BENCHWARMER

The hierarchy of things
RAMON S. DACAWI

So Hungduan, the remote Ifugao town I trace my roots to, is host to this year’s launching of the tunod, the planting season in the traditional rice cycle in Ifugao. That’s the impression I got reading between the lines of two news dispatches about a package tour -- for visitors to experience planting with the natives in Hapao, my late father’s barrio, this weekend.

I would have reservations about the tour if it were not the brain-child of Gov. Teddy Baguilat, also founder and now honorary chair of the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement which is co-handling the tour package.

Like Baguilat, most of SITMO’s members are young Ifugaos. Like him, they are educated and idealistic, culturally aware and sensitive. No way for them to compromise environmental and cultural integrity for the sake of tourism, which was the mistake in Banaue.

The “tunod” is a cultural event rather than a tourism come-on. I wish the news dispatches were angled on the revival of the “bolnat” ritual preceding the “tunod” itself, and on the “tumun-ak”, the mother paddy owned by a “kadangyan” (nobility) family where the firstrice seedling is planted to signal the season. And now is the traditional season for planting, so the ritual will be authentic, not contrived, to be done not for tourists but in keeping with cultural practice.

I wish we had a Department of Culture, and, under it, a Bureau of Tourism. It is the natural chronology and correct hierarchy of sustainable development as practiced for generations by the indigenous villages of the Cordillera. Nature first, followed by indigenous culture that developed and flourished out of respect for the natural environment. Not upside down, wherein tourism is on top, with nature and culture serving it.

Hungduan has a lot to offer that may be of interest to anthropologists and historians – and even tourists. Its rice terraces are some of the oldest, most extensive and scenic -and stone-walled-, undulating on steep mountainsides. “They look like our ancestors spread a giant, wavy G-string on these mountains,” observed Ka Elias, a.k.a. Mario Pugong, a rebel returnee and former Hungduan councilor. Except for a chalet and a few GI-sheet roofed houses, modernization hasn’t substantially crept into the terraces.

It is where Gen. Tomoyoki Yamashita made his last stand and built foxholes on the slopes of Mt. Napulawan before surrendering in Kiangan at the close of the second world war. It was where the New People’s Army was first established in the Cordillera. Former mayor Andres Dunuan told me it’s where Gen. Artemio Ricarte, the Katipunero general, was buried.

Hapao is where Ifugao woodcarving originated. So, it’s where you’ll find my Don Quixote of a cousin – tribal elder Reynaldo Lopez Nauyac. Unless he’s out carving wood in Asipulo town or up there in the mountains planting or gathering seeds of indigenous tree species. If you meet him, listen how he’s fighting the windmills of out-migration among fellow woodcarvers for whom he also built a village here in Baguio when he was barangay captain of Asin Rd. Barangay.

Notwithstanding his dream that the carvers will eventually come home to re-till their abandoned terraces. Lopez is a native spelled with a “t”. He returned home to re-till what he inherited and work out environmental projects anchored on trying to revive the “muyung” forest management system that sustained irrigation of the terraces over the centuries.

Gov. Baguilat, who is back in the gubernatorial saddle, idolizes Lopez. He told us so when we met in late 2002, just before the start of the tunod. Somehow, both believe that a way to restore the vanishing terraces is through enhancement of the culture that built them.

We met the governor during his first term, during a regional schools press conference in Lagawe just before the start of the tunod. Discussions turned to his major concern – saving the terraces that prompted him to set up the SITMO. We broached two things: for him to ask the mumbaki, the native priests who are also vanishing, to perform the tunod ritual and for his honor to lead the planting.
“Next year, Sagada (Mt. Province) can also be the site for the ritual to signal the tuned,” offered a Sagada native. “And in my hometown of Kapangan (Benguet) the following year,” quickly added newsman-lawyer Delmar Carino, a native of Balacbac.

I really like the idea of rotating the hosts of the ritual among the villages in the Cordillera where terraces are found. Tunod and payoh (terrace) in Ifugao, tuned and payew in Sagada - the difference is the same. Still, something crept up my brain over Delmar’s proposal that I had to ask him

“N’ya aya ti imulmula yo idiay Kapangan (What are you planting in Kapangan),? I casually asked Delmar. “Pagay a, sikamet (Rice, of course, what else),” he answered, getting my drift. Kapangan had been perceived to be a producer of marijuana, a high-value “crop” natives were forced to turn to due to poverty.

Abject poverty also nurtured marijuana planting in the mountains of Hungduan, prompting then regional police director, now retiredGen. Rogelio Aguana, o lead one uprooting operation. Aguana, who traces his roots to Bontoc and Kiangan, had asked me to land with him to my parents’ hometown. When I didn’t show up and he called after he flew back from the mission. “Talaga ka met,” he said. “Han mo kayat umay ta baka ibaga ti kailian ta nga sika nangireport nga adda marijuana idiay Hungduan nga ili da amam ken inam.” en. Aguana understood.

The peers of Ifugao congressman Solomon Chungalao, including media, did not. They attacked that time he filed a bill legalizing the planting, on a limited, guarded and experimental scale, of marijuana. He was caricatured with Pampanga Rep. Mickey Arroyo, who endorsed the proposal, as being on “high”. Some in media imagined him envisioning a terraced cultural landscaped turning green with five fingers.

Chungalao’s point got lost in the media hype. He drew flak trying to draw national attention to the poverty gripping the Cordillera. He pointed out that marginal farmers turn to marijuana production as rice and camote farming – like crime - doesn’t pay. He noted that 90 percent of those arrested and languishing in jail for MJ cases are from up here, nipped in the bud in their attempt not to languish in poverty.

That’s why the Cordillera contributed quite a number when the United Nations recently rallied the peoples of the world to “Stand Up Against Poverty”. As did our marijuana planters try to long before the UN rally. As did Chungalao try.

Saving the crumbling rice terraces that we Filipinos proclaim to take pride in -as our contribution to the World Heritage List - will be as difficult as stamping out marijuana. As long as poverty grips these uplands, the terraces will continue to be abandoned, or else turned into more productive use - for hotels and amenities for tourists, or imposing houses of natives to return home to and as monuments to their economic success somewhere.

Lopez the native returned home for a different reason - to do what he can in terrace restoration anchored on cultural revival. So did Gov. Baguilat who, unlikeLopez, was not born in the village.
Baguilat admitted he never experienced planting rice in the payoh as he grew up in Metro-Manila. He returned home to find answers to questions of schoolmates in the big city about his origin and ethnicity: Is it true that Igorots have tails, that their ancestors lived on trees?

In turn, Kiangan elected the homecoming boy as their mayor, before the province seated him as governor. In January, 2003, the governor asked the mumbaki (native priests) to perform the bolnat, in Julungan village, Kiangan

Our priests appeared, together with a young man serving as acolyte. Quite a number, as the remaining mumbaki in Ifugao are vanishing. They were from Asipulo, a town adjoining Kiangan, admitted educator Manny Dulawan. Kiangan, which claims to be the seat of Ifugao culture, already had none.

The ritual done, the then 36-year old bachelor leader, in his native G-string, finally dipped his feet into the terrace.

His week-end’s “Tunod ad Hungduan” is part of the governor’s efforts to revive the rituals marking each stage in the traditional rice cycle, as a backbone to the task of restoring the terraces. Hungduan, then under mayor Andres Dunuan, was the first among the 10 Ifugao towns to see the relevance of cultural revival in the terrace restoration. The villagers came up with “Tungoh ad Hungduan”, a period of rest just after the planting season during which rituals were offered to the gods in anticipation of a bountiful harvest. (e-mail:rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).