Native Musical Instruments

The two-stringed guitar on the left is a fegelung. The bowlike instrument

in the center is used for the one-stringed violin on the right, the duwagey.

This bamboo harp is called togo. Because bamboo

abound in Kulaman Plateau, togos are common

in Dulangan Manobo settlements.

This very simple bamboo musical instrument is called kubing.

Fiction: Artifacts He Unearthed III

September 14, 2017, Thursday
How It Ended
Posted at 14:00 by Rolly Jude Ortega
Labels: Dumaguete, Jovy Almero

I’ve been walking around Dumaguete City the whole morning. I had budbod and sikwati in the public market, sat on a bench in Rizal Boulevard, and of course visited the Silliman University Anthropological Museum, which houses on its second floor some burial jars from Kulaman Plateau.

I wish to visit the Writers Village in Valencia, where Jovy, our co-fellows, and I spent three weeks in May 2014 for the 53rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop. But transportation is difficult. Besides, I need to have some rest. The trip from Sultan Kudarat was tiring physically, and revisiting what happened to Jovy in Kulaman Plateau is tiring emotionally. Here are the rest of his blog posts:

May 14, 2015, Wednesday
A Witness to Violence
Posted at 10:38 by Jovy Almero
Labels: Kulaman Plateau, massacre

I was thinking that two things could happen last Monday night. First, we would spend the whole night worrying about the murderers but they would not come. Instead, it’s the police officers from the town who would come and take away the fugitive—without any fuss. Second, the murderers would come, they and the soldiers would exchange fires, and everyone, or at least many, in the camp would die.

None of that happened. What happened instead was that before the authorities came, the Manobo man fled, or he tried to. A soldier ran after him and shot him in the leg. He had to be rushed to the town for medical treatment. Everything was a blur to me now. I just found myself offering my company to two of the soldiers and Maya. The Manobo man kept on thrashing about, trying to run away, so he had to be tied up between the soldier driving the motorcycle and me, who was seated at the back. Maya rode another motorcycle with the other soldier.

On our way, the Manobo kept on struggling and cursing in his native tongue. I held him and told him in Tagalog that we would not let him be harmed further, that he had to cooperate, that everything would be all right. I’m not sure if he understood me; some of the Manobo men I’ve met could fairly speak Tagalog for some reason. Or perhaps he just ran out of strength. In any case, he stopped resisting and constantly groaned in pain. Somewhere along the way, we met the police officers, who were thankfully in a four-by-four pickup truck. We moved the injured man to the vehicle and proceeded to town. Maya cradled him in her lap.

I’m in the municipal hall right now. Maya and I have been holed up in an office here since Tuesday morning, after the Manobo man underwent surgery in the local hospital. Fortunately, the government doctor, whose duty is just two days a week, was here when we brought the Manobo man, and the bullet did not come in contact with any bone, so the patient did not have to be brought to a bigger hospital in the plains for treatment.

For safety reasons, the rest of the exploration team has come here in the town proper and staying in the mayor’s residence. That’s why I get to blog right now. The others brought with them my stuff. I don’t know now what’s going to happen now to the project. I assume we won’t be going back to the excavation site anytime soon.

Policemen are interrogating the fugitive this morning. I don’t know what would come out of it. The Manobo man might not rat out his companions. Yesterday, Maya told me that he fled because he didn’t really want to surrender to the authorities. He approached Maya because he wanted her to help him get to the plains, to run away from the crime, not to do right by the victims or anything. He went with Maya to the camp because he wasn’t aware that there were soldiers with us.

The man is not remorseful of what he and his companions did to the Peliba family. He told Maya that the Pelibas, especially the wife, disrespected and even humiliated some Dulangan Manobo. Fely Peliba was a shrewd businesswoman. She had a lease on a wide track of land owned by a Dulangan Manobo and she was claiming that the huge trees on the land were part of the deal, that she could have the trees felled and turned to logs. The quarreling parties had referred the dispute to local authorities, but Fely Peliba would not listen to anyone and insisted on having things her way. Thus, the killing.

The Manobo man has confessed everything to Maya, but I’m not sure if he would do the same thing to the authorities or if the authorities would be able to wring out the truth from him.

May 15, 2015, Thursday
Honor and Killing
Posted at 4:12 by Jovy Almero
Labels: Kulaman Plateau, violence, Rolly’s blog

The Manobo man did not fess up to anything. It seems that he would be going to the provincial jail alone as soon as his gunshot wound heals.

Once again, I found myself searching Rolly’s blog for answers. Two of his posts narrate similar but less violent incidents. Once in the late 1990s, a Visayan peddler and his wife went around a Dulangan Manobo village to collect payments for the merchandise that was taken from them on credit the month before. When one Manobo man could not pay the couple, the Visayan woman berated the Manobo man in front of his wife and children. The man bore the humiliation in silence. The couple was not able to go home. They were found dead the next morning beside the road, their bodies slashed by a bolo, their money untouched.

Rolly, quoting a book, mentions in his blog two or three other incidents where a Dulangan Manobo kills a Visayan because the latter humiliated the former. The Peliba massacre seems to fit the mold. The more I think of the Pelibas, the clearer it comes to me what happened when the archaeologists and I dropped by their sari-sari store. Fely Peliba was nice to us—extra nice. Unlike most of the women in the village, her face was pink, probably because she was using an exfoliant. Her eyebrows were plucked and her nails were polished. She spoke to us in a heavily accented Tagalog.

While we were still approaching the store, however, we heard Fely Peliba scolding someone inside. In my ears she sounded really mad, and I made out a Visayan curse or two. She was still scowling when she turned to us, and then upon realizing that we were not her ordinary customers, upon seeing that we looked as though we were from the plains, a big smile formed in her lips, showing us a gold-capped front tooth. I realized that she had been scolding a young man. It must have been John Peter Peliba, the 20-year-old nephew of her husband who also became a victim of the massacre. The young man was squatting on the floor, scooping with his hand back to a sack the heap of rice that seemed to have fallen on the floor, while Fely Peliba took our orders.

Based on that short encounter, I’d say that Fely Peliba was capable of tongue-lashing someone. I would not be surprised if she indeed haughtily insisted to the original owners of the land that the trees belonged to her and she could do anything with them as she pleased, that she could chainsaw all the trees there if she wanted to.

Policemen invited me to the precinct this morning for some questioning. I told them everything my eyes saw while the Manobo man was in the camp, but I did not say anything about him that I learned from Maya. Whenever pushed for more details, I told the officers “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember.”

September 15, 2017, Thursday
Prints We Leave Behind
Posted at 9:00 by Rolly Jude Ortega
Labels: Dumaguete, Jovy Almero, burial jars

Until now, the trial for the murder case is still ongoing. Two more Manobo men have been apprehended and taken to the provincial jail. At least eight of the suspects are still at large. The blog posts by Jovy have been presented in court as evidence, but it couldn’t be determined as of yet if the account would have an impact on the trial.

The research led by Maya Difuntorum was halted for two months, but she formed a new team soon after. With tight security, they were able to finish the project seven weeks after it resumed. They were able to unearth 17 complete jars (meaning, with lids), 22 pieces of jars only, and 5 pieces of lids only, along with fragments of human bones, boar’s teeth, metal bracelets, and some pottery. Archaeologists around the country hailed the project as the most productive in many years.

Jovy was part of the new team. Of the original team, it was only Maya and he who decided to come back to Kulaman Plateau. Camille Rivera told me that Jovy was thinking of staying in Kulaman Plateau for good to help improve the welfare of the Dulangan Manobo.

Months after the archaeological excavation came to a close, while Jovy was involved in a coffee propagation project for the Dulangan Manobo, he contracted malaria and was not able to survive. He died a few days before Camille Rivera gave birth to their child, Magnolia.

When I went back to Kulaman Plateau to take Jovy’s body to Naga, I started to re-evaluate my priorities. I remembered that I had a self-imposed duty to serve my hometown. I had once dreamed of helping the Dulangan Manobo achieve their ancestral domain claim and preserve their culture. To regain my old self, and in honor of Jovy, I decided to come back home and stay there.

Slowly I’m seeing the fruits of my advocacy, especially on the limestone burial jars. Kulaman Plateau now has a modest-sized museum that houses the most recently excavated artifacts. Some institutions and private collectors who have the jars in their possession have also agreed to return all or part of their collection to Kulaman Plateau. That’s why I’m here today in Dumaguete. Silliman University is giving half of the Kulaman jars in its museum back to where they came from. After more than 40 years here in Negros, the burial jars are coming back to Mindanao.

Jovy and our co-fellows in the Silliman workshop called the burial jars “pots.” I did not take offense because I knew they were just teasing me. They knew that the pots are more than just that. Sometimes, when I meet my co-fellows, we tell one another that Jovy died digging for pots. Jovy wouldn’t take offense. He knows we’re just teasing him. He did dig for pots, and we know he did more than just that.

Manobo Swords

The weapon at the top is a tabas. The one at the bottom is a bangkong. They both look deadly to me, but the tabas must be purely ceremonial, for based on its definition in the Kitab (Dulangan Manobo Customary Law), it is “used for war dance and for dowry.”

Fiction: Artifacts He Unearthed II

September 13, 2017, Tuesday
People We Remember
Posted at 9:00 by Rolly Jude Ortega
Labels: Dumaguete, Jovy Almero, Kulaman Plateau, binusaya

As I’ve told you yesterday, I originally didn’t have an access to Jovy’s blog, but one of the people whom it was shared was Camille Rivera, my co-fellow with Jovy in the 2014 Silliman workshop and the mother of Jovy’s child. Camille felt that I had to read the blog, and indeed, reading what Jovy wrote made me re-evaluate the things that truly mattered to me.

I am sharing with you now Jovy’s partial account of his life in Kulaman Plateau with permission from Camille and Jovy’s family. The blog was short-lived. It only saw seven entries in the course of two weeks. But it was written at a crucial time and dealt with a sensitive matter.

Jovy wrote several unflattering statements about me in his blog. But that was just the way he was. In writing, his language was normally crass and he called people names. In face-to-face conversations, however, Jovy was rather laconic and admittedly shy. I knew he respected me—was even fond of me—because of his consistent use of “Dulangan Manobo” and “Kulaman Plateau.”

He knew that I was particular with those terms. I had told him before that there are several tribes in Mindanao named Manobo, the languages of whom are mutually unintelligible and the ways of life barely identical, so one must be more specific when referring to a particular group. Also, “Kulaman” was the old name of the central village and seat of government of the Municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino, but I had told Jovy that I preferred to use “Kulaman Plateau” because it is the term used by archaeologists in their published academic papers in 1960s and 1970s.

May 11, 2015, Sunday
To Lose One’s Heart
Posted at 08:06 by Jovy Almero
Labels: Kulaman Plateau, binusaya, Rolly’s blog

I’ve been reading Rolly’s abandoned blog about his pot fetish—or, to afford the prick some respect, his fascination with the 1,500-year-old limestone burial jars that were discovered in 1960s in Kulaman Plateau and then taken to Cebu, Dumaguete, San Francisco, Belgium, and other parts of the world. I checked the blog for some information about the Dulangan Manobo, the natives in this plateau. I felt that if I knew them a little better, I would be able to put things in context. I would be able to weigh the threat of those Manobo murderers.

I’m not sure if I did the right thing. I came upon some posts in the blog about the headhunting tendencies of the Dulangan Manobo, and the information only scared the shit out of me instead of making me warm up with the natives. According to one post, there are some violent Dulangan Manobo who are called binusaya. These men kill people almost indiscriminately. The example that struck me the most is when a binusaya mourns for the death of a close family member. To release his grief, he goes out of the house and kills the first non-family member he sees. And the cranky men justify their actions rather poetically. They claim that death and other tragic events cause one to “lose one’s heart” and killing—only killing—could cause one to “gain one’s heart.”

If it’s any consolation, the massacre does not appear to be a random act of killing perpetrated by binusayas. Rolly stated in his blog that a binusaya normally acts alone and on a whim. He does not operate with a group and on purpose. It’s really possible that the murder, as rumor has it, was due to a disagreement between the victims and the killers on a piece of land. Though the Pelibas were not as rich as a logging concessionaire, the family is said to be involved in a micro-scale land grabbing. When Visayans migrated to Mindanao in the1950s and 1960s, indigenous tribes were tricked into selling their lands for ridiculously low prices. The problem persists until today.

I’m sorry. I have to cut short this post right now. There’s a commotion of some kind outside my tent. I’ve got to check it out.

May 12, 2015, Monday
The Fugitive and the Archaeologist
Posted at 01:15 by Jovy Almero
Labels: Kulaman Plateau, massacre

It’s the wee hours of the morning, and none of us here in the camp is asleep yet. The shouting voices I heard last night turned out to be that of an archaeologist and the soldiers. What happened hasn’t fully sunk in yet, and I don’t know where to start.

Anyway, here’s what happened, as told to me by Maya, the fifty-year-old lead archaeologist. Yesterday, at dusk, on her way out of the cave, she was approached by one of the Dulangan Manobo who attacked the Peliba residence. The man had no gun. He had nothing but the tattered clothes he was wearing. And he was scared for his life. He was running from both the authorities and his fellow murderers. He had a minor role in attack. He doesn’t know how to use a gun, so he was given charge of looting the store and carrying one of the chainsaws. The group brought their loot some place, and when he returned to his home to check on his family, he found policemen waiting for him. They interrogated him, and he claimed innocence. He lied through his teeth. His companions, however, became suspicious of him. When he sensed they were planning to dispatch him to keep their secret a secret, he fled. He didn’t surrender to the authorities. He was afraid that if he did it, he would be hurt, even killed. He thought instead of asking for help from the outsiders who were looking for burial jars. He had met them before, and he had found them trustworthy enough. Some of them could carry a conversation in the Manobo language. So he went to the project site.

When the soldiers learned of the identity of our guest, they wanted to maul him. It turned out that one of the soldiers is a cousin of Edgardo Peliba, the father of the family that was killed. Maya did not let the soldiers hurt the Manobo man. She told them that if they so much as laid a finger on the man, she would have them removed from service. She claimed she could do it in no time. I don’t know if she was telling the truth, but she uttered her words with so much conviction and at some points hysterics that the soldiers were reduced to swearing and pointing at the Manobo man.

The other archaeologists got worried because if the other murderers were after the Manobo man, they might be able to follow him to our camp. The murderers might kill the man and us. The archaeologists did not want the fugitive around, but Maya and the soldiers did not want him to go either. We could not come up with a solution. The soldiers suggested that two of them stay in the camp while the other two take the Manobo man to the police precinct or the municipal hall right that night. They had a motorcycle with them. But Maya objected. Without telling us, we knew that she did not trust the soldiers, that she was thinking that they would kill the man on their way to town. She consented on the condition that she goes with the soldiers. The other archaeologists thought the trip would be too dangerous for her, so they took back their original suggestion.

It seems that the only thing we can do is wait out the night, and that is what we are doing. The soldiers and Maya have radioed the mayor and the chief of police about our situation, and they said they would immediately send men to come here and take the Manobo man to the center of the town. The men are expected to be here an hour or so from now. For now, we are hoping that the murderers would not get here first.

Manobo Knives

The Dulangan Manobo people call a knife gelat. For a penknife

or a carving knife, they use the term ukab-ukab.

This knife is a salungsong, used to clear weedy areas.

Fiction: Artifacts He Unearthed I

Exactly two years ago this month, I attended the 53rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop as a fellow for fiction. As part of the three-week event, my co-fellows and I were asked to create an anthology of our works. There was no deadline for it, but my batch decided to have a finished output before the three weeks ended. In between sessions--both workshop sessions and drinking sessions--we scribbled new poems and stories or revised slightly older ones. At the closing ceremony, we were able to release printed and bound copies of our anthology, which we titled Interstices, a byword during discussions.

The electronic version of the anthology was made available in the Silliman University website, but it was taken down a year after, as a new batch was ushered [sniff]. So to give you a glimpse of Interstices, and to mark my second year as an alumnus of SUNWW, I'm posting here the story that I contributed. The story is coming out in three parts; the second and third parts will appear next Monday and the Monday after that. If you enjoy reading this blog, I believe you will enjoy the story too, for it is set in Kulaman Plateau  and has Dulangan Manobo and burial jar elements. It also has an unusual format:


September 12, 2017, Monday

There Was Once a Friend
Posted at 9:00 by Rolly Jude Ortega
Labels: Dumaguete, Jovy Almero, Kulaman Plateau, burial jars

More than two years ago, my friend Jovy Almero decided to spend the summer in Kulaman Plateau, my hometown in Sultan Kudarat Province. He was there as a member of the team that excavated a cave for Neolithic limestone burial jars. He did not do any actual digging since he was not an archaeologist. He was a writer, and he was there to document the project for the Ceramics Society of Southeast Asia, a private organization that was one of the sponsors of the exploration.

The job was supposed to be mine, but since I was still doing my MA thesis here in Silliman that time, I could not go back home. Jovy, a native of Naga and my co-fellow in the 2014 Silliman University National Writers Workshop, happened to be in between jobs when the archaeological exploration was about to commence. He also shared my passion in many things cultural and political, so I emailed him about the opportunity, and to my delight and gratitude, he accepted the offer. With lust for adventure, love for life, and a huge black backpack bearing down on his lanky frame, he roughed it up in Kulaman. He was twenty-nine.

In his fourth or fifth week in the plateau, Jovy decided to create a personal blog. It could be read only by five or six people, and I was not one of them. I came to know about the existence of the blog long after it was created, a month or so after Jovy passed away, and though Jovy was in the plateau to write about burial jars, the blog is not about the archaeological artifacts. What prompted him to reach out to the outside world, or at least to people he felt understood him, was a gruesome killing.

May 7, 2015, Thursday
In Cold Blood
Posted at 13:42 by Jovy Almero
Labels: Kulaman Plateau, massacre, Manobo, personal

You must have heard about the massacre right now. It’s on national news. It happened a village away from where our project is. I’m not sure yet of the extent of the danger, and much as I want to assure you of my safety, I can’t. The archaeologists I’m with, though, have requested for additional security. We are expecting two more soldiers to join us tonight, in addition to the two who have been with us since we got here in Kulaman Plateau, almost a month ago.

I know nothing more than you do. Whatever I’ve learned so far about the gruesome killing I just got online, through my satellite-dish Internet connection and from websites of TV stations. As I’ve told you in previous posts, this town is fucking remote. The roads here are so bad that the next village might as well be half the world away. Barangay Tinalon, where the massacre happened, shares a boundary with Barangay Kuden, where the archaeologists I’m with are excavating Neolithic burial jars, but the crime scene is three long hours away by skaylab (public utility motorcycle) from our location. Still, we are surrounded by the Dulangan Manobo, and though they have been friendly with us so far, and they seem to be as disturbed with the news as we are, we are not really sure if they have a connection to the killers.

The news says that the other night, a group of not less than 10 Dulangan Manobo gunned down in cold blood a family of Visayans. All six people who were in the house were later found dead: the husband, 46; the wife, 42; two of the children, both male, 18 and 24; the wife’s distant cousin, male, 35; the husband’s nephew, male, 20. The last two were stay-in helpers in the family business. The family owned a sari-sari store of considerable size, and the store was reportedly raided by the killers, none of whom has been apprehended yet. The missing items in the store include cash estimated at ten thousand pesos and two secondhand chainsaws that were bought on the same day the killing happened.

I think I’ve spent enough time on this blog, which is personal. I must get back to work. I’ve got to email my bosses to update them of what’s going on around here. See you. I’ll create another post in a few days. If you want to know where I got my facts about the massacre, check out inquirer.net, abs-cbn.com, and rappler.com. The articles on the websites, though, contain the same bare information. Their source is apparently the same, the provincial director of the PNP here in Sultan Kudarat.

May 9, 2015, Friday
The May Massacre
Posted at 15:45 by Jovy Almero
Labels: Kulaman Plateau, massacre, Manobo, personal

I’m supposed to be blogging for every few days, not every day, but I learned of something that I feel I have to share with you right away. The family that was massacred Tuesday night? I’ve actually met them. I’ve been to the crime scene before the crime happened.

On the second weekend of our stay here in Kulaman Plateau, the archaeologists decided to unwind a little in a cave resort in Barangay Kuden, and we dropped by the Pelibas’ sari-sari store on our way to the resort. Peliba, by the way, is the victims’ family name. My companions and I had some Coke and biscuits, and it was Fely Peliba, the wife, herself who served us. I only remember this last night when one of our cooks, a Visayan, who went with us to the resort, reminded the archaeologists and me.

I heard from a village official that the local authorities have asked for help “halin sa ubos” (from down there), referring to investigators from the provincial headquarters of PNP or even agents from the regional office of NBI. Hearing the development—or the non-development—frustrated me. Ineptitude of local officials always irks me, though I must add that I’m not singling out Kulaman Plateau. The problem is present in almost all parts of the country.

Questions hound my mind. How were those Dulangan Manobo able to get hold of guns? Why haven’t anyone of them been caught? If I were the mayor of the town, I would have been insulted. I wouldn’t allow any group to carry guns and commit crimes right under my nose. It’s 2015, for crying out loud. The natives here already use formalin for their dead, instead of letting the cadaver rot in a coffin for years and then putting the bones in a limestone urn. I’m tempted to lay out a timeline of human rights milestones, but you get what I mean. It’s 2000-fucking-fifteen.

May 10, 2015, Saturday
The Existential Question
Posted at 05:35 by Jovy Almero
Labels: Kulaman Plateau, Rolly, Rolly’s pots

The archaeologists and I were barely able to sleep last night. I heard them tossing and turning inside their own tents, and when I went out twice or thrice for coffee, I saw each time at least one of them doing the same, sipping silently from the mug, glancing warily every now and then at the darkness.

With us now are four soldiers from the 108th Infantry Brigade, guarding us day and night, and some barangay tanods who drop by at around midnight as part of their roving routine. Still, we don’t feel safe enough.

If Rolly, the one who persuaded me to take this job, were with me right now, I’d bash a burial jar on his skull. The prick. He said it’s safe here, this being his hometown and him knowing the place so well. He said he is friends with the mayor and the mayor would do everything to ensure the safety of the archaeological team. Days after the massacre, nothing and no one has assured us that we’re free and far from danger. I should have known better. Mayors could not be trusted and Rolly could not have been friends with anyone. I can’t believe what I’ve gotten myself into. Why the fuck am I here?!

I can now see what would be carved on my tombstone: “He died digging for pots.” Shit.

Manobo Fishing Tools

To catch fish, the Dulangan Manobo people use a siyuk, also called takep. I believe this is useful only in spots that are teeming with fish or in a fishpond that has been divested of much of its water.

Whew. This is another item in Delesan Menubo that I missed to record the name.