Rùnsày
An Inner Traveler’s Notes on An Indigenous People’s Filiation under the Moon
An Inner Traveler’s Notes on An Indigenous People’s Filiation under the Moon
Ancestral lands / domains shall include such concepts of territories which cover not only the physical environment but the total environment including the spiritual and cultural bonds to the areas which the Indigenous Cultural Communities / Indigenous Peoples possess, occupy and use and to which they have claims of ownership.
- Sec. 4, R.A. 8371, “The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997”
This is probably how creation starts: Before the light, everything is washed by rain and wind in the frightening dark – leaving in its track a brand new landscape that would then wait for the coming of light. At times, light was not to come from the blistering sun that arrives after a long twelve-hours wait. In the most primeval ceremonies, light comes from the watery light that arrives between the two blinding streaks of daylight…
On the last Sunday between the gregarious celebration of Puerto Princesa City’s fiesta and the more somber yule festivity, I traveled with a group of advocacy journalists some 63 kilometers south of the provincial capital.
Our trip to the town of Aborlan was to become my unexpected Christmas gift for 2003.
Despite being born in Puerto Princesa, I have a rather complicated socio-cultural upbringing. I didn’t grow up in the city I have currently adopted as my temporary outpost. My parents both taught at the Palawan National Agricultural College (PNAC, before it became State Polytechnic College of Palawan, SPCP) based in barangay San Juan of Aborlan town and I spent a great deal of my growing up years there. Beyond the tree-dotted and cattle strewn campus of PNAC, about an hour’s trek to the east is a two-kilometer wide beach where I spent childhood years learning to swim on weekend mornings. Eventually, we had to move back to the provincial capital when my parents retired from teaching.
Jean Genet, 20th century’s maverick novelist and great friend of the Palestinian cause, used to say that people should never leave their homelands. Ostensibly this was because he didn’t want the way his fellow French countrymen treated Africans and Arabs way back in the beginning of the century. Just as the Americans lassoed the Pacific islands into commonwealths, French and British administrators were busy centralizing its colonies in the African continent. With this contact of divergent cultures came economic and political hardships for the dispossessed. But what should natives do when the last remaining bastions of what they call their homelands become seeding grounds for settlers of an encroaching civilization?
Flash forward a quarter turn of the globe to the east: Palawan. Long before other peoples came to this land, the indigenous peoples (Tagbanua, Pala’wan, Batak) lived in this vast landscape of mountains, foothills, coastal flatlands, and the sea. This may look like a very large area to live in. But for the Tagbanua, each of these geographical corridors were not disparate places for their lives’ toils. From the mountains and foothills, they got light timber and rattan for their homes. On the wide flatlands bridging the sea and the mountains, they formed settlement villages and swidden farms. From the sea, they sometimes fished and gleaned for the wide variety of crustaceans in tidal flats. It was impossible for the people to stay put in one place during their entire lives as the bounty of each of the geographical corridors were dependent on the rhythm of the natural world.
At around 3:30 in the afternoon our group arrived in Iraan, where we fetched Masikampo Rolando Cursod (the Tagbanua village head in this part of the province) who then guided us to the place where the village runsay was to be held. The very same beach of my unsuspecting childhood.
Under the fronds of coconuts in a tract of coastal land which had once been a flat coastal bushland covered with cogon grass, the gathering took place. Runsay, the yearly thanksgiving and panata of the Tagbanuas.
The clearing was just a few steps away from the mouth of the Iraan river, one of the rivers that flow through the flat hilly land of Aborlan town. Aborlan had been the place of tribal relocation during the dawn of American occupation during the 1900’s. An agricultural vocational school was founded here by the Thomasite John Henry Finnigan in 1912. Principal Finnigan would eventually get killed during a prison uprising in Iwahig.
Our team arrived at around four in the afternoon just as four village elderly women of the Iraan Tagbanua community were preparing offerings for the night’s ceremony. They were seated on plastic mats laid on the ground. Each was busy preparing curious bits and pieces with intricate whorls of their fingers. One of the four elderly women brought out the contents of her plastic tote-bag on the makeshift ground-mat: a kunit (a native ginger, orangey in color); a mama’un (a betel nut, my citified eyes have seen for the first time); a partially dried rinsab (a native tobacco leaf); a bag of rice grains; and a mother-of-pearl shell containing apog (powdery lime for the native cigar they call sigep). A native chick was chirping inside a small net-bag near her lap. Another elderly was curling the reeds of an unopened young nipa frond by continuously folding each into overlapping pinch-size squares. The other two were also busy with the intricate preparation of their family offerings, mainly the mentioned native cigars (one for each family member and an extra one for another unborn soul just in case) and rice grains. One can hear them chat and laugh casually while their hands mellifluously went on with the afternoons chore beside the women’s lean-to. (A second lean-to, for the male villagers, was still being put-up when we arrived.) This familial casualness was to become the tone for the entire duration of the ceremony that was to take place that night.
At dusk, other villagers trickled in and construction of a balsa (bamboo raft) began.
With not much activity going on among the village folk, our group huddled at the beach, where we had our late afternoon snack. The tide was still out, we could see two pre-teen boys at the water beyond the amorphous tidal flat. Soon, concerned with the waning daylight, we decided to eat an early dinner.
The wind had been strong coming from the sea when we arrived. It continued on till early evening. This very elemental atmosphere of the place had always kept me on my toes whenever I am near far flung beaches. I experienced a sudden downpour in this same beach when I was a pre-adolescent 12-year old boy. Pea-sized raindrops hurtled to an almost horizontal trajectory powered by blistering wind from the sea. My companion and I had to seek shelter behind one of the kakawate patches so numerous in the grassland flanking the beach. We were like basang-sisiw, so to speak. After about ten minutes, this experience of nature at its frightening extreme ended. I would later ask my mother if it had rained at the campus in the inner-land, and when she answered with a questioning “No. Why?” I was forced to tell her about my clandestine walk to the beach. I learned from her, that coastal phenomenon was a subasko.
Early that evening, we got to experience a mild subasko. Everyone in my group (huddled inside our two tents – set up just beyond the outer periphery of the clearing made for the ceremony) was probably crossing his or her fingers for the rain and wind to abate lest it lead to a cancellation of the night’s ceremony. Knowing it always ends, I sat silently as nature’s extreme battered the fabric of the tent with a sound that was like a rain-maker being tipped-over. The sound of a thousand pebbles – music to sleepy ears.
When it ended, it was already dark outside without the moon in sight. This is the twenty-second of December – two days after the lunar solstice. The moon was expected to rise just before eight.
Other Tagbanua villagers and lowland settlers from the neighborhood continued to arrive. I have heard from accounts of previous runsay’s, specifically the one performed near another river to the south of Iraan, that village lasses and lads have been making the ceremony an excuse for non-sanctioned adolescent enterprise like dating. Inebriated boys of the community have also started to arrive with the Gibbous moon. Several times during the night, the village elderly had to halt their prayers and chanting to wait for drunken hecklers to leave the place of ceremony.
At one o’clock in the morning the send-off of the offerings commenced. The moon, hanging just a few degrees east of the zenith, bathed the beach and sky in diffused gray with a bare suggestion of blue. I licked my right pinky and pointed it up to the sky – I could not sense any wind as two village men carried the balsa to the softly breaking surf some two hundred meters from the tide line. Immediately after it was left to drift, the balsa slowly edged south, its wax-fueled fire barely getting a whiff of wind. It gets dreary as one watches this scenery, and soon everyone retreats back to the clearing under the coconut trees as the prayers resume.
Women and men held hands together to form a circle, stepping fore and forth while they recited Pinala’wan verses. The men would lead a verse which would then be answered by a repetition of the same verse by the women in the rotating circle. Soon, only the close family members would remain. The village merrymakers have gone to sleep. But this sing-song exchange of verses would go on every beat of the hour till about five in the morning, until possibly all the requests for filial favor have been chanted out loud in the rotating circle.
At six a.m. our group packed our tents and trekked back to Sitio Old Site inside the SPCP campus. The village women were gone and the old men left behind helped us carry our belongings to our waiting van. A wooden pole beribboned with the curled nipa fronds stood near the middle of the clearing, a solitary sign for the day’s newcomers, unseen or seen.
Walking through this old familiar trail, I was buoyant for having finally witnessed this ceremony that has gained a mythical status in my life as a young lowlander kristiyano in the settlement town. Left with the memory of the unperturbed gentle gaze of the old village woman whom my companions called Nanay Anita, I knew what the answer was to a nagging advocacy question: With the babaylan gone, what happens to the traditional ceremony?
It goes on. Or one way or another, in some future time, the link of filiation will be fired up again. Each of the four elderly women we have chanced upon on that Sunday afternoon had stories of how they decided to continue their filial rites to the unseen and unnamed but ever powerful god through the mediation of their ancestors. Each had been sick with chronic malady for a couple of years before. Those were the intervening years between the deaths of their fathers who were traditional babaylans of the village and the resumption of runsay in early 1990’s.
Still, what could possibly cut this intimate cycle of filiation among a dispossessed people? The weather perhaps. As I have mentioned, we were really afraid of the mild subasko we experienced that night.
Or maybe, the land. When the indigenous peoples have no more place to perform their sacred rites, this sacred filiation will finally end.
- Sec. 4, R.A. 8371, “The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997”
This is probably how creation starts: Before the light, everything is washed by rain and wind in the frightening dark – leaving in its track a brand new landscape that would then wait for the coming of light. At times, light was not to come from the blistering sun that arrives after a long twelve-hours wait. In the most primeval ceremonies, light comes from the watery light that arrives between the two blinding streaks of daylight…
On the last Sunday between the gregarious celebration of Puerto Princesa City’s fiesta and the more somber yule festivity, I traveled with a group of advocacy journalists some 63 kilometers south of the provincial capital.
Our trip to the town of Aborlan was to become my unexpected Christmas gift for 2003.
Despite being born in Puerto Princesa, I have a rather complicated socio-cultural upbringing. I didn’t grow up in the city I have currently adopted as my temporary outpost. My parents both taught at the Palawan National Agricultural College (PNAC, before it became State Polytechnic College of Palawan, SPCP) based in barangay San Juan of Aborlan town and I spent a great deal of my growing up years there. Beyond the tree-dotted and cattle strewn campus of PNAC, about an hour’s trek to the east is a two-kilometer wide beach where I spent childhood years learning to swim on weekend mornings. Eventually, we had to move back to the provincial capital when my parents retired from teaching.
Jean Genet, 20th century’s maverick novelist and great friend of the Palestinian cause, used to say that people should never leave their homelands. Ostensibly this was because he didn’t want the way his fellow French countrymen treated Africans and Arabs way back in the beginning of the century. Just as the Americans lassoed the Pacific islands into commonwealths, French and British administrators were busy centralizing its colonies in the African continent. With this contact of divergent cultures came economic and political hardships for the dispossessed. But what should natives do when the last remaining bastions of what they call their homelands become seeding grounds for settlers of an encroaching civilization?
Flash forward a quarter turn of the globe to the east: Palawan. Long before other peoples came to this land, the indigenous peoples (Tagbanua, Pala’wan, Batak) lived in this vast landscape of mountains, foothills, coastal flatlands, and the sea. This may look like a very large area to live in. But for the Tagbanua, each of these geographical corridors were not disparate places for their lives’ toils. From the mountains and foothills, they got light timber and rattan for their homes. On the wide flatlands bridging the sea and the mountains, they formed settlement villages and swidden farms. From the sea, they sometimes fished and gleaned for the wide variety of crustaceans in tidal flats. It was impossible for the people to stay put in one place during their entire lives as the bounty of each of the geographical corridors were dependent on the rhythm of the natural world.
At around 3:30 in the afternoon our group arrived in Iraan, where we fetched Masikampo Rolando Cursod (the Tagbanua village head in this part of the province) who then guided us to the place where the village runsay was to be held. The very same beach of my unsuspecting childhood.
Under the fronds of coconuts in a tract of coastal land which had once been a flat coastal bushland covered with cogon grass, the gathering took place. Runsay, the yearly thanksgiving and panata of the Tagbanuas.
The clearing was just a few steps away from the mouth of the Iraan river, one of the rivers that flow through the flat hilly land of Aborlan town. Aborlan had been the place of tribal relocation during the dawn of American occupation during the 1900’s. An agricultural vocational school was founded here by the Thomasite John Henry Finnigan in 1912. Principal Finnigan would eventually get killed during a prison uprising in Iwahig.
Our team arrived at around four in the afternoon just as four village elderly women of the Iraan Tagbanua community were preparing offerings for the night’s ceremony. They were seated on plastic mats laid on the ground. Each was busy preparing curious bits and pieces with intricate whorls of their fingers. One of the four elderly women brought out the contents of her plastic tote-bag on the makeshift ground-mat: a kunit (a native ginger, orangey in color); a mama’un (a betel nut, my citified eyes have seen for the first time); a partially dried rinsab (a native tobacco leaf); a bag of rice grains; and a mother-of-pearl shell containing apog (powdery lime for the native cigar they call sigep). A native chick was chirping inside a small net-bag near her lap. Another elderly was curling the reeds of an unopened young nipa frond by continuously folding each into overlapping pinch-size squares. The other two were also busy with the intricate preparation of their family offerings, mainly the mentioned native cigars (one for each family member and an extra one for another unborn soul just in case) and rice grains. One can hear them chat and laugh casually while their hands mellifluously went on with the afternoons chore beside the women’s lean-to. (A second lean-to, for the male villagers, was still being put-up when we arrived.) This familial casualness was to become the tone for the entire duration of the ceremony that was to take place that night.
At dusk, other villagers trickled in and construction of a balsa (bamboo raft) began.
With not much activity going on among the village folk, our group huddled at the beach, where we had our late afternoon snack. The tide was still out, we could see two pre-teen boys at the water beyond the amorphous tidal flat. Soon, concerned with the waning daylight, we decided to eat an early dinner.
The wind had been strong coming from the sea when we arrived. It continued on till early evening. This very elemental atmosphere of the place had always kept me on my toes whenever I am near far flung beaches. I experienced a sudden downpour in this same beach when I was a pre-adolescent 12-year old boy. Pea-sized raindrops hurtled to an almost horizontal trajectory powered by blistering wind from the sea. My companion and I had to seek shelter behind one of the kakawate patches so numerous in the grassland flanking the beach. We were like basang-sisiw, so to speak. After about ten minutes, this experience of nature at its frightening extreme ended. I would later ask my mother if it had rained at the campus in the inner-land, and when she answered with a questioning “No. Why?” I was forced to tell her about my clandestine walk to the beach. I learned from her, that coastal phenomenon was a subasko.
Early that evening, we got to experience a mild subasko. Everyone in my group (huddled inside our two tents – set up just beyond the outer periphery of the clearing made for the ceremony) was probably crossing his or her fingers for the rain and wind to abate lest it lead to a cancellation of the night’s ceremony. Knowing it always ends, I sat silently as nature’s extreme battered the fabric of the tent with a sound that was like a rain-maker being tipped-over. The sound of a thousand pebbles – music to sleepy ears.
When it ended, it was already dark outside without the moon in sight. This is the twenty-second of December – two days after the lunar solstice. The moon was expected to rise just before eight.
Other Tagbanua villagers and lowland settlers from the neighborhood continued to arrive. I have heard from accounts of previous runsay’s, specifically the one performed near another river to the south of Iraan, that village lasses and lads have been making the ceremony an excuse for non-sanctioned adolescent enterprise like dating. Inebriated boys of the community have also started to arrive with the Gibbous moon. Several times during the night, the village elderly had to halt their prayers and chanting to wait for drunken hecklers to leave the place of ceremony.
At one o’clock in the morning the send-off of the offerings commenced. The moon, hanging just a few degrees east of the zenith, bathed the beach and sky in diffused gray with a bare suggestion of blue. I licked my right pinky and pointed it up to the sky – I could not sense any wind as two village men carried the balsa to the softly breaking surf some two hundred meters from the tide line. Immediately after it was left to drift, the balsa slowly edged south, its wax-fueled fire barely getting a whiff of wind. It gets dreary as one watches this scenery, and soon everyone retreats back to the clearing under the coconut trees as the prayers resume.
Women and men held hands together to form a circle, stepping fore and forth while they recited Pinala’wan verses. The men would lead a verse which would then be answered by a repetition of the same verse by the women in the rotating circle. Soon, only the close family members would remain. The village merrymakers have gone to sleep. But this sing-song exchange of verses would go on every beat of the hour till about five in the morning, until possibly all the requests for filial favor have been chanted out loud in the rotating circle.
At six a.m. our group packed our tents and trekked back to Sitio Old Site inside the SPCP campus. The village women were gone and the old men left behind helped us carry our belongings to our waiting van. A wooden pole beribboned with the curled nipa fronds stood near the middle of the clearing, a solitary sign for the day’s newcomers, unseen or seen.
Walking through this old familiar trail, I was buoyant for having finally witnessed this ceremony that has gained a mythical status in my life as a young lowlander kristiyano in the settlement town. Left with the memory of the unperturbed gentle gaze of the old village woman whom my companions called Nanay Anita, I knew what the answer was to a nagging advocacy question: With the babaylan gone, what happens to the traditional ceremony?
It goes on. Or one way or another, in some future time, the link of filiation will be fired up again. Each of the four elderly women we have chanced upon on that Sunday afternoon had stories of how they decided to continue their filial rites to the unseen and unnamed but ever powerful god through the mediation of their ancestors. Each had been sick with chronic malady for a couple of years before. Those were the intervening years between the deaths of their fathers who were traditional babaylans of the village and the resumption of runsay in early 1990’s.
Still, what could possibly cut this intimate cycle of filiation among a dispossessed people? The weather perhaps. As I have mentioned, we were really afraid of the mild subasko we experienced that night.
Or maybe, the land. When the indigenous peoples have no more place to perform their sacred rites, this sacred filiation will finally end.
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