As Filipino American History Month comes to a close, take a peek inside the Field Museum’s Philippine Heritage Collection

In the Field Museum’s archives, about 8,000 miles away from the sprawling tropical islands of the Philippines, sitting on metal shelves and organized in wooden drawers, are more than 13,000 objects from the Philippines.

After navigating through a maze of hallways and elevators hidden away from the museum’s main exhibits, there is a series of rooms filled with weapons, basketry, woodcarvings, musical instruments, smoking pipes and ceramics.

There are pocket hats and fishing nets, colorful rolled textiles covered in protective plastic, baskets and bowls made of bamboo or wood or clay, and drawers full of carved wooden spoons and forks. There are swords with their sheaths and small brass cannons and armor made with carabao horns.

This is the museum’s Philippine Heritage Collection, one of the largest collections of its kind in the United States.

Seeing it for the first time can be overwhelming, and it’s hard to know where to look among the rows and rows of items.

“Every single one of those objects has their own stories to tell,” said Alpha Sadcopen, a community partner and former collections assistant on the collection’s digital co-curation project.

What might just look like just a very old jar might actually be a jar that Filipinos once believed could hold the spirits of their ancestors after saying an incantation.

“That’s why a household might have a collection of jars because they’re related to each other,” explained Lani Chan, a volunteer at the Field Museum who works as a co-curator of the collection.

Chan is full of knowledge and stories about the items in storage. She said that by the time she left the Philippines, she was old enough to know about the culture, but in some ways, she didn’t understand its importance. Some of the items in the Field Museum’s collection are things she saw in everyday life, but they were so mundane that she didn’t appreciate them until she got to the United States.

“To me, these objects are a token of me,” said Chan, who is retired and started volunteering at the Field in 2012. “Taking care of these objects is taking of me. It enables me to have some recentering of my life. My point of view is different.”

She said volunteering at the Field was also a way for her to combine being Filipina and American.

“There’s Filipina heritage in me, but sometimes I feel American too. I bring the aspects of Filipina work ethics — utang na loob, debt of gratitude — and those values here, but I feel like an American too.”

Sadcopen said she too felt a connection to the objects.

“The moment I walked into the collection space, I smelled like I was back home,” said Sadcopen, who moved to from the Philippines to the U.S. when she was 8. “The natural materials, the wood, smelled so familiar to me.”

She said that while many of the items have been in the collection a long time, some may assume that they’re ancient artifacts, but they’re not.

“A lot of people still use those objects that you see in the collection in the Philippines today,” she said. “These are not dead practices. They’re practiced less, a lot of the things that we used to do, we may not do as much anymore, but these objects are still very much alive in the Philippines.

Focus on co-curation

About three-quarters of the objects were collected between 1907 and 1910 during trips to northern Luzon, central Mindanao, Mindoro, Palawan and Sulu, according to the collection’s online website. The collection grew as U.S. soldiers who fought in the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1902 donated their personal items and as others privately donated items from the mid-20th century.

Much of the museum’s approach now to adding items centers on the idea of co-curation, which involves working with groups in the Philippines and the U.S. to gather items and add context to them.

“A lot of the items have not been identified, but they’ve been stored in the vaults since the early 1900s,” said Ruben Salazar, a community partner who is involved with the Filipino American National Historical Society in Chicago.

So a few years ago, the museum reached out to the community for help, and Salazar said local Filipinos were happy to engage with a project about their history and culture.

“It’s a pioneering effort that the Field Museum actually reached out to the community for partnership,” Salazar said.

The museum’s collaborative efforts also reach the Philippines.

Researchers from Bukidnon State University visited the museum to look at its collection of items from Bukidnon. They used photographs from the museum to create an exhibit in the Philippines and produced an exhibit catalog that included insights from their elders about the various items.

“They were great about providing us information so we can better enrich the information and knowledge about the collection here,” said Jamie Kelly, the Field Museum’s head of anthropology collections. “And they shared information about our collection with the elders and the community over there, where these items come from, and who are the descendants of the folks who used these items.”

Community partners are also helping the museum correct names and spellings that have been used for years but are actually considered derogatory, or remove items that they don’t want to be shared, he added.

“There’s this assumption that the museums are the experts, but we’re not — it’s the community,” Kelly said.

Sadcopen recalled how some people who have toured the collections would point out objects that they remember using as kids, or objects that their relatives in the Philippines still use today.

“It was a constant reminder of, these objects are still alive, there are still people who are experts about these objects who may not be considered experts because they’re not from academia or they may not have gotten the same education as people who are considered experts did, but they lived the culture, they are living the culture still,” she said.

The most recent additions to the collection are things that represent the past few years of living in a pandemic: masks.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, some communities started making face coverings that featured designs that are important to their cultures. Kelly said they wanted to have something to mark this moment in history.

Analyn Salvador-Amores of the University of the Philippines Baguio works on Indigenous textile revitalization in the northern Philippines. She helped the museum collect and purchase hand-woven masks from around the country.

Hand-embroidered masks by the Itneg people feature small symbols that are typically found on blankets and skirts, like lizards, frogs, stars, hands and grains of rice. Other masks by designer Ronald Dulay of Baguio City, Philippines, feature a pattern known as binakol, which is believed to keep evil spirits away.

Celebrating Filipino American History Month

While there was once a permanent exhibit on the Philippines in the museum, there is currently no permanent display of the Philippine Heritage Collection on the museum floor. There are a just few items tied to the Philippines spread across the exhibits, such as a small golden Agusan statue.

The museum does host tours of the collection for community and academic groups on request, but because of space constraints, groups are typically small. They have also hosted programs that community members help organize by selecting a few items to focus on and talk about.

One group with the Philippine Consulate toured the collection this month in honor of Filipino American History Month.

The month of October was selected to be FAHM in the U.S. to commemorate the earliest documented Filipino presence in the continental U.S., as Filipinos were believed to have arrived in Morro Bay, California, on Oct. 18, 1587.

This year’s theme for FAHM is “Celebrating Our History and Legacies.” 2022 also marks a series of milestones for Filipino Americans in the U.S.: It’s been 50 years since the first Filipino American studies classes were taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and UC Davis, 40 years since Dorothy Laigo Cordova founded the Filipino American National Historical Society, and 30 years since that organization celebrated the first Filipino American History Month. Congress did not nationally recognize FAHM until 2009.

Salazar noted how National Hispanic Heritage Month, which ended on Oct. 15, was covered in the news, but little has been written about Filipino American History Month.

“It’s important that we elevate our presence. We’re considered a silent minority but we should not be,” he said. “It’s a matter of people respecting that we are part of U.S. history and that we are Americans as well.”

Connecting with their heritage

In the future, Kelly said he hopes to gain more resources to help the collection expand and improve, whether that’s adding more items or displaying some of the collection in the main part of the museum. There are parts of the Philippines where the collection lacks items, so another hope is to fill in those holes.

Years ago, the museum had a grant that helped support efforts to digitize the collection and create an interactive website where people can browse the artifacts. Kelly said about 80% of the collection has been digitized.

“Our goal is to connect communities with their heritage,” Kelly said. “And to expand what we know about these collections, both on the museum side and the community side.”

Chan and Kelly both said people take away different things when they see the collection.

For some people, you can see in their eyes that they’re not engaged, but there are also groups that are very interested, Chan said.

She recalled a time when a group from Baguio City visited and one of the women cried. Kelly mentioned another visitor who took the hand-embroidered head covering he was wearing off to donate it to the collection.

“Everybody’s going to get something different out of it,” Kelly said. “They may learn something, but we may also learn something from them. These are opportunities for us as well to learn more. They may have stories to share about growing up with these items, or they may have more academic or cultural knowledge they want to share with us more generally. It goes both ways.”

Sadcopen said she hopes people who have felt disconnected from the Philippines will feel some spark of interest to begin reconnecting with their culture.

“I hope this is a way to start a conversation about your culture where you are actually able to get a sense of pride from it instead of shame because people have othered you at some point in your life because you look different or you eat different food or you speak a different language,” she said. “You can reclaim your culture back. I hope that people feel some pride or people are able to use these objects as a way to reconnect to some capacity to the Philippines, to their family.”

“To me, if there are three or two or one person, one Filipino who becomes interested in this, I’m happy,” Chan added.

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