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8
July 2003
Natives
LAST Friday's Inquirer featured Frank
Fischer, an American who prefers to be called Kiko and who goes around
in a G-string while living with the Mangyan-Buhid tribe on Mindoro
Island.
The case of this American Kiko reminds us that often it is non-Filipinos
who seem to care more about the situation of our cultural minority
groups. For most Filipinos, the cultural minorities are
"natives," complete with pejorative connotations of the
"backward" and "primitive."
Such connotations did not come about accidentally. They come from
decades of stereotyping and prejudice, dating back to the colonial
period. The Americans called all Filipinos "natives" and
eventually, the lowland Filipino -- Tagalog, Cebuano and other dominant
groups -- dissociated ourselves from the label and reserved it for the
cultural minority groups.
Just think of your own childhood and how you picked up your notions
about natives. In my own childhood, the natives were for the most part
invisible, known to inhabit the remote hinterlands. The University of
the Philippines' anthropology department in fact still has a listed
course called "Social and Economic Life of Philippine Mountain
Peoples," a terribly archaic name that I hope we will eventually
change.
Back to my story. Occasionally, we would see "natives" in the
cities, or during summers, when we would go off to Baguio City. But
again, it was the differences between "us" and
"them" that were highlighted. We were told the Igorot were
headhunters, and when we misbehaved, our elders would threaten us,
"Go ahead, we'll give you to the Igorot." That kept us
effectively within the confines of our vacation house.
I remember one time, while we were out playing, an old Igorot woman
dressed in her traditional clothing came walking toward our house.
Terrified, we all ran back to the house, screaming like we'd seen a
ghost.
But there was a paradox here: While we were made to fear the native,
they were also exoticized, transformed into objects of curiosity. I
still have photographs of our clan's children -- me with my sister in
one, with cousins in another -- the boys posing in G-strings and holding
a spear, the girls wearing a "tapis [native wraparound] and holding
a basket. For a brief photographic moment, we were "made"
Igorot and native. The pictures were just quaint souvenirs, posing for
them etched memories into our psyche of spear-wielding Igorot men and
basket-carrying Igorot women.
It should not be surprising that our parents and grandparents held
generally condescending views of the natives. I have old textbooks from
the US colonial period, in which cultural minority groups were described
as "savages" and "barbarians," complete with
photographs to emphasize their "backwardness."
Has there been change in the negative stereotyped images? Not really. I
still have students at the University of the Philippines, aged 16 and
17, asking if there are still headhunters in northern Luzon, or if
tribes in Mindoro have tails. The exoticization of the native continues
because schools and the mass media are not doing enough to correct the
stereotypes. At best, articles are patronizing, at worst, they are
blatantly bigoted, still propagating old myths.
We complain about how the Philippines makes it to the international
press only when we have typhoons or volcanic eruptions, or bombings. But
note too how the native makes it to the news mainly when there's an
epidemic, or famine, or some fanatical cult going on a rampage.
In college, I was fortunate to have joined volunteer groups that sent us
to the Cordillera mountain range, an opportunity that allowed me to
ditch the stereotypes about natives (and, I would like to think, the
natives' stereotypes about lowland Filipinos). The native did not resist
change; they resisted colonialism, first of the Spaniards, then of the
Americans and now of lowlanders. The resistance was not without reason.
They had seen how land had been grabbed, natural resources plundered,
and cultures driven extinct. The situation of the native -- the poverty,
the high child mortality rate, the famines, the proliferation of cults
-- was the product of a situation that "minoritized" them.
The "headhunter" image is disappearing, but I actually have
mixed feelings here because this fierce warrior stereotype is giving way
to even more negative images. There is the native as an urban beggar. Or
the native as a comic figure in movies and TV sitcoms. In other cases,
the native is there for entertaining tourists with their dances
(although in many cases, I suspect the dancers, and dances, aren't
"native").
I worry, too, about how the current interest in things
"ethnic" -- clothing, music -- takes on a faddish quality,
still reducing the "native" to an exotic object of curiosity.
This can take rather extreme dimensions. Remember the stories about
beauty pageants where contestants tried to outdo each other with
"talent" presentations imitating natives, usually by killing a
live chicken in some faked ritual? Apparently such gimmicks continue
today. I heard that in a recent "Male Exotic Dancer" contest,
not just one but three of the contestants pranced on to the stage
wearing "native" G-strings and doing their macho dance
routines while ripping apart live chickens, feathers and entrails flying
all over the stage.
Alas, there goes the "native," now an object of cheap
imitation and pretensions to "authenticity," a dismal
reflection of the lowlanders' search for an identity long lost to
colonization.
On Thursday, I'm going to talk about how one initiative might help
change this situation. Meanwhile, I've removed the quotation marks
around native, hoping we might re-appropriate the term, restoring some
sense of pride and reminding ourselves of another more noble Webster
dictionary meaning of the word: "an original or indigenous
inhabitant of a region, as distinguished from an invader, explorer,
colonist, etc."
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