People of the Book: Translating an Oral Tradition into Written Form in Lumad Mindanao

Over the past decade, a small Higaunon team devoted their free time to transcribing their core oral tradition, known as the Panud, into book form. The Higaunon are a Lumad (Indigenous) minority community on the island of Mindanao (Philippines), and the Panud is the story of their people from the earliest ancestors to the present. It takes the form of a genealogy, but the Panud also contains, among other things, their creation story, religious doctrines, customary laws, and a record of migrations, land claims, and wars. The first all-Higaunon book written by Higaunons, Su Panud Ta Baligiyan (2023) was quickly adopted for use in the local government’s Indigenous Peoples Education Program. This talk will present the history of the Panud project, and the challenges (logistical, political, and epistemic) our team faced in transforming this unique oral tradition into written form. Through the story of the Panud project, we will explore some of the core epistemic differences between oral and literary cultures. The process also reveals some of the dilemmas inherent to “preserving tradition” and heritage making, and the complexities of being a ‘culture bearer’ in a modern Indigenous minority community in Southeast Asia.