For hundreds, even thousands, of years, Cotabato Cordillera has
been home to the indigenous people called Manobo. There are at least five other
Manobo tribes in Mindanao, but they have no clear connection among one another.
Each tribe speaks a language that is unintelligible to the others.
Most Cotabato Manobo live in the western part of Sultan
Kudarat Province, but their territory extends to some parts of Maguindanao in
the north and South Cotabato and Sarangani in the south.
Some organizations classify the Cotabato Manobo into two
subgroups—those who dwell in the mountains and those who left and settled near
the sea. The former are called Dulangan Manobo and the latter Karagatan Manobo.
Dulangan is the name of a legendary
ancestor and is said to mean “a high place.” Though it may be a Manobo word, dulangan is not listed in existing
Manobo dictionaries. Neither is karagatan,
which is the Tagalog term for ocean.
In this blog, no differentiation is made between the Manobo
who live in the highlands and their relatives in coastal areas, since they
share ancestry and still have the same practices even up to this day. They are
collectively referred to here as Dulangan Manobo.
In 1979, the Summer Institute of Linguistics estimated the
population of the Dulangan Manobo at ten thousand. This figure, however, may
not be accurate, because the researchers stayed in a few villages only. In 1999,
the Indigenous Peoples Ministry of the Archdiocese of Cotabato conducted a more
comprehensive study, and the researchers were able to identify 102 Dulangan Manobo
settlements with a population of nearly forty thousand.
The Dulangan Manobo do not look much different from most Filipinos. Only, they are shorter and lighter in built and most of them have curly hair. It is getting more difficult to distinguish them from the newer settlers because many of them have started to wear modern clothing and adapt the ways of Christian settlers. Among the older Manobo folks, however, traditional ways are still evident. Their teeth and mouths are red from chewing betel quid, and the women often wear large loop earrings made of brass.