Essentializing the Ifugao for the National Allegory in F. Sionil Jose’s “The God Stealer”

Postcolonial writing in the Philippines turned towards the indigenous Filipino, “the tribal Filipino, or the poor Filipino least touched by colonial culture” (Roces 1994, 300) to become a vessel for an elusive national identity. One of the creatures to arise from this milieu of Philippine literature was F. Sionil Jose’s “The God Stealer” (1959), a short story often read as an allegory of Philippine-American relations or the Filipino native rejecting colonial power by returning to their roots. It is also Jose’s most anthologized short story. Despite readings of “The God Stealer” generally falling into the groove of postcolonial analysis, little has been said about how the Indigenous, particularly the Ifugao, have been constructed in advancing the grand project of forming a national identity. While “The God Stealer” provides an important anti-colonialist message, it also relies on colonial fixities of the Igorot as geo-bodies in which to locate a usable past. What emerges is a critique of how Indigenous characters are made to symbolically serve the nationalist project as essential Filipinos or as precolonial remnants.