One summer night in Sausalito, California, music makers huddled together around a crackling campfire under an almost full moon.
Everyone played something. A hegalong stringed instrument of the T’boli people. A buffalo drum. A mandolin. A guitar. A washboard. A beatmaking synthesizer. Voice.
Maluhia Castillo plucked a double bass with its endpin fixed in the earth, accompanying musician and community leader Datu Waway Saway, who he had met just hours beforehand.
Saway, a member of the Talaandig tribe of the Bukidnon province of Mindanao, told the circle that there was no wrong way to find and share one’s voice.
“The first chanter had no teacher,” Saway said softly, before launching into song.
When Castillo heard from friends that his home island of Kauaʻi was burning, he channeled all his mana into performances of "Kokeʻe" by Dennis Kamakahi and "Aloha Kauaʻi" by Maʻiki Aiu Lake.
This was the opening night of the inaugural Uni at Ugat music camp in the Marin Headlands, overlooking the Cold War remnants of Nike Missile Site SF-88, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean.
Translated as “sounds and roots” in Maguindanaon and Tagalog, the arts and cultural exchange was born from years of envisionment by Ron and Lydia Querian.
The Querians, who split their time in Honolulu and the Bay Area of California, carry on the 18-century old tradition of kulintang ensemble music, as well as other Indigenous Philippine art forms through their grassroots House of Gongs movement.
“Lydia brought up the idea a couple of years ago and it sounded like 'let's go to the moon.' But here we are,” Ron Querian said, beaming at the interactions of 17 mentees and 18 mentors, including Indigenous music masters from all over the Philippines.
Castillo found the Querians while looking up everything he could find about Filipino culture. Up until last year, the fourth generation Filipino-Kānaka Maoli cultural leader and multi-instrumentalist knew pretty much nothing about his Filipino heritage. Then, his Filipina grandmother Carole Nacion, a respected hotel workers’ union leader, passed away.
“It’s like the ancestors started pulling strings on the other side,” he said, describing the cosmic return to roots that led him to the camp.
Arriving from all different directions, the campers met under a tree on the golden afternoon of Day 1 for opening statements.
Lydia Querian announced groupings for five “tribes” of mentors and mentees responsible for creating a composition to share at the end of camp. In true Indigenous form, the end product was to be free of form, devoid of verses or other structures.
Regional food comparisons and origin stories rang out in the mess hall afterward, revealing the diversity of the attendees.
Alex Punzalan, a Toronto-based R&B composer and producer, praised California’s unsweetened iced tea and asked whether anyone knew about Canada’s ketchup-flavored potato chips.
Gean Almendras, an Ann Arbor-based music instructor and University of Michigan lecturer who was recently laureled 2024 Midwest Culture Bearer, responded that he had no idea about the snack.
But, in full knowledge of their shared winters, he recounted how a snowstorm surprised him when he first arrived in the Midwest with his family at age nine from Cebu in the Central Philippines.
Hollywood film score composer and producer Nathan Matthew David also shared his path to the diaspora. His father, from Pampanga, and mother, from Quezon City by way of Bohol, immigrated to the U.S. in 1973 to escape the Ferdinand Marcos Sr. dictatorship.
David made Western music until he visited his tito's (uncle's) house as an adult and saw a gong set from Mindanao in the southern Philippines. A surface-level fascination with the instruments turned into a lifelong study of music that has been the soundtrack to his identity journey.
Now, he brings Indigenous musical elements into his work, in a continuous exploration of what authenticity means for a diaspora detached from tradition.
Jam sessions began after dinner in two adjacent workshop rooms packed with rare Indigenous instruments. Almendras taught a beat to a team of mentees: cheese taco na-cho taco na-cho. Everyone followed along on drums and gongs until they flowed as one.
Hannah Rebadulla stood in the doorway ensconced in a cloud-patterned mint-green Snuggie, watching as the sun set and pelicans flew home in V-formation.
She traveled to the camp from the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she is pursuing a PhD in Clinical Community Psychology with a focus in Indigenous and rural stories.
Her batok traditional Filipino tattoo ceremony last year happened to take place at the Querians’ Honolulu residence. Unknown sounds entranced Rebadulla as she approached the house.
She was hearing the nonstandardized minor pentatonic arpeggios of kulintang, the ancient music that continues to emanate from the Southern Philippines and parts of Indonesia and Malaysia.
The music was a piece of Rebadulla’s soul that she never knew was missing; for a little over a year, she was serving as an assisting mentor for the camp.
“This is our resistance,” she declared, referencing the art’s survival in the Philippines through centuries of Spanish colonization and decades of American administration afterward.
Traditional and modern music industry discussions abounded in the rich programming held over the next two days.
Punzalan hosted a session on bringing ancestral instrumentation into hip-hop and R&B. Multi-hyphenate music creator and Bolo Music label co-founder Angelo LASI Marcaraeg delivered a presentation on modern gongs in music production.
David shared demos for his next major film project and fielded inquiries ranging from how to mic reverberant brass gongs to how to avoid appropriation of tribal cultures.
“These are great questions for the diaspora, you know? There’s a tension there,” David said, inviting the gathering into an essential discussion.
Castillo said the community had to consistently check in with itself, in alignment with the Hawaiian concepts of moʻokūʻauhau — a holistic genealogy of existence, consciousness, action and kuleana.
“It’s a lot of extra work but when you put something out there after all that work you feel good. We call that feeling pono,” he said, naming the Hawaiian word for wholeness in harmonious integrity.
Learning instruments, songs and dances straight from their source, Rebadulla marveled at the real-time transmission of ancestral knowledge.
Kulintang master Farid Guinomla, for example, is descended from kulintang players dating back hundreds of years on both sides of his family. He is also the nephew of the late, great Danongan “Danny” Kanaduyan, who taught and inspired Ron Querian by the age-old see-and-do method.
The masters worried to their mentees that the youth in their own villages were not passionate about learning musical traditions. The diaspora wants to carry the torch.
Music therapist, social worker and songwriter Amyliza de Jesus from Nashville, Tennessee, is the sole remaining bearer of Filipino culture for her son after losing her mother and father in recent years.
Her tribe’s final composition, Dagat (ocean), began with de Jesus’s cries of heartbreak and shifted to communal joy in under two minutes flat — not unlike the emotional whiplash of soldering severed roots back on over the course of a few days.
Lydia Querian, overcome by the closing performances, blessed everyone to take their power with them and go out into the world.
Castillo reminded folks to take the weight of their experiences with them, too, rather than leave them on Coast Miwok land.
Weeks later, he said the camp offered a bridge between Filipino and Hawaiian cultures, not just in the external world but within himself.
He brought his learnings home to start a kulintang ensemble on Kauaʻi.
“I now have a chance to share this music and knowledge with my community so we can deepen our understanding of who we are as people of the Pacific,” he said, looking forward to Filipino American History Month and beyond.
Select works of the first-generation Uni At Ugat musical tribes will be recorded, published and showcased at the Gongster’s Paradise biennial kulintang festival on May 3, 2025 — the only convening of its kind in North America or the Hawaiian islands.
