2 weeks Ago By Audrey Carpio
Grace Nono brings with her an arsenal of spiritual and cultural tools, honed from her years as a musician, an ethnomusicologist, and a student of the sacred. Born and raised in Agusan before the province was divided into two, Grace Nono is a child of the marshlands, that vast area of swampy forest, peaty bogs, and lake complexes that flow over during the rainy season. This wetland ecosystem, so crucial to the health of the greater environment, provides sanctuary to over 200 species of birds and mooring for the floating houses of the Manobo indigenous group, who have been hunting and fishing there for generations.
Agusan is the place Grace calls her earthly home, and after decades of traveling and living elsewhere for schooling, performing, and taking up residencies, she has returned to Agusan, where her parents once served the community, her mother as a schoolteacher, and her father as a farmers’ advocate. Today, however, Grace finds herself in the narrowing mires of Greifswald, Germany, where she is conducting research with landscape ecologists, hydrologists, botanists, and other scientists as part of her residency as a Climate Action Artist. Earlier this year, she was invited by the Berlin-based organization Cultural Vistas to send a proposal for the new program, which pairs artists with environmental research organizations.
It is a residency that brings together two of her passions, the arts and ecology. “Since I had already been living on the land and in the process of co-creating an eco, agri and heritage park together with my relatives and Indigenous knowledge bearer-associates—an ongoing process that requires prayer, time, resources, and advice from indigenous knowledge bearers and scientists alike, especially because the task has given rise to many questions,” Grace tells Vogue Philippines , “I thought that perhaps this Climate Action Artist Residency invitation was actually a God-send.” Before she left for Berlin, Grace visited the Protected Area Management Office of the Agusan Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary to learn more about its conservation initiatives.
There she first heard of the word “peatland,” and discovered that aside from the peatlands around Agusan Marsh, she lives right by one in her municipality of Bunawan. Peatlands are a type of wetland that is created when dead vegetation sink into waterlogged soil, creating a carbon-rich ecosystem that plays a critical role in mitigating climate change. All over the world, peatlands are being destroyed at an alarming rate, drained and burned to make space for agriculture, livestock, or development.
“All this has made me ponder about the series of disastrous floods in Metro Manila,” says Grace. “Draining and reclamation of wetlands will look like progress in the short run, but in the long run they will spell death.” In Greifswald, Grace has been joining the peatland rewetting efforts of the Succow Foundation and the Greifswald Mire Centre.
But she is also literally getting mired in the muck, bogged down in the bayou. “We are experiencing peatlands with all senses—on the ground by coring into the soil, seeing, touching smelling, tasting the peat—to increase knowledge on their properties but also to ignite the fascination and the beauty of these special ecosystems in her artistic endeavours,” describes Jan Peters, director of the Succow Foundation. As an artist and peatland dweller, Grace is working on a collaborative project that involves music, film, and text, which Jan Tasci, a director at Cultural Vistas believes has the potential to “create a synergy between indigenous knowledge and peatland preservation.
” He adds that through music and cultural storytelling, Nono’s work could enhance global understanding of peatland conservation, strengthen indigenous voices in environmental discourse, and contribute to the broader dialogue on climate solutions, emphasizing the role of traditional knowledge in modern ecological practices. For Nono, she hopes that the project will inspire others to “listen better to earth’s needs, because the earth’s health is our health, the earth’s life is our life.” Grace brings with her an arsenal of spiritual and cultural tools, honed from her intersectional careers as a musician, an ethnomusicologist, and a student of the sacred.
First there was Grace Nono the singer, who started out as a folk rocker doing covers of Western hits, a period that left her feeling empty and unfulfilled. She would develop her own sound after a chance encounter witnessing a living babaylan from her home province perform a ritual. Her albums, which offer a contemporary reimagining of indigenous songs, chants, and prayers, earned her critical acclaim, numerous awards, and a place in the pantheon of World Music legends.
She continued to search out babaylan, native ritualists, and other cultural bearers across the Philippines, from whom she would learn their oral traditions and put into recording that which would have disappeared, once incanted, into the forests and mountains. Her music became a powerful advocacy for reclaiming ancestral voices and preserving cultural memory. Between 1992 and 2009 she released six solo albums exploring these themes, followed by three scholarly books as she took up postgraduate studies in Yale and New York University.
Her most recent work, Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender, and Place was the culmination of a project she undertook as a research associate at the Harvard Divinity School, drawing on decades of fieldwork. “I became a scholar because the knowledge I have been confronted with has been so profound it has required not only artistic and spiritual but also scientific modes of apprehension,” Grace says. “I also became a scholar because what I have wished to express to the world could not be communicated through singing alone.
” Babaylan Sing Back is an engrossing and enlightening academic work that weaves in memoir with methodology, uncovering the many voices of the babaylan who live and practice today. She untangles romanticized notions of the babaylan/baylan/babalyan as pre-colonial warrior-priestesses who were eradicated by colonizers, burned as witches. “Most of them may have fallen into difficult times because of the histories of suppression of indigenous spiritualities and the persistence of the false narrative of these functionaries’ disappearance that inhibits their recognition by contemporary mainstream society,” Grace explains, “but many of them have carried on with their time-honored vocation of service.
” Her book tracks the stories of three native ritualists from the Philippines: Undin, an Agusan Manobo healer who embodies the voices of different spirit guides; Mendung Sabal, a Tboli chanter from Lake Sebu who helps women fight oppression, and Lagitan, an Ifugao mumbaki residing in Ohio who practices a range of modalities. They have been ostracized and discriminated against for believing in what they do, but they persist with their practice, because they have been chosen. Many of the Philippine ritualists that Grace has met have been unanimous in saying that their offices are spirit determined.
“The ancestors know who in a community or in a family of ritualist descendants has the heart, the dedication, and the capacity to carry out the vocation. Unlike other occupations where humans choose to pursue their own interests, ritual specialization does not just rest on human will alone.” Neither a babaylan nor a neo-shaman, Grace is simply one who resonates deeply with music, spirituality, medicine, and ecology.
She has spent most of her life trying to unsever the relationships people had with the lands and the spirit world, gravitating toward elders, whether Indigenous, Christian, or Muslim, who hold ancestral musical knowledge: “Learning and singing ancestral songs that I have been given permission to sing has been one way for me to realize my family name, nono, the root word for ninuno (ancestor).” She sings, not as a vessel for spirits to possess, but as a bridge between worlds. Hers is a voice that rises from the depths and calls out from the ages, resonant with the collective wisdom of our elders.
Her song carries the refrain of forgotten lullabies, the echoes of ancient deities. One does not need to be a babaylan, baylan, babalyan or other ritual specialist to be of service, Grace believes. “Whoever you are, whatever your station in life is, whether or not you have a lofty title, you can, in your own way, contribute to the life-giving forces of this world.
” At this moment, Grace is breathing the air of the myth-shrouded mires of northeastern Germany. In her own way, she will bring awareness to the plight of the peatlands, and continue to seek guidance from both Indigenous knowledge keepers and modern scientists as she returns to Agusan, the place where water flows, to reconnect people with a disappearing landscape that has long sustained life on the planet. By AUDREY CARPIO.
Photographs by EDGAR BERG. Features Editor: AUDREY CARPIO. Makeup and Hair: Michi Schietzel.
Producer: Anz Hizon. Photographer’s Assistant: Sheldon Harris. Special thanks to Succous foundation and Griefswald Mire Centre.
