By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Since the 1930s, Filipinos have lived on Bainbridge Island, helping to shape its contemporary history. Arriving on the island about three decades after the end of the Philippine–American War, in which the U.S. failed to take over the country, many Filipinos expected a warm welcome.
While they instead encountered still more racism and discrimination, upon arriving to the U.S., the Filipinos who came to Bainbridge Island still stayed there, working as farmhands for Japanese farmers or running their own farms.
But they didn’t just stay and work. Both Filipinos and their Indipino descendants—the children of Filipino fathers and Indigenous mothers, who came down to Bainbridge to pick berries—also built a lasting presence and legacy on the island, establishing groups and gathering places like the still-thriving Filipino Community Hall. This legacy is also interwoven with the strong bonds shared with the wider community.
Today, many pieces of Bainbridge’s farming past no longer exist. Fewer than 10 of the island’s farms’ many berry picker cabins, where hundreds of Filipino farmhands lived, are gone. Large homes now stand where there once were old farmhouses and farmland.
But even though the island’s large farms may be gone, neither the Filipino community, nor the different communities with whom the Filipino community overlaps, exist in the past tense.
Cross-cultural bonds
Stephanie Reese, an actress and singer, and the founder of Bainbridge Island’s Asian Arts & Heritage Festival—which is now entering its third year—was not born on Bainbridge, and only moved to the island about eight years ago.
Reese has Filipino heritage, but said that it was playing the lead role in “Miss Saigon” that “really connected me with a huge circuit of the Filipino community worldwide.”
“From that, I really just got to know that part of my culture, so when I moved to Bainbridge Island, I sought out the Filipino community because I wanted to just connect with them the way I have in all the other places,” Reese recalled. “This community was so, so unique.”
For instance, the bonds between Filipinos and the Japanese community are particularly strong. Many Filipino and Japanese families became close, and Filipino families were instrumental in keeping Japanese families’ farms running and their homes safe, during the U.S.’s incarceration of Japanese Americans in WWII.
“It was an act of solidarity rooted in friendship, trust, and shared struggle,” said Mark Salanga, board president of the Filipino American Community. “That same spirit continues today. Time and again, our community has shown up, ready to roll up our sleeves and help when help is needed. Whether it’s supporting neighbors, preserving community traditions, or standing beside others during difficult times, this willingness to step in has always been at the heart of our story.”
As thanks for protecting their land and homes, many Japanese families who returned to the island offered parcels of land to Filipino farmers.
Reese also learned that the Filipino community was instrumental in helping to organize the island’s first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Patrinell Wright—Seattle’s “First Lady of Gospel”— “came here, went to the Filipino community, and they gathered any islander who wanted to learn gospel music,” Reese said. “That is not super common around the States, that you would take an Asian community [and] a Black community to create this specific event for MLK Day.”
One of the island’s communities Reese didn’t previously know about before moving to Bainbridge is the Indipino community. The Indipino community began when Filipino farmers married and had children with Indigenous women from Alaska, Canada, and Washington, who had come to Bainbridge to pick berries.
Reese had known about the different regional Filipino groups, like those who had come from the Visayan Islands, an archipelago in the Philippines. But never before had she heard about Indipinos.
“It’s usually a huge association and then all these subgroups,” Reese explained of her experience meeting Filipinos and learning about different Filipino organizations. “I was surprised to discover that the only group of that kind [on Bainbridge] is not a subgroup, but … the Indipino community.”
Curious, Reese sought out Gina Corpuz, an Indipino woman who had co-founded the Indipino Community of Bainbridge Island and Vicinity, and released a film about the Indipino experience, called “Honor Thy Mother.” Corpuz’s father, Anacleto Corpuz, was one of the men who founded the Filipino American Community. Her mother, Deeney Evelyn Williams, of the Squamish Nation, had come to Bainbridge following her release from St. Paul’s Indian Residential School.
“For the first year of the festival, one of our festival events was [Corpuz’s] movie, ‘Honor Thy Mother,’” Reese said.
An inclusive festival
Despite her newness to the island, Reese quickly saw the interconnectedness of the many different Asian American and Pacific Islander communities on Bainbridge, and felt the pull to create an inclusive festival for these communities. Individual community festivals existed, she said, but not an all-inclusive one.
“I felt like an inclusive festival kind of made sense for this community, because of the intertwining of the Japanese and the Filipino and the Indipino communities,” Reese explained. “My mom’s Filipino and Chinese, and my dad is Japanese and Caucasian, so I just had this vision that it would be so cool to have this Asian festival.”
So, she pitched the idea to Arts & Humanities Bainbridge, the island nonprofit that administers the Bainbridge Creative District. The organization gave Reese the green light—but it still initially felt like “a tall order.”
“I was the only Asian person on board … but after going into the different communities and developing friendships and relationships with the Indipino community and the Filipino community and the Japanese community—specifically those three—to begin, I was able to really rally support, and that just opened up all of these incredible relationships with one another,” Reese remembered. “The festival was born from that. I was just really excited, because … my original intention was just a one-day event.”
Since then, that festival has blossomed from just four events in its first year to 22 this year.
One of those events is “The Asian Monologues,” which Reese introduced to the festival in 2025. The show is a series of 10-minute monologues encompassing a range of personal experiences, including experiences growing up as a person of color on Bainbridge. One of those experiences? Not being believed, when speaking up about discrimination experienced on the island.
“When you are in a liberal community and people do treat you with discrimination, I’d say, sometimes, your neighbors and friends don’t even believe it. … It still happens,” Reese said. “Just because we’re in modern times doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still happen here. It certainly has happened to me in different ways. … From my personal experience, … I think sometimes discrimination is hidden. And then also sometimes we have an oversensitivity to being discriminated against because of our experiences as well.”
But this is part of why she created the festival in the first place, Reese said.
“It’s just for people to participate, know, and understand one another rather than just observe culture from the outside,” she explained. “The people putting on the festival live next door, possibly. Everyone gets a seat at the table. Most of our volunteers aren’t even Asian. It’s just people who want to support our celebration of culture.”
Participation changes everything
Salanga is the Filipino American Community’s 16th board president. He’s held the position for the last two years, and is the first openly gay president in the organization’s 83-year history. Though he is not Indipino himself, Salanga also has Indipino siblings from his father’s first marriage.
While he didn’t farm, Salanga grew up in a farming family. Both of his parents farmed—and would be one of the last Filipino families to do so.
“I was exposed to the farming tradition of our community in the ‘90s and would be one of the last generations seeing their elders continue to farm and sell their crops to canneries and local markets,” Salanga said in an email. “My family continued farming on High School road, just down the street from the community hall up until 1998/1999.”
That community hall is a mainstay for the Filipino and Indipino communities. Called the Filipino Community Hall, it’s where one of the festival’s major events, the Strawberry Festival, is held. That festival is a Bainbridge Island tradition for the area’s Filipino community, and celebrates the community’s farming history.
This hall is a space where the past and present co-exist at all times. The names of its founders are on the wall, and many community events take place within.
In 1943, the Filipino Farmers Association, a group of 29 Filipino farmers, used that space to organize carrying supplies and equipment, share information, and arrange to market crops, Salanga said. After WWII, the association transferred the title to an organization that had a broader cultural focus, now known as the Filipino American Community of Bainbridge Island.
“The Hall was a gathering place, not just during the harvest time but year-round,” Salanga said. “It was a place to celebrate their culture where they couldn’t in the broader public. Today, it continues to be a gathering space, not only to the Filipinos on the island, but for the community at large. We want to function as that, a place where people can continue to build memories.”
And building memories, said Reese, means building them with everyone—past, present, and future together.
One of Reese’s festival mentors is Al Perez. He leads the country’s largest Pistahan festival in San Francisco, a sister festival to the Bainbridge Island Asian Arts & Heritage Festival. When Reese approached him with questions about how to run her own festival, he “rolled out the red carpet of information,” helping to work through her many questions.
One of Reese’s biggest initial concerns was that there weren’t enough Asian community members to spotlight as vendors and performers. But Perez suggested that she didn’t just have to feature people of Asian heritage. Reese was surprised—“But it’s an Asian festival,” she said.
“And he said, ‘No, Stephanie, everyone—and I mean everyone—every community group, every performer, anyone who wants to do a thing, no matter what race they are—should be included,’” she recalled Perez saying. “‘The inclusivity is that if they show up and they participate in any way, that it means that they support culture and they’re allies to all of us who are Asian and Pacific Islander. So give everybody a chance to participate if they want to do it.’”
Participation—rather than just observing or eating food or watching performances—changes everything, he told her.
“And he was one million percent right,” Reese said. “That is the theme for this festival, and I hope it’s the theme for all things culture. Anyone showing up and participating means they support culture and they support what we’re doing, and that they are welcome.”
Readers can find more information about the Asian Arts & Heritage Festival here, and a calendar of events, including signature events, like the Strawberry Festival, here.
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