Progressio and Lumah Ma Di Laut, Inc.: Center for Living Traditions
A version of this story was published
in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Oct. 13, 2007
Your hands deftly move among the strands mystically creating magic that slowly evolved with each row/ ….Your weaving spoke a language of its own that needed no interpretation. All the magic.all the beauty/ has already been transformed through you. *
Among the B’laan in Southern Mindanao, a hand-woven mat spread on the ground or the floor marks sacred space.
“When you tell your story on a B’laan mat, you must tell the truth and must speak of what is true, what is authentic,” stresses Rose Moranos Bantilan. On these mats, the B’laan believe that the good spirits of the earth would hover to join the communing human beings, she added. But one must believe otherwise it will not work.
Mats like this are spread out, among other commonplace rituals, whenever and wherever Rose and leaders like her or tribal elders would come to negotiate and mediate in the far-flung villages of Malapatan, Saranggani in the past three years.
These details, Rose Moranos-Bantilan said repeatedly as she cajoled everyone to settle with her on a hand-woven mat to tell her own story at the barely finished mat-weaving center, where mats of resplendent colors are displayed and serve as temporary walls.
Hers is a story of coming home, the return of the wayfaring native.
It was close to evening, and Rose and the other women members of the La Libon di Lansang (Women of Lansang) insisted on wearing their ceremonial clothes of intricately embroidered, sequined and appliqued cotton in order to honor the occasion of storytelling.
In 2001, Moranos-Bantilan became involved in conflict management and transformation seminars through the Mindanao Peace Movement. Her uncle, the clan chief Fulong Pepito Moranos, recruited her.
Getting involved in the conflict transformation training and the practical lessons of mediating between groups in the villages is for her, a way of giving back to the world her new-found energy and strength after a hysterectomy.
Besides, she saw that it was also her initiation into the responsibilities of being a clan leader. “Fulong and the other leaders are now getting old, and so I realized it is our generation’s turn to assume leadership.”
According to her, the hilly village of Lasang in Malapatan town, in Sarangani province was deserted in the late 70s after it became the battleground between the warring paramilitary cults, Ilaga and Black Shirts. ”Nothing was left standing except the chapel of a Protestant mission,” she recalled.
The village was resettled on Christmas eve of 1982, about 25 years ago.
But Rose only came back to stay about 13 years ago. After her village was burned, her family stayed in the town center and she joined her uncle Pepito’s household when the Fulung’s daughter died in her teens.
Then, she went to college in Davao for two years She wandered throughout Mindanao island, a migrant worker made both street smart and mellow by experiences as she sought employment in department stores and other people’s households in order to send her younger siblings to school and provide for the daily needs of her parents who were subsistence farmers.
She married late, when she was 35 years old, and a few months after her father died. “I have been everywhere, in Davao, Bukidnon, Cagayan de Oro, and I met a lot of men and ironically I still found my lifetime partner here in my own village.”
As the only unmarried daughter, the filial duties of caregiving to old parents rought her back. “I was asked to return home and take care of my ailing father. And then my mother got sick, too,” she recalled.
She takes great pride in her latest endeavor now of leading a group of women whose hands record dream-stories through weaving mats of romblon and buri.
“Every design is unique as each weaver dreams different designs. Some are like waves of the sea, others are like the skies full of stars while others look like the cornfields,” she observed.
She learned how to weave from her mother and grandmother who also taught her how to dream designs.
Last year, she was inspired by a program for indigenous people initiatives by the local government.
“I was urged to organize the group by someone from the governor’s office. When I look back, I remember, we talked about it in snatches , whispering to each other, at a wake,” she said.
Her group has just launched a project of reviving and preserving the mat weaving tradition and craft among the village women in Lansang. The weavers collective has 18 members who are mostly old widows now, and she is the youngest at 46.
“So few of the younger women are not keen on taking up the craft as the mat takes too long to make, and those who can afford go to college to become professionals,” she noted.
Her group recently got a grant which allows each weaver a fellowship allowance of P600 per month so they can concentrate on their unique design and get all the necessary materials. A single mat (3 feet by 6 feet) takes at least a month of persistent weaving.
Rose looks at activism, meaning her involvement in conflict mediation and management, as the other side of her public sphere as a leader.
“I am new to activism, if you can call what I do now in conflict management as such. It is a newly learned skill and it made me aware of the struggles of my own B’laan tribe and the importance of speaking out for our rights,” she said.
She had earlier resisted the violence-prone activism of youth of her age because she saw no hope in violence, in her mind the memories of her village burning persists.
But this is different, she realized. Conflict management espouses non-violent change and openness to working with those who are not from the tribe but who are also indigenous peoples in Mindanao.
“It is my turn now. And I hope my daughter will continue what I am doing and even would be able to achieve more. We are telling her to become a lawyer. Imagine, she will be the first woman lawyer and she is a B’laan.”
Aside from becoming adept with tribal craftwork, she wants her daughter to develop a repertory of skills, both tribal and secular.
The chief lessons in her fresh life as a leader include the significance of perseverance. “You must know that nothing comes easy, nothing will bear fruit instantly.”
She found her own kind of epiphany when she joined a group of mediators and scholars to seek out two warring tribes in the town’s farthest village. “We walked for hours and forded 29 streams!”
“We had to walk for 14 hours, and when we had to go back and cross the 20 streams again,” she repeated. ”And I was the only woman in the team.”
But she also believes that while patience can be a wide swathe of finely woven craft, there should be enough empty space for unraveling righteous anger. “ While I can be patient and know how to wait,” she explained, “ I also know how to be angry.”
She gets incensed by the lack of discipline in some people to whom she assigns responsibilities.“ I want things to be done thoroughly, that instructions be followed correctly. If after a while people refuse to cooperate and follow my instructions again and again, I think I have the right to express anger,” she continued.
“Mat weaving requires that kind of discipline since putting it together requires a high level of precision akin to math,” she said.
She also noted that mat weaving also requires the cultivation of a strict sense of time as the weaver must wake up early at dawn.
“You can only weave in the early hours of dawn when the strands are soft and pliable. The strands get brittle and break easily if you work after the sun has risen. If you don’t wake up on time, you lose precious hours of work.”
Rose believes in preserving and nurturing the B’laan culture, but that cultural preservation includes spreading the cultural appreciation to the rest of the world as a common and shared legacy.
That’s why she has no qualms about livelihood projects that allows for more products of the beadwork and woven crafts of her tribe.
“Making and selling the products even to outsiders make the culture alive and useful,” she said.
She noted that today it seems that her own people know longer make mats because they don’t use it anymore for ceremonial purposes. They would rather buy plastic sleeping mats from Taiwan which are sold by vendors. Other people like our mats and they use it as décor.”
Unlike other tribeswomen whoa re wary and waeary of tourists, scholars and other outsiders who come to visit her tribe, she thinks of these people who arrive at the threshold of her home as
“We offer hospitality to everyone who come into our homes, that’s part of our being B’laans. We are not only friendly, we trust that people come in peace and do not to harm us,” she said.
She favors that the younger women in the village will become apprentices to weavers as well as to visiting scholars visiting to study the weavers and their craft, and who will then pass on their knowledge to younger generations.
And she stresses the need for a cohesive B’laan family. “We have to make our families be in this together. Our husbands and children must also believe that this is important for their future too.”
For her the life of the spirit is a mixed blend of Christianity and B’laan beliefs. Even before her sojourn away from her tribe she has come to worship the Christian god and here in her village she is an active member of a denomination called the Alliance of Christ Fellowship.
Both systems of beliefs are important for her. Christianity gives her an individual connection with the divine while the ceremonies and rituals of her tribe connect bring her into the expanding circle of community in her village.
She believes in striking a balance between ancient tradition and her new religion. Mostly the rituals are now ceremonial just like wearing the costumes. These are performed and worn on special political and social occasions.
But it is in developing the weavers together, preserving the old craft and passing it on that Rose hopes to find the knot of continuity as she weaves old values into new ones, allowing the silence of dawn to sink into the sounds of morning, her hands intuitively letting the story-design to happen with her fingers, creating a sense of wholeness in the mat that she weaves.
*From "Rug of Woven Magic" by Nan Benally,in A Gathering of Spirit, Writing and Art by North American Women, edited by Beth Brunt.Vermont:1983.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Beading a spirited life
Progressio and Lumah Ma Di Laut: Center for Living Traditions
A version of this story appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Oct. 12, 2007
“…Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern? Who is setting flower upon flower and cut-glass vine? Who is beading us?”
1
Long after the clumps of cassava stalks along abandoned paddies that used to have nourished the fat and fragrant grains of dinorado in the Manobo village of Tinanuman deep in the Arakan valley in North Cotabato, had been shorn of leaves and roots they looked like forlorn wands in the wind, Magdalena Suhat remembers foremost, remembers so often even now, long after these leaves and roots which became then the very staple of their daily one-meal diet, had all ran out so women and children had to scrounge for wild yams or go hungrier than the previous day, long after the days when these had happened and yet her family had kept on running away from ramshackle shelters, fleeing from the fighting and fleeing from getting caught in the crossfire, fleeing for their lives.
“Hala bakwit, bakwit, bakwit diri, bakwit na pud, bakwit, bakwit…. ” “We go fleeing, fleeing, fleeing here, fleeing again, fleeing, fleeing,” she remembered all these, her voice trailing, as the greatest challenge of her life that found expression in a litany of almost just a solitary word, bakwit, that she recited till she was out of breath.
The theme of fleeing was central to Suhat’s life, beginning from 1969 through most of the 70s till the late 80s.
This was beginning in the middle of a life-story, of course, unconsciously cutting off memories of girlhood.
For it must have seemed to her that her life as frontierswoman truly began from there, as she began re-telling from a few months after she lost her first husband and she had gained from him the inheritance of leadership in her barangay when she was still 23 years old, a young woman who was among the few in the village who finished grade five, learned the fine penmanship of her own signature and knew marriage and motherhood at 14.
Aside from taking on the leadership, she had two kids, one just four months old and a small piece of land to nurse and farm.
Now at 53, she is the emblem of strong-willed survivorship of the internally displaced indigenous peoples in Mindanao, hers is an enduring leadership thriving amidst a long time full of adversities.
The first half of her life encompassed the years when indigenous peoples in the resource-rich frontiers of Mindanao were caught in no-(wo)man’s-lands, like mice in a maze, where the government soldiers battled against communist rebels bent on establishing a nationalist democratic government and the Moro secessionist movement battled against the government troops.
First, it was said to have been waged because of ideology and about land for the landless, about territory but as the years of attrition gathered speed, it also became ultimately the war in which the forces battled for the ultimate territory that was the hinterlands of the people’s consciousness.
“Hardly had we built our hut when we have to move again, and sometimes we go back to our old huts and rebuilt them and then we have to abandon them and flee again. And we began to ask why, why, why? Why are we invisible to the rest of the world? Does the world outside ever care about us?”
She gets moist-eyed as she recalls her people’s many losses. She had lost land, time and priceless possessions. She said those treasured heirlooms included well-worn ceremonial clothes lovingly beaded, embroidered, appliqued and stitched by her great-grandmothers, made sacred in countless rituals and handed-down to the next generations of daughters and granddaughters. These clothes had to be traded for food and farm implements, cooking utensils. She shed tears when she recalled those attires which represented lost cultures, lost stories, lost lives.
And yet, even without seeing her, you would know Suhat was somewhere near or had entered the room as long as she’d crack her distinct laughter.
Not a few had noticed that Suhat has this uncommon laughter that exudes uninhibited mirth, resonant, if not defiant, as if it originated from someone who is always full of blessings, open to the surprises of a kinder world and who lives each day ever thankful for these.
So even if you do not see her bronzed face with the wide smile showing the gap where her front teeth used to be, you will easily sense the power of her spirit. Only when she strings together her stories like radiant beads and lay them out before you like an undeserved offering that you’d realize how hard-earned this spirited worthy life is.
2
“Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bits of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of this earth? All these questions, they tug at the brain…
In the last part of the 1990s Suhat dipped her mind back deep into the ways of her Manobo-Matigsalog tribe.
By this time, a measure of peace had been established in her village via militarization but yet brutal as it was that it took its toll on the villagers existence, the presence of soldiers and rebels in a protracted truce gave her family and clan time to resettle.
This is also a time when the world’s indigenous peoples everywhere stirred into action and took matters in their own hands, reating their own destiny, so to speak.
Suhat had immersed herself into serving her people in several campaigns aimed at restoring the legal claim on the ancestral domain. As the government passed and implemented a law to provide the mechanisms to seek for recognition of ancestral domain claims for the country’s indigenous peoples, she took the lead in following the paper trail for the documentation.
“We already have the CADT and we have it registered with the register of deeds. We are now waiting for the finalization of the grant,” she said. The ancestral domain claim covers about 102,000 hectares of communal land within the borders of Arakan town and the mountain barangay of Matigsalog in Davao City.
She was becoming a sage. She had been named as bae, a respected elder and inducted into the inner circle of elders among Arakan’s tribespeoples. She is among the advisers and decision makers.
“The elders told me it is my time to lead not only the barangay but the tribe. This is about trust,” she said. She had come from a lineage of leaders. “I came from a family which had always led. The elders remind me that my grandfather, datu Duyan, my mother’s father was the first leader of those who settled first in this area a long time ago,” she explained.
As her own domestic affairs receded in the background and she focused on her work as chairperson of the Mindanao Peoples Caucus, a network of lumad (indigenous peoples) for peacebuilding and conflict transformation formed in 2001, on the homefront, her own family had to contend with grave problems.
“No one told me about anything but I have this capacity to sense things. To just know even if others would not let me know…I don’t know how but I just know.” She said that she sensed something was amiss. The string was loosening somewhere, the beads unstrung and some of the pieces were broken into shards.
She sensed that her husband, the fifth of a string of many through the years, had wronged her in ways so serious she could only speak about these in figurative language. She had to act swiftly. She not only told him to leave, she sought to find justice against him in the court of law. He is now a fugitive.
She acknowledges that her public duties impinge on the quality of care she gives her family. But she remains certain of her priorities. “Of course, it hurts to lose someone. But between family and community, still I chose the community, the people, who are many, a family (member) is just one (person)”. The needs of many surpass those of her own family and clan. Always the community weighs heavier in her scale of justice and priorities.
She had earlier lost a third, and a fourth husband. Even a fifth, if you count the single day she got married to a Baptist pastor and almost got hitch to a new career as Baptist pastor herself but soon the next day somehow she got back her senses, she said, followed by her signature laughter.
Bakwit. Even after the period of fleeing because of the war, Bae Magda also told us of herself as a woman internalizing the art of fleeing in her own domestic sphere. She had spent some years, wasted them, she said, on a husband who was a drunkard but who she loved and feared and later she would only fear. And when the fear was threadbare and she gained courage, she left him and never went back to him.
Instead she got back to herself . Did this happen in the 90s or in the 80s, she as not so sure herself now, as she told snatches of her stories of violence and betrayals, shuttling back between yesterday with near past and long-past and back again.
3
“…. We stand on tiptoe, trying to see the edge, and only to catch a glimpse of the next bead on the string…”
- Is it enough? Do you have all the information you need to write about me?
- Most of it, I think.
- Have I given you everything you need to know? Have you everything now?
She had just presided over an early morning meeting among some leaders and was sitting alone in the yard, in hand a cup of coffee; chewing the last piece of biscuit from the packet. We both knew there is still a story left untold that must be told.
- What is it that you think is essential to your story? What do you want to tell that I have not asked for but you want to share?
- Hala dali. Paminaw. Come here, sit. Listen.
On the thick patch of carabao grass in the frontyard of her hut in Tinanuman, now renamed Valencia, I sat down and looked up to her, now looking more crone and sage in pants and t-shirt than yesterday when she wore the bright red plumage of ceremonial starched-stiff loose blouse and shirred skirt. Sitting on the wooden bench as she would tell some more stories the morning after she re-told about the distant past and the immediate present.
This time it is about Bae Magda beading herself tight within.
“I met an accident recently, you know. I got hospitalized. I was bedridden. I fractured a legbone. It took a long time for me to walk again. It was a difficult time. Because I am not used to staying put, not moving around, to be served by others. I have always been moving around, always doing something. I can’t live without working, you know that,” she said.
“I was riding on a habal-habal back home when a vehicle bumped us from behind. I woke up dazed in the hospital. I was aching and numbed all over,” she recalled.
“I was okay the doctor told me. He was surprised, he told me, that I suffered less than he would have expected from such an accident. I was thrown far from the motorcycle. Later, the owner of the vehicle which hit us came and told us she had to spend a fortune to repair her vehicle."
Bae Magda was wonderstruck when she learned the vehicle was wrecked and she was spared from serious injury. How could that have happened that the vehicle that bumped us suffered so much damage and we are alive? Some bones broke but aside from that she felt okay. She thought this isn’t about happenstance. There was no such thing as chance. There was a message somewhere embedded in this event.
“ I have forgotten. Forgetten my ancestors and they wanted me to remember,” she said. She said she saw them in a dream. They came to her and when she woke up she as in the hospital.
She had been increasingly spending time as a representative of her people in conferences and workshops all over Mindanao and elsewhere in the Philippines. But she had forgotten the gestures of remembrance from where a tribeswoman’s power emanates, the loop that keeps the bead-strand together.
Others outside her tribe, like me, might think it was her own version of a near-death experience, But for her and her tribespeople, it only meant that the spirits were calling her back. She had strayed away. She must return.
Her spine ached. Her bones ached. Her limbs were numb and she could hardly move, and yet she struggled and right there after her dream, she asked for a handful of cooked rice and placed these on a window ledge above her hospital bed. It was the gesture of acknowledging the spirits, willing their return to her side. That night she slept well.
As she waited for the her foot to heal, she had time to examine her own life, to get used to being served instead of serving, to heal herself.
She literally turned to making beadwork. In her wheelchair and later on crutches, she made her fingers busy making traditional Manobo jewelry. ”I was able to make six matching pairs of necklaces and earrings and there were some visitors who were here to see the missionaries in the village and they all bought everything. I was pleased to earn even as I was house-bound.”
She made her own spirit place. A squat ritual hut, palm-roofed and walls made of
woven split bamboo by her house. Inside, a shrine for the spirits with a plate of betel nut and lime and old coins. And she learned the ropes about becoming baylan, ritual and prayer leader and healer. She learned from an elder sister and a cousin about the healing herbs and the words to whisper and chant to ease pain and make things right in the body, to link with the ancestors and other good elements we cannot see.
4
“…and the woman’s hand moving, one day, the next, and the needle flashing over the horizon.”
The night we came to visit, she could not even stay for the supper of chicken soup and steamed river fish her sons had cooked for a gathering of women and men for the pamuhat (ritual) to welcome some guests at twilight. She had to leave despite a drizzle in order to attend a meeting with some local politicians. .She came back late that night, on tiptoe, crouching to sleep on a bench somewhere in her own home as she had offered her own bamboo bed to her guests.
She had learned to talk among leaders in high places, bishops, army generals and the police, rebel leaders. She speaks with authority, her voice calm and stern at the same time; she would like to be better, to be as persuasive like that of the woman-lawyer who helped her like the embodiment of a guardian-spirit these past years.
She had several tasks to undertake before she can rest; a long list, in fact.
She learned that her daughter had been missing for days in another barangay and her daughter was in the care of neighbors. She has taken back her teenage granddaughter; she will look for her child, find out why she is lost and where.
Meanwhile, she needs to instruct her sons how to make sure their niece will be safe in their hut. Later, she will tell them them in the dawn light, in hushed whispers, not to hurt a kinswoman, to guard her with their lives.
She needs to talk to the young men and women in the village who might want to follow her footsteps, aside from her own sons. She needs apprentices, the youth who can learn from her. She will bring them when she goes to mediate between two feuding neighbors or two feuding tribes.
She has to plan for a training on human rights in armed conflict as coordinator for Sulong Cahrhill, another network of organizations. She will convene other tribesleaders soon to discuss the growing number of them lending their land to banana planters. She is anxious about the toxic effects of the periodic spraying of chemicals on the health of the children and the old.
She has to ask for a scholarship for her son who needs to finish an engineering course or else, he’d fall prey to the enticements of paramilitary life. She would not want that.
She prays for a reconciliation of the tensions between domestic and public affairs in her own life, between the wife/mother and the community leader. It’s got to be like working out the quiet design in her daily beadwork of chevrons and diamonds, a constant striving for the right colors of bead ordered here and there so as to make an exquisite jewelry of a life.
“I see no other calling than this till my last breath, I think,” she says. “This is going to be the only thing I do well for my people. To serve. Until my last breath.”
*The lines in italics framing the story are from Louise Erdrich’s
The Antelope Wife (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc: New York, © Louise Erdrich 1998).
A version of this story appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Oct. 12, 2007
“…Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern? Who is setting flower upon flower and cut-glass vine? Who is beading us?”
1
Long after the clumps of cassava stalks along abandoned paddies that used to have nourished the fat and fragrant grains of dinorado in the Manobo village of Tinanuman deep in the Arakan valley in North Cotabato, had been shorn of leaves and roots they looked like forlorn wands in the wind, Magdalena Suhat remembers foremost, remembers so often even now, long after these leaves and roots which became then the very staple of their daily one-meal diet, had all ran out so women and children had to scrounge for wild yams or go hungrier than the previous day, long after the days when these had happened and yet her family had kept on running away from ramshackle shelters, fleeing from the fighting and fleeing from getting caught in the crossfire, fleeing for their lives.
“Hala bakwit, bakwit, bakwit diri, bakwit na pud, bakwit, bakwit…. ” “We go fleeing, fleeing, fleeing here, fleeing again, fleeing, fleeing,” she remembered all these, her voice trailing, as the greatest challenge of her life that found expression in a litany of almost just a solitary word, bakwit, that she recited till she was out of breath.
The theme of fleeing was central to Suhat’s life, beginning from 1969 through most of the 70s till the late 80s.
This was beginning in the middle of a life-story, of course, unconsciously cutting off memories of girlhood.
For it must have seemed to her that her life as frontierswoman truly began from there, as she began re-telling from a few months after she lost her first husband and she had gained from him the inheritance of leadership in her barangay when she was still 23 years old, a young woman who was among the few in the village who finished grade five, learned the fine penmanship of her own signature and knew marriage and motherhood at 14.
Aside from taking on the leadership, she had two kids, one just four months old and a small piece of land to nurse and farm.
Now at 53, she is the emblem of strong-willed survivorship of the internally displaced indigenous peoples in Mindanao, hers is an enduring leadership thriving amidst a long time full of adversities.
The first half of her life encompassed the years when indigenous peoples in the resource-rich frontiers of Mindanao were caught in no-(wo)man’s-lands, like mice in a maze, where the government soldiers battled against communist rebels bent on establishing a nationalist democratic government and the Moro secessionist movement battled against the government troops.
First, it was said to have been waged because of ideology and about land for the landless, about territory but as the years of attrition gathered speed, it also became ultimately the war in which the forces battled for the ultimate territory that was the hinterlands of the people’s consciousness.
“Hardly had we built our hut when we have to move again, and sometimes we go back to our old huts and rebuilt them and then we have to abandon them and flee again. And we began to ask why, why, why? Why are we invisible to the rest of the world? Does the world outside ever care about us?”
She gets moist-eyed as she recalls her people’s many losses. She had lost land, time and priceless possessions. She said those treasured heirlooms included well-worn ceremonial clothes lovingly beaded, embroidered, appliqued and stitched by her great-grandmothers, made sacred in countless rituals and handed-down to the next generations of daughters and granddaughters. These clothes had to be traded for food and farm implements, cooking utensils. She shed tears when she recalled those attires which represented lost cultures, lost stories, lost lives.
And yet, even without seeing her, you would know Suhat was somewhere near or had entered the room as long as she’d crack her distinct laughter.
Not a few had noticed that Suhat has this uncommon laughter that exudes uninhibited mirth, resonant, if not defiant, as if it originated from someone who is always full of blessings, open to the surprises of a kinder world and who lives each day ever thankful for these.
So even if you do not see her bronzed face with the wide smile showing the gap where her front teeth used to be, you will easily sense the power of her spirit. Only when she strings together her stories like radiant beads and lay them out before you like an undeserved offering that you’d realize how hard-earned this spirited worthy life is.
2
“Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bits of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of this earth? All these questions, they tug at the brain…
In the last part of the 1990s Suhat dipped her mind back deep into the ways of her Manobo-Matigsalog tribe.
By this time, a measure of peace had been established in her village via militarization but yet brutal as it was that it took its toll on the villagers existence, the presence of soldiers and rebels in a protracted truce gave her family and clan time to resettle.
This is also a time when the world’s indigenous peoples everywhere stirred into action and took matters in their own hands, reating their own destiny, so to speak.
Suhat had immersed herself into serving her people in several campaigns aimed at restoring the legal claim on the ancestral domain. As the government passed and implemented a law to provide the mechanisms to seek for recognition of ancestral domain claims for the country’s indigenous peoples, she took the lead in following the paper trail for the documentation.
“We already have the CADT and we have it registered with the register of deeds. We are now waiting for the finalization of the grant,” she said. The ancestral domain claim covers about 102,000 hectares of communal land within the borders of Arakan town and the mountain barangay of Matigsalog in Davao City.
She was becoming a sage. She had been named as bae, a respected elder and inducted into the inner circle of elders among Arakan’s tribespeoples. She is among the advisers and decision makers.
“The elders told me it is my time to lead not only the barangay but the tribe. This is about trust,” she said. She had come from a lineage of leaders. “I came from a family which had always led. The elders remind me that my grandfather, datu Duyan, my mother’s father was the first leader of those who settled first in this area a long time ago,” she explained.
As her own domestic affairs receded in the background and she focused on her work as chairperson of the Mindanao Peoples Caucus, a network of lumad (indigenous peoples) for peacebuilding and conflict transformation formed in 2001, on the homefront, her own family had to contend with grave problems.
“No one told me about anything but I have this capacity to sense things. To just know even if others would not let me know…I don’t know how but I just know.” She said that she sensed something was amiss. The string was loosening somewhere, the beads unstrung and some of the pieces were broken into shards.
She sensed that her husband, the fifth of a string of many through the years, had wronged her in ways so serious she could only speak about these in figurative language. She had to act swiftly. She not only told him to leave, she sought to find justice against him in the court of law. He is now a fugitive.
She acknowledges that her public duties impinge on the quality of care she gives her family. But she remains certain of her priorities. “Of course, it hurts to lose someone. But between family and community, still I chose the community, the people, who are many, a family (member) is just one (person)”. The needs of many surpass those of her own family and clan. Always the community weighs heavier in her scale of justice and priorities.
She had earlier lost a third, and a fourth husband. Even a fifth, if you count the single day she got married to a Baptist pastor and almost got hitch to a new career as Baptist pastor herself but soon the next day somehow she got back her senses, she said, followed by her signature laughter.
Bakwit. Even after the period of fleeing because of the war, Bae Magda also told us of herself as a woman internalizing the art of fleeing in her own domestic sphere. She had spent some years, wasted them, she said, on a husband who was a drunkard but who she loved and feared and later she would only fear. And when the fear was threadbare and she gained courage, she left him and never went back to him.
Instead she got back to herself . Did this happen in the 90s or in the 80s, she as not so sure herself now, as she told snatches of her stories of violence and betrayals, shuttling back between yesterday with near past and long-past and back again.
3
“…. We stand on tiptoe, trying to see the edge, and only to catch a glimpse of the next bead on the string…”
- Is it enough? Do you have all the information you need to write about me?
- Most of it, I think.
- Have I given you everything you need to know? Have you everything now?
She had just presided over an early morning meeting among some leaders and was sitting alone in the yard, in hand a cup of coffee; chewing the last piece of biscuit from the packet. We both knew there is still a story left untold that must be told.
- What is it that you think is essential to your story? What do you want to tell that I have not asked for but you want to share?
- Hala dali. Paminaw. Come here, sit. Listen.
On the thick patch of carabao grass in the frontyard of her hut in Tinanuman, now renamed Valencia, I sat down and looked up to her, now looking more crone and sage in pants and t-shirt than yesterday when she wore the bright red plumage of ceremonial starched-stiff loose blouse and shirred skirt. Sitting on the wooden bench as she would tell some more stories the morning after she re-told about the distant past and the immediate present.
This time it is about Bae Magda beading herself tight within.
“I met an accident recently, you know. I got hospitalized. I was bedridden. I fractured a legbone. It took a long time for me to walk again. It was a difficult time. Because I am not used to staying put, not moving around, to be served by others. I have always been moving around, always doing something. I can’t live without working, you know that,” she said.
“I was riding on a habal-habal back home when a vehicle bumped us from behind. I woke up dazed in the hospital. I was aching and numbed all over,” she recalled.
“I was okay the doctor told me. He was surprised, he told me, that I suffered less than he would have expected from such an accident. I was thrown far from the motorcycle. Later, the owner of the vehicle which hit us came and told us she had to spend a fortune to repair her vehicle."
Bae Magda was wonderstruck when she learned the vehicle was wrecked and she was spared from serious injury. How could that have happened that the vehicle that bumped us suffered so much damage and we are alive? Some bones broke but aside from that she felt okay. She thought this isn’t about happenstance. There was no such thing as chance. There was a message somewhere embedded in this event.
“ I have forgotten. Forgetten my ancestors and they wanted me to remember,” she said. She said she saw them in a dream. They came to her and when she woke up she as in the hospital.
She had been increasingly spending time as a representative of her people in conferences and workshops all over Mindanao and elsewhere in the Philippines. But she had forgotten the gestures of remembrance from where a tribeswoman’s power emanates, the loop that keeps the bead-strand together.
Others outside her tribe, like me, might think it was her own version of a near-death experience, But for her and her tribespeople, it only meant that the spirits were calling her back. She had strayed away. She must return.
Her spine ached. Her bones ached. Her limbs were numb and she could hardly move, and yet she struggled and right there after her dream, she asked for a handful of cooked rice and placed these on a window ledge above her hospital bed. It was the gesture of acknowledging the spirits, willing their return to her side. That night she slept well.
As she waited for the her foot to heal, she had time to examine her own life, to get used to being served instead of serving, to heal herself.
She literally turned to making beadwork. In her wheelchair and later on crutches, she made her fingers busy making traditional Manobo jewelry. ”I was able to make six matching pairs of necklaces and earrings and there were some visitors who were here to see the missionaries in the village and they all bought everything. I was pleased to earn even as I was house-bound.”
She made her own spirit place. A squat ritual hut, palm-roofed and walls made of
woven split bamboo by her house. Inside, a shrine for the spirits with a plate of betel nut and lime and old coins. And she learned the ropes about becoming baylan, ritual and prayer leader and healer. She learned from an elder sister and a cousin about the healing herbs and the words to whisper and chant to ease pain and make things right in the body, to link with the ancestors and other good elements we cannot see.
4
“…and the woman’s hand moving, one day, the next, and the needle flashing over the horizon.”
The night we came to visit, she could not even stay for the supper of chicken soup and steamed river fish her sons had cooked for a gathering of women and men for the pamuhat (ritual) to welcome some guests at twilight. She had to leave despite a drizzle in order to attend a meeting with some local politicians. .She came back late that night, on tiptoe, crouching to sleep on a bench somewhere in her own home as she had offered her own bamboo bed to her guests.
She had learned to talk among leaders in high places, bishops, army generals and the police, rebel leaders. She speaks with authority, her voice calm and stern at the same time; she would like to be better, to be as persuasive like that of the woman-lawyer who helped her like the embodiment of a guardian-spirit these past years.
She had several tasks to undertake before she can rest; a long list, in fact.
She learned that her daughter had been missing for days in another barangay and her daughter was in the care of neighbors. She has taken back her teenage granddaughter; she will look for her child, find out why she is lost and where.
Meanwhile, she needs to instruct her sons how to make sure their niece will be safe in their hut. Later, she will tell them them in the dawn light, in hushed whispers, not to hurt a kinswoman, to guard her with their lives.
She needs to talk to the young men and women in the village who might want to follow her footsteps, aside from her own sons. She needs apprentices, the youth who can learn from her. She will bring them when she goes to mediate between two feuding neighbors or two feuding tribes.
She has to plan for a training on human rights in armed conflict as coordinator for Sulong Cahrhill, another network of organizations. She will convene other tribesleaders soon to discuss the growing number of them lending their land to banana planters. She is anxious about the toxic effects of the periodic spraying of chemicals on the health of the children and the old.
She has to ask for a scholarship for her son who needs to finish an engineering course or else, he’d fall prey to the enticements of paramilitary life. She would not want that.
She prays for a reconciliation of the tensions between domestic and public affairs in her own life, between the wife/mother and the community leader. It’s got to be like working out the quiet design in her daily beadwork of chevrons and diamonds, a constant striving for the right colors of bead ordered here and there so as to make an exquisite jewelry of a life.
“I see no other calling than this till my last breath, I think,” she says. “This is going to be the only thing I do well for my people. To serve. Until my last breath.”
*The lines in italics framing the story are from Louise Erdrich’s
The Antelope Wife (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc: New York, © Louise Erdrich 1998).
By fierce and tender mercies
Blended justice a Higaonon way
a version of this story appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer
IMPASUG-ONG, BUKIDNON --The front yard by a bungalow a stone’s throw away from the public cemetery’s gate was ablaze with the fierce mid-morning light, and there, by the shed the newly slain piglet’s blood-soaked throat shone dark crimson. The specks of half-chewed yellow ginger studded the red streaks on the grass.
And, even as the pamuhat, the ritual of chants and animal offerings to unseen spirits of ancestors and Magbabaya, was over, Datu Masilsil’s words were predictably copious as ever, especially when the topic was about himself.
He took time as usual to speak aplenty and he had plenty of time as we were waiting for the slain white hog to cook. Some vari-feathered chickens were dumped into huge cauldrons filled with boiling water to be cooked over a smoky fire of burning twigs.
One must be prepared to be patient and gracious because it could take forever.
This time though forever would take almost a day, with the day’s single meal served after 4 p.m.
And always, whatever Masilsil did assume that gung-ho mood, and everything slowed down.
First, a nice feel-good sense of slowing, just as if time, like a habal-habal, stopped for a while, and got stalled, until it got impossibly slow and tedious and delayed.
He got into a discussion of why he was named “masilsil.”
“Masilsil means to etch a memory on the consciousness,” he said.
He paused a while and even added, “Masilsil means to carry something forever in the heart.”
“Masilsil means to seriously carry through a task till it is finished,” he said, with a wink. Remarkable stamina, endurance, sheerest of wills.
Not far away, the clanging of church bell’s after the morning mass blended with the shrill calls of cicadas wafted by the easterly wind.
ONCE every month, on a Sunday like this one, he and the other Higaonon leaders from the different villages around the Barangay Poblacion here, about 50 kilometers away from the capital city of Malaybalay, would gather for tribal rituals. And recently, these gatherings had also been slowly transforming.
The past years Higaonons like Datu Masilsil had been recipients of “empowerment” trainings -- the consequences brought about by worldwide recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples as the United Nations instituted the Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1994-2004). The Philippines, being a signatory, endeavored to pass the Indigenous Peoples Act in 1996.
Several institutions and agencies offered assistance in the processes of transferring know-how.
Datu Masilsil as his tribe’s leader had attended much training, seminars and other learning experiences from which he got lessons like a lifeline on which his own community hold.
“Daghan. Enough now to grant me many diplomas, maybe a doctorate degree!”
Many, he tried to count by his fingers and beyond his fingers what trainings he had attended and what learnings he had passed on in the long relay of knowledge back to his own.
Planning, governance, cultural heritage, community livelihoods, poverty alleviation, the laws, justice, paralegalism. Whatever lessons in community building so the people can forge and refine their own systems, mechanisms and rules.
“But what is distinct now, as in the workshops on paralegalism, is that we are made to realize our ways are also honored and acknowledged. We don’t have to adopt the settler’s ways, the Westernized ways of carrying out justice within our tribe. We are never told we were wrong,” he explained.
He had just attended a series of workshops held by the Balay Alternative Legal Advocates for Development in Mindanao (BALAOD) under a grant from the World Bank and Asia Foundation.
“It is not all about learning new things but also about preserving the good, practical and culture-appropriate ones. Before that we thought we were ignorant. Wa gani katunob hayskul. (We haven’t even stepped into high school). Now we are told we can teach what our ancestors taught us to our people, and even the settlers can learn from us.”
In a while, these leaders of their tribes huddled inside the house, they adjusted their red cotton head kerchiefs that were heavily beaded, resembling the flamboyant beaks of woodpeckers.
Their heads bowed, they speak in serious tones but once in a while laughter exploded and rippled among them, even among the children and women close by.
The gathering of men was nothing new, but it had taken in an innovation. Time is not much of essence still but they now have a clear list of agenda, just like any regular modern-day meeting, and the agenda resembled something quite familiar to efficient governance – resolutions, plans, even minutes and forms of documentation, fines and butaw, one-peso coins as monthly contributions to the general funds of the organization.
It used to be just a post-ritual ritual of passing time, sharing the cheap Kulafu or Fighter Wine, the betel nut, lime and tobacco till the meal is cooked.
But now, resolutions were discussed seriously. Datu Star sponsored the passage of a resolution addressed to the barangay to ask the poultry farm owners to pack up or at least compensate the farmers for all their sleepless nights because of “the damned flies attracted to the chicken shit.”
“All the whole year, we got no share of the harvest except a skyful of flies and terrible headaches due to the putrid stench. Our children are getting sick, always having runny noses and headaches,” Star complained and there was a murmur of laughter and assent.
We didn’t think Star was his name. But we called him Datu Star, nonetheless, after the huge tattoo of the word in stiff script on his left forearm.
The others suggested to look into how the pineapple and banana plantations are encroaching into ancestral domain claims and assigned someone to think about how the resolutions would be worded, and to get more facts, how many are affected, how big the tracts are...
A look into the proposal to grant livelihood loans to members especially the one that honors the words of their womenfolk….
Masilsil was hoping that he could present these resolutions to the barangay development council for swift action in the coming months.
Masilsil said they are pushing too that their methods of conflict mediation and resolution would be acknowledged by the barangay and incorporated into the guidelines and procedures of the Barangay Lupon Tagapamayapa, the community-based conciliation body, for surely, he said, he has learned that the tribal dispute resolution systems have a place in the country’s smallest local government unit. “The law provides for that but the implementation is not so good. Very slow. If we indigenous people don’t push for it, it won’t happen,” he said.
He said he was making headway with the town court. He owes it to a mayor who is also Higaonon, to groups who had helped advocate for indigenous rights.
Although he was still trying to persuade the prosecutor to let go of a murder case, he informed. “We have settled the case between two tribes. The suspect is in hiding from the police and the court. But he is safe within us. His family has settled by offering survivors two carabaos and about P100, 000.”
He too remembered how a decade ago, he had to agree that the man who killed his brother could leave jail. He, eldest among the siblings, issued an affidavit of desistance. The prosecutor could do nothing because without a witness, it was difficult to prove homicide.
The offender, said Datu Masilsil, is like my brother now. He was adopted into our family. His family is like part of my family and my family part of my family.
“Years in a jail won’t reform an offender, that’s what we think. Jail can only harden the soul,” he said. That’s what the tribe understands.
Datu Magdesisyon who had come in late, and was perhaps only trying to find the right moment to express an opinion, cleared his throat, and he said sto us, omething to explain the old ways to which many Higaonons have began to return.
“Higaonons look at things differently from the settlers. We consider each one and each act as part of a larger community. Like a hand belongs to the body, a tooth inside the mouth. Before we can cut off a limb, extract a tooth, we have to know how the rest can live without the hand, the tooth,” he explained. Somehow the saw sounded familiar, something heard from another wise mountain man or read in a book about ancient peoples, although it might have been said differently.
FOR those outside the tribe, schooled in the modern ways of the law, the tribal way might seem strange, but already it has features akin to an acknowledged newfangled, post-modern concept of restorative justice. Or more probably, the concept of restorative justice owes its prescience to ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples.
In restorative justice, “all the parties with a stake in a particular conflict or offence come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the conflict or offence and its implications for the future. Offenders also have the opportunity to acknowledge the impact of what they have done and to make reparation, and victims have the opportunity to have their harm or loss acknowledged and amends made."
As in restorative justice, dialogue and negotiation are central to tribal justice. On their own or through their spokesperson, usually another datu or baylan or bae, both parties are allowed time to speak their minds.
Consider the tampuda sa balagon (covenant of the rattan vine), Masilsil said. The tampuda is a Higaonon dispute resolution and reconciliation ritual using a rattan vine:
Two groups in dispute hold both ends of a rattan vine, and promises are exchanged between the parties not to take and exact revenge or make another offense, after several minutes of chanting, calling the ancestors for guidance, the shaman, with a sharp native machete, cuts in half the vine.
The offense is forgotten, the offender is forgiven, the relationship between persons, between families and between tribes is healed and the community can move on.
FOR the believing Higaonon, the ceremony of the vine attains a certain kind of magic, a staying power.
“The shaman who presided over the ceremony will bury the vine in a secret bamboo grove,” said Masilsil.
Will the vine take root? Sprout shoots? Or will it really become a snake, a giant sleeping python even burrowing there awaiting the possibility of betrayal when it will finally come out to hunt for the one who would disobey the covenant of reconciliation?
Or will it become the spirit-snake striking at the heart or conscience of the one who will break the covenant and thus releasing the venom of a cursed life?
As it was etched deep into the memories of Masilsil’s lineage, the Higaonon believe so.
THE Sunday afternoon glided towards dusk, and the meat steamed over fervent wood fires cooked so softly they peeled off from the bones on their own, and it was time for the gathering of men, women and children to move on to the dining table inside the bungalow for the day’s long-awaited big meal.
Below the dappled shadows cast on the old spears, woven baskets and hunting guns hung on the wall, another community ritual feast to last the entire night had began, celebrating togetherness, solidarity and tribal justice’s fierce but tender mercies.
a version of this story appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer
IMPASUG-ONG, BUKIDNON --The front yard by a bungalow a stone’s throw away from the public cemetery’s gate was ablaze with the fierce mid-morning light, and there, by the shed the newly slain piglet’s blood-soaked throat shone dark crimson. The specks of half-chewed yellow ginger studded the red streaks on the grass.
And, even as the pamuhat, the ritual of chants and animal offerings to unseen spirits of ancestors and Magbabaya, was over, Datu Masilsil’s words were predictably copious as ever, especially when the topic was about himself.
He took time as usual to speak aplenty and he had plenty of time as we were waiting for the slain white hog to cook. Some vari-feathered chickens were dumped into huge cauldrons filled with boiling water to be cooked over a smoky fire of burning twigs.
One must be prepared to be patient and gracious because it could take forever.
This time though forever would take almost a day, with the day’s single meal served after 4 p.m.
And always, whatever Masilsil did assume that gung-ho mood, and everything slowed down.
First, a nice feel-good sense of slowing, just as if time, like a habal-habal, stopped for a while, and got stalled, until it got impossibly slow and tedious and delayed.
He got into a discussion of why he was named “masilsil.”
“Masilsil means to etch a memory on the consciousness,” he said.
He paused a while and even added, “Masilsil means to carry something forever in the heart.”
“Masilsil means to seriously carry through a task till it is finished,” he said, with a wink. Remarkable stamina, endurance, sheerest of wills.
Not far away, the clanging of church bell’s after the morning mass blended with the shrill calls of cicadas wafted by the easterly wind.
ONCE every month, on a Sunday like this one, he and the other Higaonon leaders from the different villages around the Barangay Poblacion here, about 50 kilometers away from the capital city of Malaybalay, would gather for tribal rituals. And recently, these gatherings had also been slowly transforming.
The past years Higaonons like Datu Masilsil had been recipients of “empowerment” trainings -- the consequences brought about by worldwide recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples as the United Nations instituted the Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1994-2004). The Philippines, being a signatory, endeavored to pass the Indigenous Peoples Act in 1996.
Several institutions and agencies offered assistance in the processes of transferring know-how.
Datu Masilsil as his tribe’s leader had attended much training, seminars and other learning experiences from which he got lessons like a lifeline on which his own community hold.
“Daghan. Enough now to grant me many diplomas, maybe a doctorate degree!”
Many, he tried to count by his fingers and beyond his fingers what trainings he had attended and what learnings he had passed on in the long relay of knowledge back to his own.
Planning, governance, cultural heritage, community livelihoods, poverty alleviation, the laws, justice, paralegalism. Whatever lessons in community building so the people can forge and refine their own systems, mechanisms and rules.
“But what is distinct now, as in the workshops on paralegalism, is that we are made to realize our ways are also honored and acknowledged. We don’t have to adopt the settler’s ways, the Westernized ways of carrying out justice within our tribe. We are never told we were wrong,” he explained.
He had just attended a series of workshops held by the Balay Alternative Legal Advocates for Development in Mindanao (BALAOD) under a grant from the World Bank and Asia Foundation.
“It is not all about learning new things but also about preserving the good, practical and culture-appropriate ones. Before that we thought we were ignorant. Wa gani katunob hayskul. (We haven’t even stepped into high school). Now we are told we can teach what our ancestors taught us to our people, and even the settlers can learn from us.”
In a while, these leaders of their tribes huddled inside the house, they adjusted their red cotton head kerchiefs that were heavily beaded, resembling the flamboyant beaks of woodpeckers.
Their heads bowed, they speak in serious tones but once in a while laughter exploded and rippled among them, even among the children and women close by.
The gathering of men was nothing new, but it had taken in an innovation. Time is not much of essence still but they now have a clear list of agenda, just like any regular modern-day meeting, and the agenda resembled something quite familiar to efficient governance – resolutions, plans, even minutes and forms of documentation, fines and butaw, one-peso coins as monthly contributions to the general funds of the organization.
It used to be just a post-ritual ritual of passing time, sharing the cheap Kulafu or Fighter Wine, the betel nut, lime and tobacco till the meal is cooked.
But now, resolutions were discussed seriously. Datu Star sponsored the passage of a resolution addressed to the barangay to ask the poultry farm owners to pack up or at least compensate the farmers for all their sleepless nights because of “the damned flies attracted to the chicken shit.”
“All the whole year, we got no share of the harvest except a skyful of flies and terrible headaches due to the putrid stench. Our children are getting sick, always having runny noses and headaches,” Star complained and there was a murmur of laughter and assent.
We didn’t think Star was his name. But we called him Datu Star, nonetheless, after the huge tattoo of the word in stiff script on his left forearm.
The others suggested to look into how the pineapple and banana plantations are encroaching into ancestral domain claims and assigned someone to think about how the resolutions would be worded, and to get more facts, how many are affected, how big the tracts are...
A look into the proposal to grant livelihood loans to members especially the one that honors the words of their womenfolk….
Masilsil was hoping that he could present these resolutions to the barangay development council for swift action in the coming months.
Masilsil said they are pushing too that their methods of conflict mediation and resolution would be acknowledged by the barangay and incorporated into the guidelines and procedures of the Barangay Lupon Tagapamayapa, the community-based conciliation body, for surely, he said, he has learned that the tribal dispute resolution systems have a place in the country’s smallest local government unit. “The law provides for that but the implementation is not so good. Very slow. If we indigenous people don’t push for it, it won’t happen,” he said.
He said he was making headway with the town court. He owes it to a mayor who is also Higaonon, to groups who had helped advocate for indigenous rights.
Although he was still trying to persuade the prosecutor to let go of a murder case, he informed. “We have settled the case between two tribes. The suspect is in hiding from the police and the court. But he is safe within us. His family has settled by offering survivors two carabaos and about P100, 000.”
He too remembered how a decade ago, he had to agree that the man who killed his brother could leave jail. He, eldest among the siblings, issued an affidavit of desistance. The prosecutor could do nothing because without a witness, it was difficult to prove homicide.
The offender, said Datu Masilsil, is like my brother now. He was adopted into our family. His family is like part of my family and my family part of my family.
“Years in a jail won’t reform an offender, that’s what we think. Jail can only harden the soul,” he said. That’s what the tribe understands.
Datu Magdesisyon who had come in late, and was perhaps only trying to find the right moment to express an opinion, cleared his throat, and he said sto us, omething to explain the old ways to which many Higaonons have began to return.
“Higaonons look at things differently from the settlers. We consider each one and each act as part of a larger community. Like a hand belongs to the body, a tooth inside the mouth. Before we can cut off a limb, extract a tooth, we have to know how the rest can live without the hand, the tooth,” he explained. Somehow the saw sounded familiar, something heard from another wise mountain man or read in a book about ancient peoples, although it might have been said differently.
FOR those outside the tribe, schooled in the modern ways of the law, the tribal way might seem strange, but already it has features akin to an acknowledged newfangled, post-modern concept of restorative justice. Or more probably, the concept of restorative justice owes its prescience to ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples.
In restorative justice, “all the parties with a stake in a particular conflict or offence come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the conflict or offence and its implications for the future. Offenders also have the opportunity to acknowledge the impact of what they have done and to make reparation, and victims have the opportunity to have their harm or loss acknowledged and amends made."
As in restorative justice, dialogue and negotiation are central to tribal justice. On their own or through their spokesperson, usually another datu or baylan or bae, both parties are allowed time to speak their minds.
Consider the tampuda sa balagon (covenant of the rattan vine), Masilsil said. The tampuda is a Higaonon dispute resolution and reconciliation ritual using a rattan vine:
Two groups in dispute hold both ends of a rattan vine, and promises are exchanged between the parties not to take and exact revenge or make another offense, after several minutes of chanting, calling the ancestors for guidance, the shaman, with a sharp native machete, cuts in half the vine.
The offense is forgotten, the offender is forgiven, the relationship between persons, between families and between tribes is healed and the community can move on.
FOR the believing Higaonon, the ceremony of the vine attains a certain kind of magic, a staying power.
“The shaman who presided over the ceremony will bury the vine in a secret bamboo grove,” said Masilsil.
Will the vine take root? Sprout shoots? Or will it really become a snake, a giant sleeping python even burrowing there awaiting the possibility of betrayal when it will finally come out to hunt for the one who would disobey the covenant of reconciliation?
Or will it become the spirit-snake striking at the heart or conscience of the one who will break the covenant and thus releasing the venom of a cursed life?
As it was etched deep into the memories of Masilsil’s lineage, the Higaonon believe so.
THE Sunday afternoon glided towards dusk, and the meat steamed over fervent wood fires cooked so softly they peeled off from the bones on their own, and it was time for the gathering of men, women and children to move on to the dining table inside the bungalow for the day’s long-awaited big meal.
Below the dappled shadows cast on the old spears, woven baskets and hunting guns hung on the wall, another community ritual feast to last the entire night had began, celebrating togetherness, solidarity and tribal justice’s fierce but tender mercies.
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