As many Penn students were finishing final exams or heading home for winter break last December, Vernon Wells was instead flying into Manila, then taking a 3-hour bus ride to the city of Olongapo, catching a cab to the municipality of Morong, and finally hitching a motorbike ride to the village of Sitio Kanawan, all to engage in fieldwork with the Ayta Magbukún tribe.
This was the fourth-year student’s third trip to the Philippines over the year. Wells visited for preliminary research the winter before and for their senior thesis last summer, residing for two weeks in Kanawan while conducting ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in the Tagalog language with Ayta elders. This is thanks to funding that Wells, an anthropology and sociology major in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received from the Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration, and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, where Wells also works as a research peer advisor.
Aware of how research with Indigenous communities can be exploitative and transactional, Wells has taken care to do the opposite, to “establish lasting relationships and not just extract data and leave and never return.” Wells, who is from Ocean Park, Maine, wants to keep working with Filipino communities long-term—starting with a Fulbright U.S. Student Award to conduct cultural anthropology research in the Philippines from August to next May.
Collaborating with Indigenous communities, local advocacy partners, and Filipino scholars, Wells will use archival sources and ethnographic methods to examine how Indigenous peoples negotiate pag-unlad, or development, in relation to tribal goals of economic self-sufficiency.
This work builds off Wells’ senior thesis research, analyzing how challenges of the 21st century have spurred the Kanawan Aytas to foster new collaborations. Since the enactment of the Indigenous People’s Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997, Indigenous communities like the Kanawan Aytas have been pressured to adapt to the state’s bureaucratic system. Wells explains that under the IPRA, the Aytas must show they have been on their land since time immemorial to negotiate land claims, but this is complicated.
“Not every Indigenous group has, for example, a chieftain and a tribal representative,” Wells says. “Not every community agrees on where they come from, and there’s a lot of different oral stories that might conflict with one another, and not every community wants to use the land in the same way.”
Wells is interested in how the Ayta Magbukún have interacted with stakeholders who have tried to weaponize the bureaucratic process to dispossess the Ayta of their ancestral land, and how communities and their advocates mobilize in response.
Wells has been dedicated not only to research in the Philippines but also to connecting and strengthening the Southeast Asian community at Penn. They served on the board of the Penn Philippine Association as community liaison for two years and started the now-annual Southeast Asian Mixer, bringing together different student groups for food, music, and games. Wells has also been particularly active in the Asian American Studies Program (ASAM).
“I’ve been able to have conversations that I never had when I was younger. I just didn’t have Asian people to talk to, period, so that was really great, and I took some of my favorite classes in ASAM,” says Wells, who is an ASAM minor. Wells is a member of the ASAM Undergraduate Advisory Board and was an ASAM Fellow in 2022-23.
Fariha Khan, co-director of the Asian American Studies Program, says Wells joined the UAB as ASAM was celebrating its 25th anniversary and has been instrumental in thinking through programming. Having known Wells since their first year at Penn, Khan says she has seen them become a mentor to younger UAB students and seen them grow as a scholar, bringing dedication and fearlessness to their fieldwork.
“Vernon’s really building a relationship of trust, and it’s a reciprocal relationship,” Khan says. “I think this is what makes this project really special in terms of the knowledge it’s producing but also the relationships it’s building.”
Connecting with Filipino heritage
Wells had been wanting to do a senior thesis since their second year at Penn, and in December 2022, they traveled to the Philippines for 10 days to see what kind of research would be possible. It was their first time in the country in about a decade.
Wells says they had an impactful conversation with someone who had done research with Indigenous peoples as a graduate student, and she shared the barriers to that kind of work. Wells learned about the principle of obtaining Free and Prior Informed Consent when working with these communities, and they understood this would probably require working with a professor who had already established that kind of rapport.
Wells was starting to get worried about not having a topic fleshed out, but a Filipino language course last spring provided a fortuitous connection. Though their mother speaks Tagalog, Wells didn’t learn it growing up. Pleasantly surprised to learn of the Filipino language program at Penn, they took two years of the language and then audited a class last spring, in preparation for further research.
The first guest speaker of the semester was Borromeo Motin of Romblon State University; he and Filipino scientist Lourdes J. Cruz have long worked with the Ayta Magbukún community. Wells explains that the two advised the Ayta on their legal rights, helping them formally organize and finally get their land recognized through a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title. An influential project now happening in Kanawan, Wells says, is a coffee plantation Cruz initiated, with the long-term goal of economic self-sufficiency for the community.
Wells connected with Motin and Cruz, who provided the necessary mentorship for Wells’ summer research. At an Indigenous people’s conference in the Philippines last summer, an Indigenous people’s advocate Wells reconnected with after their previous visit introduced them by saying, “This is Vernon. They’re doing research that is helping them connect with their Filipino heritage.” Wells recalls never telling her this was the motivation behind their research, but she wasn’t wrong. She could just tell.
Wells is half-Filipino; their mother is from the island of Mindanao and immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1990s. At Penn, they wrote a final paper on her story. “Even though I don’t come from an Indigenous Filipino background, I’ve learned so much about Indigenous history through tracing my mom’s and my family’s story,” Wells says.
But this hasn’t been a lifelong interest. Wells says while it “felt very isolating” growing up a racial minority in a small public school in Maine, which is about 94% white, it wasn’t until the end of high school that they wanted to focus on their ethnic identity. Even then, Wells didn’t arrive at Penn knowing they wanted to do research on the Philippines.
But their first year, Wells took a Modern Southeast Asia course with Andrew Carruthers, assistant professor of anthropology. Wells started writing papers on the Philippines and became interested in Indigenous communities.
Wells later took Carruthers’ Globalization and its Historical Significance course and got involved in the Southeast Asia Working Group, of which Carruthers is faculty adviser, and the professor is now Wells’ senior thesis adviser.
“Vernon is an incredibly self-motivated individual who’s able to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, while also thinking about how everyday village life links up to broader comparative dynamics of importance at an international and national level,” Carruthers says. “A major aim of theirs is to make this research maximally accessible, particularly to the people they lived among and worked with.”
