An immersive exhibition presenting rarely seen works from the Fowler Museum’s collections, Mountain Spirits brings Indigenous knowledge, artistry, and living cultural traditions to the forefront—revealing how centuries-old Ifugao relationships to land, ritual, and rice offer urgent insights for our world today. The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents Mountain Spirits: Rice and Indigeneity in the Northern Luzon Highlands, Philippines, a major immersive exhibition that invites visitors into a living cultural landscape where rice cultivation sustains life, memory, and spiritual practices. Opening April 12, 2026, the show explores how the Ifugao of northern Luzon have for centuries shaped their mountainous habitat through agriculture, ritual, and ancestral knowledge. At a moment of global environmental crisis and renewed attention to Indigenous sovereignty, Mountain Spirits demonstrates how Ifugao artistic traditions encode ecological wisdom, collective responsibility, and spiritual connection to land. Through carved wooden figures, ritual objects, baskets, textiles, tools, and videos, Mountain Spirits presents rice not only as food, but as a sacred substance central to Ifugao cosmology, social life, history, and identity. Drawing on the Fowler Museum’s holdings, the exhibition foregrounds Indigenous knowledge systems based on reciprocity and long-term environmental stewardship. The presentation centers on the Ifugao rice terraces— engineering and ecological achievements first constructed in the 16th century as a strategic response to Spanish colonization of the Philippine lowlands. By moving into the highlands and expanding wet-rice agriculture, the Ifugao transformed steep mountainsides into irrigated fields supported by complex forest and water-management systems, ensuring both food security and political autonomy. Today, five terrace clusters in Ifugao Province are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. “The rice terraces are agricultural structures that express Ifugao identity, values, and responsibility,” said exhibition curator Marlon Martin, chief operating officer of the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo). “They are living heritage, shaped...... Read more on Full Issue!