When Lumad Youth (Re)Write the Indigenous and the Juvenile: Constructiveness in Children’s Books Told by Children

Produced, purchased, and read to their target readers primarily by adults, the medium of literature for children and young adults (LCYA) published in the mainstream commonly disseminates dominant values and knowledges that accord to hegemonic constructions of children. At the same time, popular and state-sanctioned portrayals of Indigenous peoples elide the political-economic forces that endanger their communities. These romanticizing and even infantilizing cultural representations parallel the marginalization of the two sectors. In the Philippines, for example, Indigenous students from the Lumad people of Mindanao face the destruction of their community schools and violent attacks against their rights as children by government forces. With the help of literary texts created by Lumad students, this chapter demonstrates the critical potential of children’s books written by Indigenous children in popularizing the struggles faced by Indigenous juvenile populations. This chapter explores their autopoietic reconstructions of Indigenous juvenile selves in examples of LCYA, namely Si Obello (Obello, 2019) and the anthology Ang Bayabas sa Tagaytay at Ibang Kuwento mula sa Kabataan ng Paaralang Lumad (The Guavas at the Ridge and Other Stories from the Youth of Lumad Schools, 2019). Both books purport to contribute to the Lumad people’s movement for self-determination by dramatizing the communities’ unshakeable conviction to defend their yutang kabilin (ancestral land). By exercising a constructive agency against “voiceless” constructed-ness, the tellers of these stories reposition the Indigenous and the juvenile as active agents in effecting social justice.