In this richly sourced study, Oona Paredes reconsiders the place and politics of the Lumad, or indigenous peoples, in the early history of colonial Mindanao. Based on a critical reading of rare and difficult-to-access archival sources, as well as extensive ethnographic research among Lumad communities in the southern Philippines, Paredes argues that “a new look at the historical record of northeast Mindanao” reveals not only a history of Lumad conversion to Christianity, but that intimate encounters with Recoleto missionaries, in particular, “brought about significant transformations in their social organization, especially with regard to religious practice, warfare, and identity” (p. 36). By focusing on Lumad-Iberian interactions from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Paredes destabilises not only a set of historical perceptions and political positions which have constituted Mindanao as Muslim and built its colonial history around Jesuit sources, but also brings to light new terrains for rethinking the encounters and entanglements of indigenous peoples, more generally, across multiple scales of time and space (on Jesuit sources and Mindanao history, see Bernad Reference Bernad2004).

In locating the Lumad within a history of missionisation in Mindanao, rather than outside it, Paredes challenges popular as well as historical constructions of the Lumad as ‘non-Christian tribes’. In this regard, her study firmly disrupts the fields of Philippine anthropology and history as well as Southeast Asian studies more broadly. She supports this intervention by charting the presence of the Lumad in Mindanao's early colonial past through a series of vignettes. Methodologically, these vignettes succeed in weaving together threads of experience, exchange, and enmity to ultimately recast the early colonial landscapes of interaction and intelligibility between Lumad communities and Recoleto missionaries. Indeed, “stories are tools”, writes Hjorleifur Jonsson (Reference Jonsson2011: 93), and with stories of the Lumad-Recoleto past, Paredes excavates both how different episodes in the early Spanish colonial period were represented, but also how these episodes revealed new understandings of the Lumad-Iberian encounter when translated texts and the archival record were re-examined.

Moreover, Paredes’ stories make several significant contributions to reconsidering the Lumad within the histories of Mindanao, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. After establishing the historical contact between the Lumad and Recoletos, and how these communities were unfolding across the same landscape at the same time, Paredes maps out the process of Kagayanon conversion in the early seventeenth century and the nature of Lumad interaction with Recoleto missionaries. In particular, she traces the advent of strong social ties between the Kagayanon and Recoletos during this period, and tracks how these new and emerging networks of alliance and intimacy reshaped the political landscape of Mindanao. Paredes makes the case, quite convincingly, that the Lumad were part and parcel of the beginnings of early colonial society in northeast Mindanao.

In subsequent stories, Paredes unmaps how the Lumad have been defined in colonial, national, and popular historical narratives. For example, through a critical rereading of the Caraga Revolt of 1631, Paredes fleshes out the complex contours of convert and missionary, which precipitated the “little-known bloody uprising” by Karaga Christians at the Spanish garrison of Tandag in northeast Mindanao, and uncovers the dynamics that surrounded a majority of Lumad converts turning “against their kinfolk in protecting Recoleto lives, suppressing the revolt, and luring escaped rebels out of hiding afterwards” (p. 16). At the centre of Paredes's analysis is the notion of betrayal and the figure of Maria Campan, a Lumad convert “once regarded as a very good Christian woman” who performed a mock mass wearing the alb, stole, and cope of Fray Jacinto de Jesus Maria, “the murdered parish priest of Tandag” (p. 111). Indeed, through the blasphemy of Maria Campan and her ‘treacherous’ act of cross-dressing, Paredes underscores the liminality of Lumad conversion and identity-formation in early colonial society while also pointing out how the Recoletos went through a conversion of their own as new members of the Lumad world.

Similarly, in another chapter, Paredes draws on rare official correspondence between representatives of Lumad communities and Spanish authorities to capture the flux and fluidity of power relations in northern Mindanao during the early colonial period (p. 121). Paredes reveals that the Lumad exercised a greater position of power in relation to the Spanish state during this time, demanding and receiving, for example, concessions as well as acts of patronage such as the request for Spanish justices of the peace to be placed among Lumad datus of Misamis. However, in addition to evolving positions of power and prowess, Paredes highlights how Lumad were, in part, literate and that Lumad datus operated within a world of circulating letters, written texts, and public readings (p. 98). The rare expedientes, or dossiers of correspondence, that Paredes explores in this chapter encourage a more critical rereading of the colonial record in other historical contexts.

Paredes also illuminates how the notions of Lumad power, authority, and organisation were affected by Spanish colonial expansion. Working across ethnographic sources and archival documents, she elicits the ways in which certain Lumad narratives, symbols, and mythologies were rooted “in Spanish colonial practice… or in the Lumad experience of Spanish colonisation” (p. 164). By re-examining the Lumad ‘origins’ of the golden cane (bagobal ha bulawan, a political and legal symbol of authority), the honorary title masalicampo, and formative ideas about datuship, Paredes gives life to a history of localisation in early colonial Mindanao, which fundamentally disrupts fixed forms of ‘original’ or pre-Hispanic Philippine culture (p. 164).

In the end, A Mountain of Difference powerfully repositions the missionary and the convert in the shifting landscapes of early colonial Mindanao. In this regard, Paredes's work will undoubtedly have a lasting influence on the broader study of colonial-indigenous encounters for years to come. Moreover, her analysis contributes to a wider conversation about the power, purpose, and poetics of place in our understandings of the colonial past and post-colonial present. As such, A Mountain of Difference provides a timely window into the myriad ways of being ‘Lumad’ and ‘Recoleto’ in early colonial Mindanao, and effectively connects and contextualises episodes of interaction as a powerful frame for heeding their value in ethnographic and historical writing.