Sanchez, M.

Unnatural the natural: the historical making of Indigenous peoples' vulnerability and the potential of health promotion frameworks in mindshifting disaster management
Sanchez, M.C.

This paper is an attempt to deploy health promotion frameworks in debating the 'natural' connotation of disasters. Proposing a continuum in the application of ecological and systems models, this paper argues that disasters like health is shaped by an interplay of determinants and any attempt for the prevention, mitigation and/or recovery from disasters, particularly with Indigenous populations, require a shift from paternalistic and expert thinking to culturally sensitive and co-created leadership.

This paper is among the outputs of my community organizing and advocacy research with the people of Sitio Sto. Nino, Tublay, Benguet from 2009 to 2018. The funding for my engagement with the community from October 2009- February 2011 was provided bt Team Cafe by the Ruins, a local volunteer group that coallesced in response to the massive destruction brought by Typhoon Pharma in Northern Philippines.

The increasing occurrence and worsening impacts of disasters are among the major threats to Indigenous peoples' health at present. While disrupting the physical and social environments where communities exist, disasters also exacerbate disparities and amplify barriers to achieving individual and collective wellbeing. Disasters are undeniably public health concerns, yet there is paucity of information in the examination and approach to disasters from a public health perspective. This is especially evident in countries like the Philippines where the civil defence framework dominates disaster governance and practice. The paradigm of the extreme-the propensity to focus solely on massive catastrophies likewise exists, potentially missing the insights from local and small-scale disasters and their effects on a population's health.

In this paper, I highlight the contributions of historical injustice and development impositions to the occurrence of a 2009 landslide series in an Indigenous peoples' village in Cordillera, Luzon Philippines. Informed by people's participatory evaluation and reflections nine years after, I articulate the interlinks of individual, organizational, and institutional factors in the community systems to illustrate the complexities of the community building back process. This paper is an attempt to deploy health promotion frameworks in debating the 'natural' connotation of disasters. Proposing a continuum in the application of ecological and systems models, this paper argues that disasters like health is shaped by an interplay of determinants and any attempt for the prevention, mitigation and/or recovery from disasters, particularly with Indigenous populations, require a shift from paternalistic and expert thinking to culturally sensitive and co-created leadership.