(Under)Mining Empire: Towards Dangerously (Re)membering Diasporic Surigaonon Stories of Lands, Rocks, and People That Move

Abstract

“(Under)Mining Empire: Towards Dangerously (Re)membering Diasporic Surigaonon Stories of Lands, Rocks, and People That Move” is an anti-colonial project that maps the environmental, political, and cultural implications of the expansion of North American mining on my ancestral homelands in Surigao. From 1908 until the present day, Surigao has been a key site for the extraction of copper, gold, and nickel ore across the nineteen islands of the Surigaonon archipelago. This dissertation, which draws from archipelagic theory (Roberts/McDougall/Goffe/Glissant) to map the multiple scales in which extraction saturates and is resisted, aims to historicize how shifting notions of race, capital, value, life/non-life, and extraction in Turtle Island in the late nineteenth century led towards the expansion of settler extractivism in Surigao. A place that was first perceived as a “geological frontier” that could support emerging American/Philippine settlement projects in Mindanao (1908-1939) and was later transformed into an extractive economy that could be used to support late liberal Philippine/Canadian partnerships (1946-Present) built on enduring logics of dispossession. Against these worldending logics that are predicated on enduring geographies of colonial ruin, this dissertation turns towards the estorya/punahon (stories/folkloric stories) of (diasporic) Surigaonon women who witnessed the development of North American mining to consider how Surigaonon historicized the violent impact of extraction in their everyday lives and how they negotiated these conditions by (re)imagining alternative forms of ecology, collective care, and survival/survivance. As North American mining increasingly became visibly unsustainable, working class Surigaonon women who were historically excluded from working in mining industries drew from their inter-generational forms of ancestral ecological knowledge and community relations to provide alternative economies and forms of self-sustainability to survive recurring ecological crises. This dissertation aims to foreground these stories to highlight the insurgent possibilities of these everyday forms of Surigaonon ecological knowledge that insist on life, relationality, and connection amidst ongoing forms of slow violence (Nixon) and erasure. I argue that these everyday acts of creativity and imagining otherwise offer an important corpus of anti-colonial knowledge that are critical in historicizing our contemporary crises but also in (re)imagining our collective futures beyond enduring histories of environmental destruction.