Calling names

WHAT is the power in naming?

We call into being what we name. Those we have no name for do not exist for us.

In class, I first read about the Kalanguya and the Ikalahan of Northern Luzon from Babette P. Resurreccion’s “Imagining identities: Ethnicity, gender and discourse in contesting resources”.

In her 1998 study, the Ikalahan reside in Imugan and nearby villages in the town of Sta. Fe in Nueva Vizcaya. The group lives inside the reserve of the Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF).

Outside the KEF reserve is the group that calls itself the Kalanguya. Fighting a land-grabbing attempt in 1970 to develop parts of Imugan into a mountain resort, the Kalanguya asserted the right of ancestral domain.

In 1974, the government granted instead the KEF a 25-year lease agreement that placed some 15,000 hectares of public forest land in Imugan under its stewardship.

In this competition for resources and other entitlements from the government, a “crisis of ethnic identity” arose among some of the Kalanguya and the Ikalahan: can a tribe have two names?

According to American colonial records, neither the Ikalahan nor the Kalanguya existed. Resurreccion traced that in their 1908 survey that became the basis for subdividing the Mountain Province and Nueva Vizcaya, the American authorities named only eight major groupings of uplanders.

By their non-inclusion in this colonial survey, the Ikalahan and the Kalanguya were not allocated territories.

The contemporary struggle of the Ikalahan and Kalanguya over ethnic identity goes back to this colonial act of omission, which turned them into a “people without history,” observed Resurreccion.

What is worse than being historically invisible? Being named by those who consider your existence a curse.

Ethnic names “were imposed” by the colonial authorities and later lowlanders, wrote historian William Henry Scott.

“Igorot,” the name given to ethnic groups, such as the Kalanguya, living in the uplands of Northern Luzon, has its roots in the Tagalog word “gulod,” meaning “mountain range,” according to Nestor T. Castro.

Yet, the “Y gorrote (people of the mountains)” was lumped with the other “tribus salvajes (savage tribes),” as the Spanish colonizers labelled the Igorot “pagans” who resisted Christianity.

Stereotyping the uplanders was also played up by the American colonizers, who practiced “divide and rule” among the uplanders and lowlanders of the Cordilleras, observed Scott and Castro.

The “Igorot” only acquired honor in World War II, when they drove the Japanese imperial forces to surrender in Northern Luzon, wrote Scott.

What is a name? A seed of narratives.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 26, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”