September 22, 2024, Manila- The wooden Ibaloi warrior sat in my crafts souvenir bag, keeping watch over the bus, and me-like Little Bear, in “The Indian in the Cupboard”. I would not have been surprised, had he come to life and begun murmuring fiercely in the Ibaloi dialect of the time. The history of the indigenous people of the vast Malay archipelago: East Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Timor L’Este and the Philippines mirrors that of the First Nations of the Americas. Indeed, they were all subjugated by the same European conquerors-and their successor cultures.

Mabel Cook Cole provides us with this account of the origin of the Igorot nations

“The Creation

Igorot

In the beginning there were no people on the earth.

Lumawig, the Great Spirit, came down from the sky and cut many reeds. He divided these into pairs which he placed in different parts of the world, and then he said to them, “You must speak.”

Immediately the reeds became people, and in each place was a man and a woman who could talk, but the language of each couple differed from that of the others.

Then Lumawig commanded each man and woman to marry, which they did. By and by there were many children, all speaking the same language as their parents. These, in turn, married and had many children. In this way there came to be many people on the earth.

Now Lumawig saw that there were several things which the people on the earth needed to use, so he set to work to supply them. He created salt, and told the inhabitants of one place to boil it down and sell it to their neighbors. But these people could not understand the directions of the Great Spirit, and the next time he visited them, they had not touched the salt.

Then he took it away from them and gave it to the people of a place called Mayinit. These did as he directed, and because of this he told them that they should always be owners of the salt, and that the other peoples must buy of them.

Then Lumawig went to the people of Bontoc and told them to get clay and make pots. They got the clay, but they did not understand the molding, and the jars were not well shaped. Because of their failure, Lumawig told them that they would always have to buy their jars, and he removed the pottery to Samoki. When he told the people there what to do, they did just as he said, and their jars were well shaped and beautiful. Then the Great Spirit saw that they were fit owners of the pottery, and he told them that they should always make many jars to sell.

In this way Lumawig taught the people and brought to them all the things which they now have.”-Source: Mabel Cook Cole, Philippine Folk Tales (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Company, 1916), pp. 99-101.

The First Nations of the Malay Archipelago, including the Philippines, have much the same richness in their cultures and in their societies, as have the First Nations of the Americas-and in fact, all the First Nations, across the globe. It was all too easy for Europeans and their settler descendants to have lost sight of this, because no sooner had a wave of Eurasian nomads come across from the steppes of the landmass’s center and settled down (the Celts, the Aryans, the Teutonic tribes, the Huns, Avars and Turks), than another wave of nomads, the Mongols being the last, came thundering across the plains, to conquer and disrupt society. Each successive wave of settlers disdained those they found in place. So did the ethos of conquest become ingrained in the European mindset-and in many ways, the wisdom of the indigenous people was discounted and overlooked.

I am grateful to have had a small amount of time with the Idaloi. I will be back, possibly as early as next month.

I came back to the capital, this afternoon. The return trip was made the way the average Filipino makes it-via a local bus, that stopped in four different depots and two rest areas. The bus picked up roadside passengers in the countryside between Baguio and Sison, which was the first rest area. We continued through small cities, like Urdaneta and Moncada, stopped at a second rest area, in Angeles, and still got to Pasay Victory Line Terminal in five hours. Now, there are four days to regroup and replenish, before going to Palawan, the “frontier” of the Philippines, in the southwest.

Here, as a bonus, is a collection of Igorot legends.