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.

February Updates

I’m having trouble with the comments feature of this blog. I activated it a few weeks ago, but the widget remains hidden. I’ll try to fix it when I find the time. Don’t hold your breath, however. For suggestions and queries, you may always e-mail me at rj2ortega@gmail.com.

Finally, I’m done writing the content of the Manobo Overview page. All the pages of this blog are now complete. For the information on Manobo location, population, and the like, I am greatly indebted to three sources: Violence and Christianization in Manoboland, a book by Fr. Rafael Tianero, OMI; Journey from the Margins, the Doctor of Ministry dissertation of Fr. Francis Efren Zabala, OMI; and Defending the Land, a study by the Tri-People Consortium for Peace, Progress and Development in Mindanao (Tricom).

While my posts are written in Kulaman Plateau, they are uploaded online in Isulan, the capital town of Sultan Kudarat, or in Koronadal City, South Cotabato. Kulaman has no internet connection of any kind anywhere, so at least once a month I “go down” the plateau to update this blog and attend to other matters. It’s a good thing that Blogger has a prescheduling option. I’m able to have a new post come out each week.

The citation format I used for the Bibliography page is based on The Chicago Manual of Style. I chose Chicago because I’m comfortable with it; it’s our bible when I was still working as a copy editor for a self-publishing company. Note, however, that most research journals and academic books use other styles and the publication details are ordered differently.