By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
In the 1930s and ‘40s, 36 Indigenous women from 19 different tribes in Canada, Alaska, and Washington came to Bainbridge Island to pick berries on the island’s once prolific farms. Those women married Filipino men who were already there, either running their own farms or working as farmhands on Japanese families’ farms.
Together, these Indigenous women and Filipino men had 150 children, who make up the Indipino community.
But until fairly recently, the word “Indipino” had not entered the wider public’s lexicon.
Gina Corpuz, a social justice advocate and educator, is one of these 150 children. She’s the co-founder of the Indipino Community of Bainbridge Island and Vicinity (ICBIV), and the narrator and co-writer of the 2021 film “Honor Thy Mother,” which details some of the Indipino experience.
Corpuz and several other Indipino children—now adults—feature in the film. They talk about their individual experiences as mixed-raced children, facing discrimination and racism both in school and in the Filipino community, because of the predominant colonial messaging around people of color, Indigenous people, and interracial marriage.
They also speak of their memories of their mothers, who also faced discrimination on top of the trauma of family separation at the hands of the Canadian and U.S. governments.
Because of these overlapping factors, as well as the fear many Filipinos felt, as they watched the U.S. government round up their Japanese friends and neighbors during WWII, Corpuz, her siblings, and other Indipino children were often simply raised Filipino, never speaking their mothers’ tongues, nor knowing anything of their maternal lineage and culture. It wasn’t until they were young adults that many Indipino children learned of their mothers, and sought to learn more about and meet their Indigenous kin.
Since the release of that film, as well as the founding of ICBIV, Corpuz and many others of Indipino heritage have fielded the question, “Why didn’t you tell your story sooner?”
“And the way that I’ve answered it is: we weren’t ready to tell our story yet, because it’s a somewhat painful story,” Corpuz told the Northwest Asian Weekly.
A mixed family
Corpuz’s father, Anacleto P. Corpuz, originally came to the U.S. in the 1930s, settling later that decade on Bainbridge Island. Like many Filipino men, he worked as a farmer. His work is how he met Deeney Evelyn Williams. Anacleto married Deeney when she was just 15 or 16 years old.
Like many of the Indigenous people who had come down from Canada to work the fields, the Canadian government had stolen Deeney from her family when she was just 9 years old, tossing her and many other First Nations children into St. Paul’s Indian Residential School. Residential schools were brutal, torturous places. There, the government worked to strip the children of their heritage and culture, forcing them to perform manual labor, beating them, and starving them.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, specifically created to address the atrocities the Canadian government carried out against First Nations peoples, published a report stating that what happened at these schools was “cultural genocide.”
“Our mother … had six children,” Corpuz recalled. “We were one of probably five or six families who were left without a mother and raised by our Filipino fathers because our mother just couldn’t cope with being in a new social cultural environment and having so many children.”
ICBIV’s history page notes that “[a] few outspoken Filipinas, bringing with them their colonial mentality, resented the Indigenous women and their mixed-race children calling them ‘injuns’ or ‘half-breeds,’ making them feel unwelcome in the Filipino Hall.”
“Oftentimes in these bicultural, biracial intermarriages, there is a hierarchy of cultures or races [where] one race will dominate the other race,” Corpuz explained. “And unfortunately, that is what occurred in our community. … And it was never talked about because it is a very sensitive topic within marriages and within communities.”
Deeney left when Corpuz was 5 years old. Corpuz thinks she may have come back at some point to pick berries with her family. Anacleto raised the six children as Filipino Americans..
“We never really knew our Indigenous relatives in Canada,” Corpuz said. “We identified as Filipino Americans and it wasn’t until we were adults that we sought out our Squamish Nation relatives in Canada.”
Discrimination within the wider community
The ICBIV’s history page also briefly touches on how hate groups on Bainbridge Island also targeted Indipino children with racist slurs and bullying. During the war in Vietnam, someone spray-painted the slur, “Gooks Stink” on New Brooklyn Road, along which several Indipino and Filipino farms, including Corpuz’s family’s farm, were located.
Corpuz, her siblings, and their Filipino and Indipino friends and family members often faced discrimination and racism in educational settings both from school peers and their instructors.
“We were called the ‘brown kids.’ And because we were children … we didn’t know how to defend ourselves or self-identify. And teachers would talk about us as the ‘brown kids,’ not ‘Filipino Americans,’ or even ‘Asians,’” Corpuz remembered. “We would hear the teachers talking about us—‘Why do all the brown kids sit together?’ Or even come to us in the lunchroom and say, ‘Why are all the brown kids sitting together? Why don’t you go mix with some of the white kids?’ That sort of thing. And we would just look at each other and not know what to say.”
Back then, she continued, there was no school reporting system. Indipino and Filipino children also didn’t have adult advocates, because their fathers’ first language was not English.
“And so, very seldom would they go to the school and challenge a teacher or a principal, because when they arrived in this country, there were signs that said, ‘Filipinos not welcome here,’” Corpuz said. “And they watched their friends, the Japanese farmers, being removed from Bainbridge by the Army. So we were actually raised in a fear-based environment to never, ever challenge anybody in a position of authority. Just be quiet, because the soldiers might come.”
In 1967, when she was a teenager, Corpuz submitted a poem to the Bainbridge Review. The poem was about people targeting her for her heritage. The editor liked it so much that he subsequently hired her for $0.15 a line to continue to write about these feelings and how other students treated her and her fellow students of colour, due to their race.
So she did—but it didn’t last long.
“I think I only wrote for two weeks and people started writing in and saying they were going to pull their subscriptions if he didn’t fire me and make me stop writing, because I clearly had a chip on my shoulder. And there was no such thing as racism on Bainbridge Island,” Corpuz said. “And so he had to let me go.”
“We wanted to meet you”
Even as discovering their mother’s heritage and reconnecting with their Indigenous heritage has allowed the siblings to heal, it’s also still been and continues to be a difficult path to tread.
“We’ve had to actually construct our own identity as Squamish Nation people, as Squamish Nation women,” Corpuz said. “We were adults when we had to seek out our own relatives.”
Corpuz and her sisters all gained their Squamish Nation membership, after Canada’s passage of Bill C-31, which allowed women with Indigenous heritage to apply for nation membership. After that, she said, “we started taking trips up to Canada, meeting all our cousins.”
“It felt fabulous. They were so warm and welcoming and very embracing and said all the right things,” Corpuz remembered. “‘We wanted to meet you, and ‘We knew about you and we were hoping that you would come up and look for us.’”
“We could drive home—we call it ‘going home,’ because it’s our mother’s traditional territory,” Corpuz continued. “We could drive home and be with our relatives and be embraced, but we were still ‘outside outsiders.’ Once we received our … status card and became voting members of the Squamish Nation, there was a shift and we became ‘inside outsiders.’ And we were still outsiders because we don’t live on the reserve. And we were born in the U.S. The only way we could become ‘inside insiders’ is to move on to one of the reserves.”
Once, about 30 years ago, Corpuz considered this. The Squamish Nation had hired her as their education director. She packed up her belongings and drove up to the Squamish Nation, on the shores of the Squamish River, and put her name in for a house.
She didn’t get a house—which would have been one of her entitled benefits, as a Squamish Nation member—but said that, if she had, her life would have been very different.
“I would have lived there and probably stayed there. But I didn’t get a house, so I moved back to the States,” Corpuz said. “But at this age, I wouldn’t consider the move. There was a time in the ‘80s, when I was in my graduate program at the University of Washington, that I would have loved to have moved on to the reserve and had the Nation pay for my tuition. Because if I lived on the reserve, I could have had my educational benefits paid all the way through a PhD. But living in the United States, I had to pay for my own tuition and I had to mortgage my house.”
Opening the path
Over the years, the ICBIV has facilitated several different oral history projects. The goal, Corpuz said, is to “decrease the distance between human beings.” Corpuz is also involved in the restoration of the Suyematsu Farm.
But it took courage for Corpuz and co-founders Joseph Martin, Toni Martin, Corpuz’s son Jason Cruz, Corpuz’s sister Lorraine Hale, Alex Marshall and Belinda Moreno to start the ICBIV, Corpuz said. Its creation directly spoke to decades of a very private, personal aspect of their and their loved ones’ own history, after all. Still, they are glad they did.
“Biracial, bicultural communities now have a forum, a platform to talk about biraciality and the challenges that come up when you are raised in a home from two different cultures and two different races and one culture is oppressed,” Corpuz said.
And it’s not only the Indipino community who has benefitted. “Honor Thy Mother” has had a profound impact on mixed race schoolchildren, allowing them to begin to unpack and express their own feelings about being mixed race
“Oftentimes when we do our presentations—and especially in the eighth grade presentations after the students have watched the film—I have students who are biracial and bicultural come up to me and that’s what they want to talk about: their biraciality and how in their homes, their parents never talk about their differences,” Corpuz said.
They want to talk about it at home, she continued, but they don’t know how, “because they’re children.”
“It was the same in our family and in our community. And it was never talked about until our film came out,” she said. “And it’s still a sensitive topic. Race is always a difficult dialogue, even in a very structured educational setting. It’s hard to talk about race, teach about race, and dialogue about it.”
Readers can learn more about the Indipino Community of Bainbridge Island and Vicinity (ICBIV) here, and purchase “Honor Thy Mother” here.
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