Facing Ongoing Extractivism and Structural Violence in the name of “Development”
The Philippines, alongside many other countries in Southeast Asia has become a battleground for soft power wars between the U.S. and China. Audrey and her ancestors have been intentional collateral of these “development” projects for generations. As a womxn from an Indigenous Peoples community, she has been at the forefront of violence all her life, resisting development projects such as the Chico Dam.
In recent years, Audrey has strengthened her approach to political activism by engaging with JASS in multiple ways including through feminist popular education processes, transnational solidarity building, solidarity resourcing and most recently through engagement in JASS Southeast Asia’s flagship program “Follow the Money.” Follow the Money (FtM) is a core strategy and approach to challenging extractives in the region, and an expansion to the activist toolkit Behind the Scenes of Extractives: Money, Power & Community. The process brought together community leaders of Innabuyog, a regional alliance of indigenous women’s organizations in the Cordillera region, to map where the money of four major extractive mega-dams are funded from and to find links across these resource mobilizers.
Follow the Money
The FtM process that was led by JASS in 2022, brought together Audrey alongside 20 other community leaders to find links in the investments of these mega-dam projects. The investors turned out to be offshore and not even located in the Southeast Asia region.
While community leaders are working on local strategies for challenging these mega-dam projects, JASS discovered through the FtM process in Indonesia in 2023 that the investors of a mining project were the same as the mega-dam project in the Philippines. This set the scene for a transnational movement to challenge extractives in the region, with Audrey at the helm of the movement in the Philippines.
Solidarity with other Indigenous Peoples
Audrey deeply understood the purpose of long-term feminist movement building because of the Cordillera region’s history of resistance. The people of Cordillera are known for their actions against the government and World Bank in the 1980s to defend against development aggression. Her motivation to continue this type of resistance is what led to the formation of Innabuyog, where Audrey is the Secretary General.
Women must keep themselves perpetually organized to keep forwarding the rights and welfare of Indigenous women.
Audrey’s decision to work with JASS on Follow the Money to co-create and contextualize the four mega dam projects in the Cordillera region has shifted the strategic approach in which she and the Indigenous people of Cordillera have been organizing their resistance. Audrey shared –
We were able to deeply understand the connection of issues, who are involved in the projects in our ancestral domains, and where we will focus our efforts in the campaign.
As a result of this strengthened approach of Innabuyog and other organizations in the region, Audrey was able to set collective agendas alongside her communities to strengthen Indigenous women’s demands for basic rights.
FtM was an opportunity for the collective movement building for Audrey where JASS has provided solidarity resourcing among other strategic capacities to systematically address the multitude of ways that womxn and Indigenous Peoples lack basic services, are silenced through violence and continue to face extraction of their natural resources.
Audrey shared that despite the ongoing “development” taking place in the Cordillera region, it remains one of the poorest (in terms of access to basic needs) parts of the Philippines. Being part of JASS’ feminist popular education processes helped her deepen her political analysis – and gave her an expanded definition of what gender-based violence is in her region. The violence that the Indigenous people face in Cordillera is so much more than domestic and family violence – it is the increased militarization, coupled with sexual abuses committed by soldiers and police officers all while receiving minimal state support, access to public services and mounting debt.
JASS and Audrey began their relationship at a national gathering of women four years ago, where Audrey had shared the experiences of the Cordillera women. Audrey then joined the transnational solidarity movement of Indigenous Land Rights Defenders through the South to South exchange, held virtually.
It is important to participate in gatherings and spaces where we can further amplify our issues, and share knowledge and experiences with fellow Indigenous womxn, with whom we share the same issues, the same oppression, and the same fervour in struggling for self-determination.
