ATANG: An Offering to Our Grief and Healing Through the Pandemic

• In Event: Offerings of Love and Accountability: Cultivating Empathy Through Loss and Grief

Abstract

We acknowledge that we live, work, learn, and teach on the land that is ancestral and unceded territory of the Indigenous Ramaytush Ohlone people. We call in our ancestors of the past, present, and future—those we have lost in war, state-sanctioned violence, a global pandemic, racism, xenophobia, white supremacy, and anti-terrorism laws. We acknowledge and uplift the stories and experiences of communities that are constantly pushed to the margins and erased by the dominant narrative. We are community engaged motherscholars, descendants of the Third World, voyagers, farmers, war brides, Alaska cannery workers, blue collar poor righteous artists, and teachers. Because of their sacrifices, struggles, and survival, we are afforded opportunities of higher education and vocations our ancestors never imagined. We call back to our Indigenous rituals and practices to inform our pedagogy and response to our grief and healing.

This paper focuses on the development of a critical response and praxis to the COVID-19 pandemic, as we began to see the connection to what was happening in the world within our own lives. Isolated within our own homes and forced to work through unknown conditions, we were faced with the rising number of deaths from COVID-19 and anti-Asian violence. We had to come to terms with loss and ways in which we could heal simultaneously through a never-ending cycle of grief. Grounded in the legacy of Ethnic Studies and Community Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), this paper employs atang (offering), an Indigenous ritual for the dead in the Northern Philippines as a method and analysis to understand how educators can ground themselves with practices to respond to grief and healing in and outside of the classroom.

“Sociologically speaking, atang provides a deeper and continuous bond between the living and the dead. The hybridity of such beliefs allows them to be transposed, incorporated, and materialized into different rituals, practices and socialization” (Corpuz, 2020). Atang has inspired possibilities to create rituals and pedagogies to respond to the grief and healing occurring with our students, colleagues, and ourselves.

Advocating and creating opportunities for access and visibility is a priority for our students especially when institutions of higher education continue to marginalize and silence their existence. The use of CRP and atang helps students develop critical thinking, action-oriented goals, and leadership skills that can help with their aspirations for themselves, families, and communities. This paper draws from philosophies, approaches, and practices of Indigenous and contemporary Ethnic Studies understandings and scholarship (Meyer, 2003; Strobel, 2001). CRP is “an equity-centered approach to education that is responsive to the material conditions that are particular to a student’s lived experience in a community and the histories that created that experience“ (Tintiangco-Cubales & Duncan-Andrade, 2021, pp. 8-9). Moving forward, we are living in a time of transition that encompasses the traumas of the pandemic, racial violence, and the healing work needed to navigate a healthy and hopeful future. As we continue to live through a global pandemic, our stories of survival include sustaining our own wellness to continue to support our communities.

Author

• Arlene S. Daus-Magbual, San Francisco State University