The many faces of Igorots

This morning, I went to interview some students at a retreat house for an article I'm doing for an online site. The students are from Tarlac. I got to chat with one of their teachers as I was waiting to do the interview. When he found out that I am an Igorot, he eyes got really big, and asked "Talaga?" And so I have to tell him that yes, we no longer wear tapis or g-strings, except on special occasions. And that yes, we do look a lot like other Pinoys. He just smiled and said "Ganun pala." Just to give you an idea what a breathing, living Igorot looks like, here are a few of our photos taken within the last couple of months.

As you'll notice, just like other ethnolinguistic groups such as Tagalogs, Ilocanos and Bisaya, Igorots as a group don't have a single appearance. Maybe in the past, Igorots as one group look almost the same although they belong to various ethnolinguistic groups (Ibaloi, Kankana-ey, etc). But intermarriages, migration, even the food we eat and work we do, have slowly changed the way we look.

Similarly, while many of us are poor, many others are professionals, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers. While we have beggars in Manila, we also have golfers in California, although I'd have to say they're fewer in number. But for this post, let's focus on our physical attributes.

High school students from Poblacion, Itogon, Benguet giving an upbeat song at a concert.

Kikay Igorot Nursing students share their smiles.

Apong Patani and her friends in front of the Baguio Botanical Garden. She claims to come from the boundary of Bontoc and Kalinga.

This is me and two of my good, old, reliable friends. Hehe! Two of us come from Mountain Province, while our other friend is of Mountain Province-Benguet parentage.

Photo of a friend's high school buddies from Itogon, Benguet.

Igorot priests from Mountain Province and Benguet give a concert-for-a-cause at the Baguio Convention Center.

It's not only in the way we look that we are different. We also have varying perspectives, even on issues that affect Kaigorotan as a whole. Who says Igorots are made of one solid block, anyway?

IP Voices in the Media

It’s the second year that we are observing the Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples which began in 2005 and will end in 2015. Despite the UN’s recognition that IPs have serious concerns that need to be addressed, the mainstream media continue to ignore IPs in their coverage of the news. Even here in the Philippines, IPs are generally written about in a stereotypical, romanticized manner. (Read more about it here).

(Tourists pose with elderly Igorots in front of the Baguio Botanical Garden. Are we also partly to blame that lowlanders and the media stereotype us as poor and ignorant? More on this in my next post.)

In 2003, the UNESCO sponsored the International Forum on Local Cultural Expression and Communication and they came out with a document entitled “Giving New Voice to Endangered Cultures.”

One of the most revealing statements in that document is that “…(I)ndigenous people produce very little media about themselves.” Next, it poses the question: “How do indigenous voices and cultural systems become more widely available?”

Media student or not, we all agree that information is power. And information is media’s main product. Just imagine your day without tuning to the radio, watching TV or surfing the net. Unimaginable, di ba? But because media owners are more concerned about profit than anything, then it’s high time that we IPs produce our own media products. Thank God for the Internet, it has created another space, free (loosely speaking) at that, that encourages discussion and social networking. It's another thing that we have Marky Cielo to give a face to the Igorots as a people. Thank you, Marky, for proudly admitting that you are an IP:-)

It’s encouraging to see VCDs of Cordi musicians being sold in selected shops in Baguio. Even if the singers usually wear cowboy hats and boots, their music has rhythm and rhyme that’s uniquely Cordi. Knowledge of new technology is definitely a must for us if we intend to bring our voices to a larger audience.

I’ll be sharing some of my articles here about people and places in Cordi as an attempt to produce IP content. I think I’ve been bitten by the blog bug. Hahaha!

Joan’s Destiny

Joan Cosme (not her real name), 35, sits down on a big rock to put on a pair of black rubber boots. She then straps a spotlight on her forehead and grabs her metal tools. She’s now ready to enter her family’s “usok” or private mine somewhere in Itogon, Benguet, one hour ride from Baguio City.

She crouches to enter a small opening, about four feet by three feet, framed by braches of pine tree, at the side of a mountain. She walks through a narrow, dark, moist tunnel, “duck walk” fashion, for a distance of 250 feet from the entrance. Her only source of light is her improvised rechargeable spotlight “mineros” in these parts have so ingeniously put together.

“The soil here is soft that’s why we can’t make a big tunnel. The timber cannot hold the weight of the soil and rocks,” she explains.

(The mountains of Itogon, Benguet viewed from Virac)

Barely five feet, Joan is a fulltime mother and wife but these last few days, she has been helping her husband work in their private mine. This is her fifth day of working in their “usok.” “It’s been years ago since I last worked inside the tunnel. But I need to help Armando (her husband) now because we need money for our children’s education,” she says. Joan, a Kankana-ey, has six children; the eldest is 12, the youngest is 4.

Negotiating the way to the Cosmes’ "usok” in the mountain is an adventure by itself. It’s almost like sliding down a mountain positioned in a 90-degree angle. At first you step on rocks as you descend into a steep, winding path. But as you go deeper down into the mountain, you start running and sliding down more often because there are no longer rocks or big stones to step on, but only bare soil and a few branches of trees to hold on to. At one point, you even have to turn around and crawl downward because the trail seems to have disappeared so suddenly.

(The entrance to Joan's usok)

After about 20 minutes of doing the walk-run-slide-crawl combination, you reach the mining site, less than 200 meters above the base of the mountain. Sweat now runs down your temple.

“I had fever the first night I came here. My muscles were sore I couldn’t even raise my legs. But after a few days, I finally got used to going up and down the mountain again,” she says. But the real adventure starts once you are inside the “usok,” according to Joan.

After several minutes of “duck walk,” Joan now heads to a “destino,” or a particular mining hole. If the “usok” is the big hole, the “destinos” are sub-holes. Her husband, two brothers, a sister-in-law, and two male cousins are scattered in two “destinos.” In these parts, small-scale mining remains to be a family affair.

It’s quiet inside the “usok” except for the sound of tools hitting rocks, and short, low conversations. Joan adjusts her spotlight to focus on a blue vein that runs vertically on the side of the “destino.” She says, “This rock has gold.” The soil is soft so she carefully chips off portions of this ore.

“Destino,” Joan explains, is a Kankana-ey translation for “destiny.” Miners don’t just chip off soil or rocks indiscriminately; they look for “naba” or gold ore. “Once we find gold ore in a particular area, this becomes our ‘destino,’ or destiny,” Joan explains.

She points at a few “destinos” of different sizes and directions inside the mine: “diretso,” “ulsod,” and “patangad.” Just go straight to a “diretso” but you may need a rope or a ladder to go down to an “ulsod.” There’s also a hole going up, called “patangad.”

No, Joan isn’t afraid of working inside this dark, moist mine. The only thing she dreads most is what miners call “gas.” She describes it as hot air being emitted by elements inside the tunnel, including the carbon dioxide being given off by every person working inside the “usok.”

“You feel warm and you couldn’t breathe. It’s like you’re being suffocated,” she says, describing how it feels when “gas” forms inside the mine. A few seconds without fresh oxygen could be fatal for everyone inside the “usok.”

As Joan walks deeper into the “destino,” cool air blows in from the entrance of the tunnel. Another male cousin has just turned on a big blower near the tunnel’s entrance to pump in fresh air into the “usok” to prevent suffocation. Joan breathes in deeply, taking in all the oxygen she could inhale.

After three hours of chipping away “naba,” (gold ore) and putting them in her sack, Joan decides it’s time to go out. She emerges from the tunnel with mud splattered on her forehead, nose, and clothes, her hands black with mud. She laughs at how she looks. “I look like a ghost!” She washes her hand at a small pail filled with blackish water outside the “usok” before unfastening her spotlight.

“I hope this sack gives me at least a gram of gold,” she says. With the way she works, Joan seems to be destined for success.

Of Romanticized and Insulting Statues

I was a freshman at a state university almost two decades ago and I still remember how a male classmate from the south embarrased me due to my ethnicity. I was standing in front of my History 1 class reporting on my home province when we suddenly heard a male voice say, “Ay, Igorot!” I felt so humiliated that I shot back, “So, what makes you different from me?” Our young female instructor immediately intervened and said we were there to learn and not to put others down. The guy never said sorry for what he did and expectedly, we never became friends up to the time I graduated. He stayed for another semester, I think.

I remember this incident now as a fellow blogger, Bill Bilig, writes about his anger over a seemingly harmless statue of a peeing Igorot man at Barrio Fiesta in Baguio. You see, the restaurant placed several Igorot statues in different poses and that of other prominent personalities along its “Igorot Stairs.” How do we know they’re Igorots apart from a big sign that says “Igorot Stairs”? Because the statues are all in traditional Igorot garb – tapis, g-string, inabel vest. Some of the statues are even naked. A few of the statues have explanations near their base with captions like “Headhunter,” “Chieftain,” and “Mumbaki.” With or without the sign, you’d know the group of people these statues represent.

From Upper Session Road, you’d see Cardinal Sin and Cory Aquino talking and a group of Igorots sitting on the stairs. As you go down, you’d see on your right Ninoy Aquino and on your left, another group of elderly women Igorots removing lice from each other’s hair (nagkukutuhan). A few more steps and there’s a statue of a guy in shorts, texting. Behind him, at the entrance of the restaurant, are two Igorots posed ala-Bernardo Carpio, their hands supporting the ceiling.

Go several steps down and you’d find a young Igorot boy picking on his nose and a young Igorot lass, half-naked, her breasts exposed. Further down the stairs are two jubilant headhunters, one of them holding the severed head of an enemy. All these images are acceptable to me because they show glimpses of our way of life almost a century ago (or was it just several decades ago?). No matter how much we have achieved as a people, it seems lowlanders will always choose to remember us as headhunters and half-naked people. But here’s the really infuriating part.

At the lowest level of the Igorot stairs, near the main entrance of BIR, are three statues in one corner. One is a giant image of an Igorot chieftain and below him, that of a security guard whistling at an Igorot in a g-string peeing against a post with a yellow sign that says, “Bawal umihi.” What's this statue doing here?

I bet many Igoys who frequent the resto don’t notice this insulting statue since it's placed way down below. I myself haven’t seen it until I read Bill’s post. What’s bothersome is that someone uploaded a video of this humiliating depiction in the Internet, giving thousands of readers from all over the world a wrong impression of who are.

That statue is offensive and should be taken down because it’s a clear sign of prejudice and discrimination against Igorots. Why depict them as ill-mannered, ignorant and lawbreakers? What's worse is that this statue is a permanent, inaccurate image being displayed by the restaurant for all to see, year in and year out.

So, are we going to let this pass since it’s not that serious, according to some? Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The anger I feel towards this statue may be linked to my own experience of prejudice years ago. When will other Pinoys see us in a more positive light? I hope in my lifetime. But I guess the past will always haunt us if we don’t do something about the present.

(Tourists take a look at these romanticized images of Igorots along the "Igorot Stairs")