By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

A new grant from the Henry Luce Foundation will strengthen a burgeoning network of Indigenous communities, nonprofit organizations and universities through Southeast and East Asia spearheaded by Stephen Acabado, director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

UCLA International Institute, March 24, 2026 — The UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, or CSEAS, has received a second grant for its collaborative Global Indigeneity Program from the Henry Luce Foundation in the amount of $200,000.

Stephen Acabado, UCLA professor of archaeology, CSEAS director and chair of the interdepartmental archaeology program, and Karminn Daytec Yañgot, senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines-Baguio, are co-principal investigators for the grant. The program itself is a joint initiative of a network Indigenous communities, academic institutions, nonprofit and advocacy organizations and universities across Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific.

“This new grant is a continuation of the momentum generated by the Banaue Global Indigeneity Conference in 2024, where participants drafted the Banaue Declaration, calling for research and engagement shaped by Indigenous leadership and community priorities,” said Acabado, referring to program achievements funded by the initial Luce Foundation grant, with additional funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Participants at the Global Indigeneity Conference in Banaue, Ifugao province,
Philippines, August 22–25, 2024. (Photo provided by Stephen Acabado.)

“I want to express my sincere appreciation to the Henry Luce Foundation for its long-standing support of our work,” said the anthropological archaeologist. “I first benefited from Luce support when I was a graduate student in Hawai‘i through a generous dissertation grant, and that support has continued through the years.

“Now, as director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, I am especially thankful that the foundation continues to support initiatives like the Global Indigeneity Program — particularly at a time when federal funding for international and area studies programs has been severely reduced.”

The new grant was secured by a team of scholars, universities and community partners that include CSEAS; the Philippine universities of Agusan del Sur State College of Agriculture and Technology, Partido State University, Western Mindanao State University, Sorsogon State University, University of the Philippines Visayas, Pangasinan Polytechnic College, Mindanao State University-Gen San and Ifugao State University; the Center for Taiwan-Philippines Indigenous Knowledge, Local Knowledge and Sustainable Studies (a collaborative initiative of Taiwan’s National ChengChi University, Ifugao State University, UCLA and several other partners); and the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement.

Phase two: Creating institutional structures and building capacity

The second phase of the Global Indigeneity Program will focus on building a permanent institutional structure for the network in order to promote Indigenous-led community research and knowledge production in Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific, anchor Indigenous studies in the region’s universities, sustain Indigenous culture and facilitate both the transmission of crucial indigenous knowledge across generations and Indigenous engagement in policymaking.

Indigenous studies programs will become rooted in partner universities across Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific, which will serve as the institutional backbone of the network, complemented by a content management system that supports the secure, culturally appropriate sharing of knowledge and heritage materials among Indigenous communities and scholars.

Leadership training will support Indigenous leaders and youth in Southeast Asia and the Asian Pacific in developing skills in project management, policy processes, communication strategies and the long-term maintenance of community-driven initiatives, including cultural heritage projects.

Several specific community-led projects will also be funded in the Philippines. The Ethnographic Encyclopedia and an associated mobile application will document and organize knowledge shared by Ifugao elders, educators and community researchers. The Agusan Manobo Ethnobotany Project will document and preserve traditional plant knowledge held by Manobo communities. And an Indigenous foodways initiative will document recipes, farming practices, seasonal knowledge and cultural narratives related to traditional foods, including a digital Indigenous Food Atlas.

The Global Indigeneity Program will also engage with educators in the region to integrate Indigenous histories and knowledge into local educational curricula. And finally, it will support Indigenous communities in articulating their policy needs and engaging in regional policy discussions, based on policy briefs and position papers that present Indigenous perspectives on land governance, cultural heritage management, climate change and climate adaptation.

Building collaborations to the scale of his vision

Acabado embraces a decolonial, non-extractive, non-Eurocentric approach to knowledge production on Southeast Asia rooted in the continuous cultural and social history of Indigenous peoples in the region, as evidenced in archaeological research, agricultural techniques, oral histories and such technologies as textiles, ceramics and wood.

“My work started with community-engaged archaeology in Ifugao, where collaboration with local communities reshaped how research was conducted and interpreted,” explained Acabado. “Over time, these partnerships expanded into training programs, field schools and institutional collaborations across Southeast Asia and Taiwan. This led to the development of a regional network linking Indigenous communities, universities and NGOs.

“I did not initially expect my vision to reach this scale, but a commitment to non-extractive research required building structures that could sustain it.”

Restoring Indigenous voices and knowledge to the history of the region requires not only inviting their participation in setting research goals and in the research itself, but training a new generation of scholars in non-extractive scholarship.

“Workshops and field programs in the next phase of the program,” noted the UCLA professor, “will expose students and early-career researchers to approaches developed in different regions, allowing direct comparison of community-engaged methods and strategies for knowledge transmission.

Acabado, far right in hat, conducts fieldwork training with university students
in Ifugao. (Photo provided by Stephen Acabado.)

The archaeologist, for instance, is working on a separate project in Morocco in collaboration with Université Internationale de Rabat. That project uses the framework he developed with the Indigenous community of Ifugao, where “long-term, community-engaged and non-extractive research guided both methodology and outcomes,” he said.

“By placing Southeast Asia and North Africa in conversation, the project examines how Indigenous knowledge systems inform responses to climate variability, agricultural practices and resource management. This comparative approach strengthens the broader network we are building in Southeast Asia by identifying shared strategies for addressing climate change and food security, while also refining how community-engaged research can support both local priorities and wider policy discussions,” concluded the scholar.

Published: Tuesday, March 24, 2026