonization wherein indigenous traditions, practices, and beliefs were eradicated, the United States added a disserving method in writing Philippine History. United States enforced a system of education geared towards the establishment of their imperialist motivations. Furthermore, under United States “supervision,” efforts to retrieve pre-colonial historical narratives did not include local oral histories and written regional histories. In the western perspective, Spain has always “discovered” Philippines, and later on, it is considered that the United States “liberated” the country.

When Philippine History is viewed from the texts and the narratives of its Asian neighbors’ history textbooks, it is revealed that the “Islands to the West” was more than just an archipelago. In mountains of Luzon, tribal communities have mastered ground cultivation and farming various topographies in addition to their hunting methods. Its shoreline indigenous groups, including those in the patches of islands in Visayas, local tribes were masters of currents and aquaculture. They traded with Chinese tradesmen in what was believed to be peaceful and cordial relationship. They also traded goods with the communities of what are now known as Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and even Japan. In Mindanao, trade routes can be traced as far back the Middle East as evidence of the existence of silk during the pre-colonial period can be found in Indonesia’s trade history with its neighbor to the north.  

 The idea that pre-colonial Filipino societies were “pagans” is also misleading. While many communities practiced religious traditions that are animistic and paganistic, there were already established religious communities scattered across the country. Prominently discussed in Indonesian and Malaysian pages of history, there were already “localized” Hindu and Buddhist tribal Filipinos at least three hundred years before the Spaniards arrived. Villalobos himself wrote in his report the existence of Buddhist population (although he did not specify the ethnic backgrounds of these people) on the very island they landed on, Merete. Earlier than these evidences, however, was the introduction of Islam and Muslim royalties on a date difficult to pinpoint. However, it is very well-documented that the Spaniards had to extinguish “rajanates” or “sultanates” as they expanded their conquests throughout the archipelago.

When we start to look at the history of the Philippine archipelago through the words and thoughts of its neighbors, we start to see a complicated yet complex system of societies that practiced religion, commerce, trade, and business. We see groups of people possessing a peaceful way of life that were evolving at their own pace. These societies thrived independently and never needed foreign intervention for its development. However, the process of rethinking this history requires more than a synthesis of different historical accounts and sources – it also demands that every island be meticulously studied as the one before it, a task very daunting for a single person to achieve. The indigenous systems of writing were eradicated during the colonial era, and the surviving oral histories were sifted through to satisfy foreign perspectives, and so the island communities of “The Islands to the West” – all of the history, the traditions, the literature – remain but an overlooked thought of the country’s past.

Sources

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