Balik-Lumad in the city

Progressio and Lumah Ma Di Laut

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY -- For years, Undag had been an exile from her tribal homeland.

Even now, as she lives about an hour and a half away from her birthplace in barangay Luna, Claveria town, a glance away from the sacred mountain called Sumagaya, deep in her guts she still feels intensifying dislocation.

Nena Undag's latest city dwelling is the first hut in a row of nondescript dwellings back of the dead-end of a street in a subdivision in Cagayan de Oro City.

On the porch, her sister is sewing small pieces of cloth into rounded rugs the circumference of outspread human palms, and as she steps on the pedals of the machine to coax the needle to move over the cloths, the loose floorboards rocks gently in rhythm with her movements.

In the mountain village they have left behind, the sisters could have woven native fibers on the loom and not sewing wiping rugs.

But someday, Nena is certain she is coming back to stay put where she belongs, among her people, the Higaonon.

But for now she and her family must dwell in the fringes of a city tauted as the gateway to Mindanao.

This clump of shacks amidst fruit trees and thickets of wild grass feels pastoral, a Third World pocket in a First World universe. Here, piglets grunt and fighting cocks crow, and the grunting and crowing blend well with the squeals of children playing with kites and the whirr of the sewing machine.

Amid these rural sounds, dust glides on the shafts of afternoon sunlight , landing as soft matte on almost everything inside the house: the 16-inch tv, the electric fan, the silken curtains with the splendor of peacocks , a lucky ukay-ukay find; the many books on anthropology and sociology and porcelain dining ware on the shelves, even on Undag’s necklace of stunning beadwork.

Even as she stays here, Undag’s spiritual geography has shifted, she is actually in transit now. In her present work, she is always on her way home. Despite the dislocation, there is no disconnection with her roots.

“Many have expressed surprise that we are still doing organizing and linkaging work among our own, the indigenous peoples. Naa pa diay na? Naa pa diay mo? (Are you still around, doing the same work?)”

“It has been our commitment and challenge. And we find a sense of triumph in the fact that we have sustained this endeavor, that we have influence and impact, and we are still recognized and needed in the hinterlands,” Undag declares.

It was mostly a Catholic girlhood for her, steep in the Christian values she learned at home and in school.

In Claveria, she had to climb up and down the steep cliffs in order to go to school every day and so it was easier to drop out of school than to continue.

“So our parents decided to allow me to stay in the city to ensure that I will be educated,” she recalls.

Undag worked her way through high school, providing housework in some middle-class households. She attended night classes. She remembered that “working in other people’s homes was mostly sweat, tears and a runny nose.”

But when she went to college, her life took a fortunate turn as she lived with a woman who had left the convent and was running the Roman Catholic Church’s Apostolate for Tribal Filipinos, the church’s missionary arm ministering to the indigenous communities who were bearing the brunt of militarization at the height of the martial law years.

“She got me motivated. To look into the situation as a people, as a nation in struggle. She gave me a political context to my life as a lumad,” Undag recalled.

She added, “And later I was on the way to return, to take my being Lumad, being Higaonon seriously. To speak in my own tongue and be proud.”

She dreamed of becoming a teacher back in her village. “I have always wanted to become a teacher. My original plan was to return to my village and teach there, because it was difficult to find a teacher who would stay there in my village to teach the kids.”

“As I went to school I also learned about the national situation. My colleagues helped me developed my understanding, particularly in 1981, when the tribal lands became disturbed by the revolutionary movement and upwelling of mass support for the protest movement against the effects of the long years of the martial regime.”

She got recruited into the activist movement at the Cagayan de Oro College during the dying years of the Marcos martial law regime. She in turn recruited several young co-eds to join rallies and join sit-ins.

“I am grateful for those who gave me political orientation then. We are just sad because later my parents also traumatized as they were harassed, they were detained by the military and interrogated. The military were then looking for me.

“By 1982 we have organized the Kahugpungan Alang sa Lumadnong Kalingkawasan (Solidarity for Indigenous Liberation). We helped the evacuees who were displaced from their lands because of the fighting between the New Peoples Army and the government army. I helped organize fact-finding missions to investigate into military abuses in the countrysides,” she recalls.

It was also at this time when she met Tony, also a lumad and an organizer of indigenous peoples who facilitated negotiations with community elders and leaders.

“Tony was instrumental in my return to the tribe, especially to honoring and using our own language and speaking it with pride. Even in the city, he would insist that we talk in Higaonon.”

The comradeship turned into companionship, and they soon begat a son who they named Bagani, the Higaonon word for warrior.

As the military crackdown on activists groups got harsher in the mid-80s, Undag’s group got dispersed in the confusion, doubts and betrayals. “We were told not to go back to our homes anymore.”

Their support group urged the couple to work in Manila, their son in tow. It was a temporary arrangement that lasted for three years.

They went back to Mindanao in 1990, and for six years, they lived a life detached from the political movement, eking out a living from menial work. “We did not get involved at all (in the political realm),” she stressed.

They tried going back to the farm and the land won’t yield enough during a series of droughts in the early 90s.

Meanwhile, without political anchors, it was for them a different form of drifting, and almost like being off-course. “We made wood boxes for tomatoes, we marketed sausages, I managed a cooperative store, we worked in a sawmill, Tony tried working for a while as security guard.”

In 1994, as the United Nations declared the Decade for Indigenous Peoples and Cultures, Undag and her husband led consultations and conferences which culminated in the formation of Kahiusahan sa mga Higaonon, Inc. (KHI).

She says,” We began with projects on self-governance and preservation of living tribal traditions. We networked with other local and national groups doing the same work. We felt we belong to something large and interconnected. We were no longer alone.”

A new significant design in her work was emerging, and it would become her compass, a mooring.

Today, she is using her competencies in ethnography and cultural management to help out tribals who are claiming for their ancestral domain claims as she is adept with the processes and needed services by the National Commission of Indigenous Peoples.

“We help other get land of their own, reclaim the land of their ancestors, but we do not have land of our own,” she noted.

Figuratively though, her spiritual homes have multiplied, not diminished.
Although she does not have a single tribal community to return to she instead has adopted several in the course of her work: her father’s Aposkahoy, in Claveria and her mother’s Kiabo, in Malitbog , Bukidnon; the communities where she taught young girls on their roots in Balingasag and Salay in Misamis Oriental.

In Higaonon myth, she rediscovered a strong role model. She is the Pesosan. “We have this story of the pesosan, they were women who can do other men’s work; she would hunt, farm, fish in the river and still be able to do housework.”

She has some hopeful expectations that younger women can be empowered to take on more political and cultural responsibilities in Higaonon tribes. But she is cautious about organizing them. “We are careful about organizing women. We have a standing policy that we would only allow Higaonon to organize among us, including women.”

She is part of some research projects to find other ways of preserving communal forests by not felling trees and instead nurture non-timber products like bamboo, rattan and other grasses to make into crafts; medicinal herbs and woven cloth from renewable resources.

Going balik-lumad means she performs the pamuhat, or rituals, even in the city. She no longer goes to church and instead remembers Magbabaya and the pantheon of ancestral spirits in their house, with kin and friends.

“We recognize that there are sort of three kinds of the lumad now. There are the traditionals and they are mostly in the mountains and they live almost the same ways as those generations before them. They cling to their ways without inquiry or critique.

“There is the other group of Higaonon who are thoroughly assimilated into the lowland culture, and who have forgotten and even denounced their tribal roots. They are mostly urban dwellers and educated and are professionals and have become Christianized.

And there are those who are balik-lumad. “We are in-between, the semis, semi-traditional and semi-assimilated. We have faith in the ways of Higaonon tradition even if we have been educated in schools and colleges. But it does not mean that we have stopped questioning or inquiring into some of these beliefs and practices.

“We understand that culture is evolving, it is not static, but also we think whatever change on a personal and collective level must be on our terms and at our pace and not dictated to us from the outside.”

She has faith in the value of preserving oral traditions as prized possessions, heirloom pieces for the next generation. “So the world after us will keep on remembering. We Higaonons, just like other IPs, have already lost many things, lands, rituals.”

Documenting traditions, the voices of elders, is also an act of reclaiming some spiritual and psychic ancestral domain. “Outsiders have stolen these from us before and even now, using them and claiming them as their own without even asking for our permission,” she explains.

These she explains to us as she readies the accouterments of ritual this afternoon, a prelude to sharing personal and collective stories to outsiders. The blood of white- and black-feathered chickens would be spilled, coins and lime and betel nut placed as offerings on a plate.

As the ritual proceeds, the only soft sounds are that of the sewing machine at the porch and the whispered chant and prayers of the couple Tony and Nena.

The weathered hut, tethered on soft, fragile city soil, creaks and rocks so gently, conjuring in the mind a hammock swinging in the breeze, a weaver on the loom, a boat breaking the waters as it reaches shore.