Kirsten Flores

Knowledge has never been neutral. It has always been forged and filtered through systems that privilege power. What counts as the truth and who gets to speak it is not merely an adjudicatory endeavor. It is a political struggle over recognition, voice, and survival. 


In every corner of the archipelago, the Philippines houses over a hundred indigenous ethnolinguistic groups whose history predates the nation-state itself. However rich and progenitor this cultural existence may be, our Indigenous Peoples (IPs) socio-epistemic experiences have long been silenced by our institutions and damaged by misrepresentation. 

Epistemic injustice is the wrong done to a person in their capacity as a knower. In the conceptualization of Miranca Fricker, it can take the form of testimonial injustice, where someone’s credibility is unfairly dismissed, or hermeneutical injustice, where one’s experiences are misunderstood because society lacks the interpretive tools to comprehend them. Filipino IPs experience both pervasively and persistently.

At the very heart of this is the systematic devaluation of indigenous epistemologies in favor of settler-colonial, capitalist, and technocratic norms. Unfamiliar ways of living are seen as obscure, leading to the exclusion of these communities’ ideas as they are deemed unimportant to the broader society’s development.

In legal discourse, IP communities are expected to  "prove" land claims through state-certified maps and documentation, while the verbal contracts and generational memory of land stewardship are excluded from what counts as evidence. 

As for education, Philippine history is often narrated from the center outward. From Manila down to the other neighboring and competitive areas, erasing Indigenous resistance, philosophies, and contributions. The Indigenous Peoples Education (IPEd) program faces gaps in the execution and implementation of the program. 

Even in public affairs, IP voices are invited only when convenient, spoken over when disruptive, and celebrated only when depoliticized. 

The case of the Molbog and Cagayanen peoples in Palawan is just one example—but a searing one.

For over a year, the Molbog community in Sitio Marihangin, Bugsuk Island, has endured violent occupation and harassment from private guards deployed by San Miguel Corporation, in service of a 5,000-hectare luxury eco-tourism project that sits on ancestral lands. Their 2005 Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) application remains unrecognized. Their vigil—now over 87 nights long—goes unseen by institutions that claim to protect human rights. They are defending not just territory, but truth.

When Indigenous testimony is disregarded, when ancestral maps are overruled by corporate titles, and when community elders are arrested on legal technicalities from decades past, we are witnessing more than just dispossession. We are seeing the erasure of entire systems of knowledge. This is hermeneutical injustice: the inability of dominant society to even comprehend Indigenous perspectives because its frameworks were never built to.

This injustice functions as a barrier to genuine intercultural dialogue and reconciliation. Until our interpretative frameworks expand and transform, our reception will be clouded. This societal blindness perpetuates our shared histories and futures to remain out of reach.

To repair this injustice, we must first listen—but not to extract or “include” Indigenous knowledge in a piecemeal fashion. We must listen to transform.

Addressing epistemic injustice is not simply incorporating Indigenous knowledge in our textbooks or making room for ritual in tourism festivals. It is to challenge the coloniality of our institutions and ask: whose knowledge counts, and why? It requires that we build spaces where Indigenous communities are not token participants, but epistemic equals—scholars of their own realities, scientists of their own ecosystems, historians of their own past.

Efforts must not be measured by meager justness but by concerted efforts. We must fund community-led research, support language revitalization, and reform education to de-center hegemonic knowledge systems. Universities, in particular, must shed their gatekeeping function and become genuine partners in Indigenous self-determination. True decolonization is not just political. It is epistemic.

In the struggle for justice, listening is radical. But even more radical is ceding power, transforming institutions, and recognizing that the knowledge systems that we have relegated to the backdrop may be the very ones that hold the wisdom for the Philippine society to thrive.

Confronting epistemic injustice means ceasing to demand proof on terms not designed to recognize IPs' truth. The terms themselves must be transformed.

When we silence indigenous thought, we deny their right to interpret and define their realities. This is not mere erasure; we are enforcing inhibition.