Fr. Brendan Kelly helps Mindanao’s indigenous Subanen people overcome their history of oppression and poverty through agricultural economic development, education and reconciliation with both Visayan settlers and the Catholic Church.
By Fr. Frank Hoare

It was 2 a.m., and the sound of a brass gong reverberated throughout the valleys near the village of Katipunan on the island of Mindanao. The exultant tones were celebrating a Subanen wedding, but it seemed to Columban Father Brendan Kelly, from Northern Ireland, that the Subanen revelers were symbolically reclaiming their stolen land and lost dignity.

As he lay in bed nursing a cold at the end of a busy day, Fr. Brendan wondered what the Visayan neighbors would think of the noisy celebration in the new parish formation center.

Columban Father Brendan Kelly of Northern Ireland was ordained in 1993.

The bride and groom were both Subanen. The bride, Arlyn, is a teacher whose mother had been found dead with the skin peeled off her face during the dark years of the Philippines’ militarization and insurgency.

The groom, Tanny, is the educated son of a village leader. He had been connected with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that came to the island with big projects to improve the living conditions of the Subanen people.

Despite Fr. Brendan’s deep misgivings, Tanny and his friends used a large part of the NGO money to finance a traditional Filipino political campaign to have Tanny elected mayor of Don Vitoriano, Divisorio—the only town in the entire province with a Subanen majority.

They believed that they could change the system that oppressed the Subanen people by gaining a position of political power. Their campaign consisted of attempting to buy as many votes as possible by supplying voters with food and alcohol in the weeks before the election.

The incumbent, a corrupt and brutal Visayan, sensed a threat to his position and recruited paramilitary thugs who oversaw a reign of terror. The mayor’s henchman in another village shot one of his political opponents on the day after Christmas and boasted publicly that this was his 11th murder victim. When Tanny lost the election and feared reprisals, he and his supporters came to Fr. Brendan for support and protection.

Fr. Brendan put aside his disappointment at Tanny’s foolish misuse of the development funds. Knowing that Tanny was a marked man, he offered the parish’s formation center as a safe venue for his wedding.

It meant risking the enmity of the mayor and his paramilitaries. But it was the only place close to the mountain villages that could hold the expected crowd.

The traditional wedding was performed that night, and the church wedding followed the next morning. This wedding symbolizes how the Subanen people and the Catholic Church are growing in mutual respect and trust.

One With The Subanen
When Fr. Brendan arrived in Katipunan eight years earlier, he was shocked by the area’s lack of education and medical services. The Subanen people, the original but displaced owners of the land, lived in extreme poverty. As a Catholic missionary, he wanted to help. But he was aware of the big development plans of the well-financed NGOs in the area, and he wondered if he had any role to play.

That’s when he decided upon a people-centered approach.

To overcome the understandable mistrust of outsiders that ran deep in the Subanen people, Fr. Brendan studied their language. That might not seem very radical, but the Subanen all understood and used the Visayan language and even denied that they used their own Subanen language. Some were refusing to teach their children the language. They were ashamed to be identified as Subanen and be laughed at as backward, dirty, ignorant people.

Fr. Brendan walked into the mountains and sat around in the villages. It was hard to break through the suspicions. But he hung around all day, and the natural hospitality and humanity of the people won out over their reservations. They invited him to share their meager fare and to sleep in their huts. They came to know him, and he came to know them personally.

Knowledge of language and culture followed. Fr. Brendan was overjoyed when an old Subanen visitor, hearing him speaking Subanen, overcame his shyness and sat beside him to listen more intently to this great wonder.

After gaining the trust of the people, Fr. Brendan launched a strategy of community building and leadership training. He started the “Katipunan Subanen Organic Farming Group,” a cooperative venture whose members shared seeds, and Fr. Brendan helped by supplying agricultural tools.

He helped market their produce by identifying potential customers. These included the diocesan seminary and the Columban headquarters in Ozamis, about a 30-minute drive away. Fr. Brendan offered to transport the organic bananas, sweet potatoes, Chinese cabbage, spring onions and other vegetables to the city when he went there on his weekly day off.

Fr. Brendan sent promising young men from different villages to courses in sustainable agriculture, and they became the organizers of the cooperatives in their villages. The fine formation center built in 2003 became the venue for meetings, training, important social occasions and the collection point for agricultural produce.

Water was a major problem for some villages. Fr. Brendan helped the Subanen community near the church install an irrigation system. This was sponsored by a private charitable foundation with the condition that the source of the water should be within four kilometers of the village.

Namut village, which was the heartland of the Subanen in that area, could only find a water source high up in a mountain forest interior seven kilometers from the village. Fr. Brendan was able to obtain money needed to supplement the foundation’s assistance.

It was a historic day for the people when they saw the water gushing from a pipe in the middle of their village. They would no longer trudge up and down steep mountains carrying buckets of water for hours every day. The women, who bear the brunt of the burden of washing clothes in the river in the ravine below, were especially delighted. One old man was seen shedding a silent tear of joy and disbelief at the flowing water they had so long dreamt about.

Subanen children smiled for the camera in the Tonggo settlement near Katipunan, the village on Mindanao where Fr. Kelly lives among the tribal Subanen people.

The community was enthusiastic: Fr. Brendan would supply the materials, and they would carry the materials from the road across the ravine to the village. They would also supply the site and labor force for the building.

Fr. Brendan sent a promising young woman graduate, Langlang, to be trained as a daycare teacher. When the building was complete, Fr. Brendan employed her as the daycare teacher and part-time office worker and bookkeeper for the farming projects. He also sent her to conferences on the legislation introduced by the Philippine government addressing the ancestral land rights of indigenous peoples such as the Subanen.

The Face Of True Christianity
The Subanen people, in earlier times, identified Christianity as the religion of the Visayan immigrants who took over their best ancestral land and pushed them back into the mountains. For them, the symbols of Christianity were foreign and oppressive.

Fr. Brendan, a Christian leader who was clearly not Visayan, helped change this inaccurate understanding of Christianity. This was reinforced when they heard Fr. Brendan lead worship in their own language and saw him welcome their traditional rituals into Church proceedings.

Fr. Brendan sent Delma, an intelligent young Subanen woman, to be trained as a catechist. In her course, she is encouraged to understand the message of Jesus Christ in terms of the history, culture and context of her own Subanen people.

Fr. Brendan sees his role not just as a champion and organizer of an oppressed ethnic minority. He also recognizes the need for respect and reconciliation between the Visayan and Subanen peoples. So, though his main work is with the Subanen people, most of his sacramental ministry in Katipunan is for the Visayan people in their language. He also trains young lay Visayan leaders.

Jesus Dosado, the bishop of Ozamiz, recognizes the duty of the Church to affirm respect for Subanen rights. In 2000, Bishop Dosado drafted a formal apology from the Church for its part in the abuse of the Subanen people. He had it inscribed on a stone at the entrance of his cathedral in Ozamiz. The same apology greets the Subanen people as they enter the church in Katipunan.

The Subanen communities around Katipunan have now experienced the fruits of their cooperative efforts. They have a group of young enthusiastic leaders who are the hope for the future. Above all, however, the people have experienced a paradigm of development that is very different and ultimately more powerful than the traditional political mechanisms of corruption and violence.