Back from the Crocodile's Belly by S. Lily Mendoza & Leny Mendoza Strobel (editors)

Back from the Crocodile's Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory
Edited by S. Lily Mendoza & Leny Mendoza Strobel

"Back from the Crocodile’s Belly" is a celebration of the beauty, richness, and diversity of indigenous ways of being as revealed in the critical studies and creative performances of living native traditions in the Philippines and in the United States diaspora. Through the use of primary and secondary research, the re-reading of historical and cultural archives, and the articulation of silenced stories, the book seeks to open up space for an alternative discourse on indigenous knowledge that does not merely reproduce progressivist and social evolutionary paradigms that invariably position the Indigenous Subject as “primitive,” “barbaric,” and nothing more than a “quaint relic of the past.” In revealing the beauty of vibrancy of native Filipino cultures, the book lays claim to the relevance and power of indigenous epistemologies in healing colonial and civilizational trauma brought on by the violent conscription of native peoples into the project of Modernity. In the face of growing economic, spiritual, and ecological crises portending global collapse, the book affirms that the abjected “Primitive,” who now stands as Modernity’s only remaining Other, has much to teach us not only about survival but about living generously and fiercely “with all our relations.”

"This powerful collection of essays is part of a crescendo of voices emerging from the struggles of decolonization, the misunderstandings of postcolonialism, and the search for indigenization. It beautifully exemplifies two important aspects of this emergence and assertion of indigenous voices for the future: the presence of a uniquely Indigenous voice of inquiry, a voice beyond the confines of established academic discourses, and the importance of this voice for Philippine cultures and humanity beyond."
—Jurgen W. Kremer, Ph.D.

"'Back from the Crocodile’s Belly' is a book of power—a record of severe struggle to hang on to our soul and its unbroken link to the womb of our ancestral world wherever the Filipino may be. Dedicated to the babaylanes—our shamanic ancestors, many fed to crocodiles by the Spanish conquistador in the attempt to wipe out their world—this book offers a harvest of homecoming. Here the lived experiences of our kababayan carving expatriate lives in “the belly of the beast” links arms with the continuing struggle in the motherland to keep alive what it still remembers of that ancestral world. With passion, wit, and grace, racial memory propels us to evolve as we meet ourselves and link hands in that blessed moment 'before the invention of violent hierarchies and the beauty-killing empires, machines, markets, standing armies, corporations, and governments that now threaten life on the planet.'"
—Sylvia Mayuga