Mindanao and Kulaman Maps

I have found three maps that will be quite helpful to those who want to know where exactly Kulaman is. The first map is that of Mindanao, the second one is that of Sultan Kudarat, and the last shows the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino.

The map of Mindanao above is taken from the second page of a paper by Douglas M. Frasier. (I was able to download the whole document months ago from the website of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, but now only the abstract is available from the site.) In the map, the different provinces and two cities of Mindanao are identified. The area in gray is supposedly the ancestral domain claimed by the Dulangan Manobo. The mark is inaccurate, however. The Manobo territory does not cover the entire Sultan Kudarat, just the western part of the province.

Furthermore, the map is a little old. It does not yet show the province of Sarangani, which was created in 1992 out of the southernmost towns of South Cotabato.

The map above shows the province of Sultan Kudarat and its eleven municipalities and once component city. Note, for the nth time, that the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino is more popularly known as Kulaman, which is the name of the capital barangay. I took this map from the dissertation submitted by Fr. Francis Efren Zabala, OMI, to the faculty of the Catholic Theological Union at Chicago.

The third map, below, is that of Senator Ninoy Aquino, courtesy of the Municipal Planning and Development Office. It shows the twenty barangays, the location of the barangay halls, the roads, and the waterways. In the north is the municipality of Isulan, the capital town of Sultan Kudarat. When people from Kulaman go to Isulan, however, they take the eastern route. Isulan looks like an inverted L turned 45 degrees to the right. Its poblacion is east of the municipality of Bagumbayan, not north of Barangay Kuden.

Villages Named After Manobo People

According to Defending the Land, a study on ancestral domain claims, place-names in Kulaman were often derived from the names of Manobo people. Below are some of them. Note that a barangay is a village and a sitio is a slightly remote and well-populated district within a barangay.

• Barangy Lagubang was named after the oldest resident of the area.
• Barangay Kapatagan was named after the wife of Lagubang.
• Barangay Nati got its name from the first known leader of the community. Nati died in a flood that occurred before the Spanish colonized the Philippines in the 1500s.
• Sitio Bagsing of Barangay Gapok got its name from the first datu of the place.
• Sitio Todog of Barangay Bugso was named after a hunter from Barangay Malegdeg who slept under a large tree and never woke up.
• Barangay Sewod took its name from a well-known and respected datu.
• Barangay Langgal was named after the third wife of Datu Sewod.
• Barangay Kadi was named after the fourth wife of Datu Sewod.
• Barangay Kulaman, of course, was named after a famous seventeenth-century sultan.

Kulaman (official name: Senator Ninoy Aquino) is composed of twenty barangays, all of which have Manobo names. This is one proof of the claim of the Dulangan Manobo that Kulaman Plateau is their ancestral domain.

What I find interesting in the list are the ones named after women. Traditionally, Manobo women were owned by their husbands, so to speak. The dowry system forced them to live almost like slaves once married. I wonder how Kapatagan, Langgal, and Kadi were able to have such a status as to have a territory named after them. They might have been great beauties, or they might have been good leaders, the first empowered Manobo women.

How This Blog Came Into Being

I have long been into blogging. Since 2005, I have been jumping from one blog to another. I could not find a topic or theme I could regularly write about. I have created at least five blogs, and the longest I stayed in one was perhaps a year.

Now I think I will be able to maintain this blog for a long time, maybe years. I am passionate about Kulaman Plateau and the Dulangan Manobo, and I have a rich material, both personal and from other sources. The idea to create this blog, though, came to me rather accidentally and slowly.

It all started when a cousin of mine asked for help for her graduate-studies research. Her goal was to gather the folk tales and similar stuff of the Dulangan Manobo. She’s not tech savvy, and she could not find adequate references online. Googling master me came to the rescue. I loved googling, for a hundred reasons, which I won’t enumerate here because they’re irrelevant. To cut the story short, I was able to find about half a dozen downloadable academic papers and other references that were quite helpful to my cousin. I saved copies in her laptop and in my own.

Though I did not help my cousin write a word of her thesis, I read the materials. I was personally interested in the Dulangan Manobo. I dreamt of writing a novel about the life of Manobo women. My interest intensified when I learned about the lost burial jars of Kulaman Plateau. One Google result led to another, and I eventually realized that for a few weeks I had been spending hours almost every day doing research on the Dulangan Manobo. The more surprising realization was that I had been spending much of that time on sifting Google results, not on reading the materials.

I thought of how difficult and time-consuming the task was for researchers. I wished no one else had to go through what I had. So I decided to create a blog on the Dulangan Manobo that would direct the readers to all available relevant materials online. At first I wanted the blog to be academic and technical, but later on, I just couldn’t help blabbering about my personal experiences in and knowledge on Kulaman Plateau.

I hope you readers find my personal adventures and misadventures interesting and not a clutter you have to brush aside while doing your research. I can’t promise you’ll like each of my posts, but I promise that this blog will keep on evolving and expanding to always give you something new.

Ilyan Hill

Ilyan Hill is one of the landmarks of Kulaman. It stands out among hundreds of hills because its one side is rocky and dips abruptly whereas the other hills slope gently in almost all sides.

Ilyan Hill as seen from the highway in Barangay Buenaflores.

Photo by M. Linan.

The hill’s peculiar shape has inspired tales about it. The Dulangan Manobo have a legend on how the land formation got its name. The account in the next paragraph is taken from a paper by University of the Philippines professor Rosario Cruz-Lucero. It’s originally in Tagalog, and I translated it into English. Cruz-Lucero spelled the name Iliyan, but I prefer to use Ilyan because it’s closer to how the people here pronounce it.

A long time ago, Ilyan Hill was ordinary and had no name. It wasn’t different from the hills standing along it. A hunter named Ilyan was living at the foot of the hill. One day, he left his home to hunt. When he came back, he found M’lat Kum’l, an evil supernatural being with a hundred thumbs. M’lat Kum’l claimed for himself Ilyan’s house and land. Ilyan disappeared, and a hill rose where his house and land had been. This is why the hill is named after him.

I have yet to climb Ilyan Hill. It’s in my bucket list.

Kulaman River

This is Kulaman River. If you are traveling from the lowland towns of Sultan Kudarat, this body of water is the indication that you are entering the village of Kulaman, the seat of government of the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino. The river is the major vein that runs through the heart of Kulaman Plateau.

Kulaman River as seen from the bridge in the national highway. The photo at the top shows the water flowing toward the bridge, and the photo below shows the water flowing downstream, away from the bridge. Courtesy of M. Linan.

Local legend has it that the river is where Sultan Kulaman drowned in the seventeenth century. In the next paragraph is the story according to a paper by University of the Philippines professor Rosario Cruz-Lucero. It is written in Tagalog, and I translated it to English.

A long time ago, the old name of Kulaman River was Matihaw.  A long period of drought occurred. Matihaw River dried up. Kulaman dug up the mud in search of food, and he caught a fish. He informed his tribesmen of his find, and they happily went to the location of the fish. They slept there that night. A heavy rain suddenly came. Matihaw River flooded, and Kulaman drowned. That’s why the river is named after Kulaman.

It’s only the river and the village that are named after Kulaman. A whole town, too. Kalamansig (the town where Barangay Kulaman used to be a part of before becoming the capital village of Senator Ninoy Aquino in 1989 got its name from the phrase Kulaman suwayeg, which means “Kulaman in the river.”

A spot in Kulaman River. Motorcycles often pass through this shortcut, for the bridge is a couple of kilometers away from the center of the town. For five pesos, a “ferry,” made of bamboo poles tied together, can carry you and you vehicle across the river. A Manobo man propels the ferry forward by pulling on a rope tied to both banks of the river. The kid in the center is taking a bath and soaping his hair. Photo by M. Linan.

Manobo Population

I’ve got here for you the population data of the Dulangan Manobo. The photos below show the results of the census taken by the Indigenous Peoples Ministry of the Archdiocese of Cotabato in November 1999 to February 2000.

Unfortunately, this is the latest and most reliable study I could get my hands on. As far as I know, the ministry has not conducted a follow-up study since then. I’m not also sure if other NGOs or a government agency has a Manobo population data of its own. For the meantime, let’s be thankful for this document, which is an appendix to the dissertation submitted by Fr. Francis Efren Zabala, OMI, to the Catholic Theological Union at Chicago.

The ministry recorded a total of 37,139 Dulangan Manobo living in eight municipalities. Six of the municipalities are in Sultan Kudarat Province, while two (Ampatuan and South Upi) are in Maguindanao. A note in the bottom of the document states that Sharif Aguak Municipality was excluded, probably because of the peace and order situation at the time the census was taken. It’s not likely, though, that there is a significant number of Dulangan Manobo living in Sharif Aguak. I think most of the indigenous people who live there are Teduray.

Note also that the study was conducted only in the parishes under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Cotabato. Some Dulangan Manobo live in the provinces of South Cotabato and Sarangani, which are part of the Archdiocese of Marbel. Therefore, there might have been several hundred or a few thousand Dulangan Manobo who weren’t counted. The total population of the Dulangan Manobo in 2000 might be more than forty thousand.

In the document, the population of the Dulangan Manobo is at the lower part of the right column. Beside it is the population of the Lambangian, who seem to be a group of people who have a mix Teduray and Manobo blood. It’s my first time to learn of these people, and I’ll keep in mind to research more about them. They numbered 4,276 in year 2000.

Another surprising info for me from this list is the existence of a Manobo tribe in the province of Cotabato (old yet more popular name: North Cotabato). In 2000, seven towns in the province were home to 7,329 Aromanon Manobo. This means that using the term Cotabato Manobo for the Dulangan Manobo may be confusing to some people. I should avoid doing this from now on. Note that the papers written by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, listed in this blog’s bibliography, use Cotabato Manobo and refer only to the Manobo living in and near Kulaman Plateau, in Sultan Kudarat Province.