The half-way sun

Front matter

t

AA greenest iy q i 7 4 y, es

4 ul

Epilogue

APPENDICES

Plates marked by a star were not photographed by the author. Some of them are published through the courtesy of Dennistons, Inc., Manila. As to some others, it is not known to whom credit should be given.

PLATE I In the region of our enemies of Alimit. Frontispiece PLATE II Facing page Tagudin. 2 PLATE III

(a) The national diversion, for which Americans are trying to substitute baseball. B

(b) United they stand, though singly they would fall. 3

PLATE IV

Court in front of men’s club—on the Bontok border. 6

PLATE V

Bontok children grabbing for tossed matches. 7

PLATE VI

Bontok girls harvesting rice. 12

PLATE VII The Bontok tattoo. 13

PLATE VIII Facing page

The Ifugao tattoo; the following designs may be distinguished: dancing man, dog, shield, eagle, centipede, scorpion, thunderbolt, star.

PLATE IX Ifugao girls.

PLATE X Two of the wards of a Bontok town.

PLATE XI

Negrits, pigmy blacks, not related racially to Filipinos or mountain pagans; forest dwellers.

PLATE XII

“Descending through terracing far grander than any I had yet seen” . .. Distances are so great that villages, aside from being hidden by trees, are hard to find. Some terraces are sixty feet high. A little to the right of the middle, three men are standing on the sixth wall up from the river.

PLATE XIII

(a) Benaue Government House.

(b) Tooth-filing in another Philippine tribe. Lower teeth blackened.

PLATE XIV

Some of the first pupils. The third from the left is in the legislature now.

PLATE XV Facing page Playing at war with reed tips and shields. 44 PLATE XVI Laying the last stone of the new school building. 45 PLATE XVII

A portion of the home region—looking toward the river. In the scope of the picture are three large villages, hidden by trees. 60

PLATE XVIII The Benaue school, at the lower left. 61

PLATE XIX Ifugao belles. 64

PLATE XX Baby tenders gather on large boulders when the evening becomes chilly. 65

PLATE XXI “The acme of primitive agriculture.” Every stalk in these freshly planted rice fields will receive individual attention until harvest. 72 PLATE XXII The Nagakaran Region. 73,

PLATE XXIII Was-Made-Afraid and his wife at their elevation to Kadangyang rank. 76

PLATE XXIV Facing page

Ginnid becoming a Kadangyang. He is being addressed (from behind) by one of his wife’s kinsmen.

PLATE XXV .

At the home of a Kadangyang. The villagers use the lounging bench, znmsignium of his rank, as much as he. Chickens are called into the basket-like coops at night, and hung high under the eaves.

PLATE XXVI

Cicada, some years before her marriage, helping village youths make rice flour for a ceremonial idleness. She is the girl directly behind the mortar.

PLATE XXVII (a) Cicada’s mother inciting her soul to vengeance. (b) The female father and other kin relieve the mother.

PLATE XXVIII Three Benaue men; thought bad by my Kiangan friends because aliens who mispronounce words, wear g-strings of a different pattern, trim their hair another way, and make backbaskets of deerskin instead of rattan.

PLATE XXIX Priests at a harvest ceremony. Note the rat fenders on the house posts.

PLATE XXX

Was-Made-Lonesome costumed as the Full-Fledged Cock at his headfeast.

g2

96 96

PLATE XXXI Facing page

Dancing at the Big Apo’s canyao.

PLATE XXXII Ifugao soldiers who posed themselves before me requesting a picture they could hand down to their posterity. The tallest was, for years, my cook.

PLATE XXXIII

Part of a himong procession.

PLATE XXXIV Scramble over a water buffalo. A double-edged knife is best because the other scramblers give it room!

PLATE XXXV The reward of a double-edged knife.

PLATE XXXVI

Poison.

PLATE XXXVII

Some hipag and the basket in which they are kept.

PLATE XXXVIII

Benders-in-the-Dance performing a ceremony to cure a wound got in a scramble.

PLATE XXXIX

Routine ceremony against enemies. The priest is reading the omen of the bile-sac.

PLATE XL Facing page

(a) He may not trim his locks until he has avenged a kinsman’s death.

*(b) A woman’s head.

PLATE XLI (a) A war party.

(b) A banyan tree at which heads were left by folk of Place-Set-with-Ethics-Locks until “entered.”

PLATE XLII

(a) Putting the head on the banana stalk. (b) Addressing the head.

PLATE XLIII

Dancing during headfeast. A religious ceremony is being performed at the left.

PLATE XLIV

Recitation of the myths. The very young priest on the right has several great-grandchildren—classificatory system—although no children by our reckoning of relationship.

PLATE XLV The cockfight dance.

PLATE XLVI “Fledgling yields ... Full-Fledged Cock stands over him in triumph.

141 141

157 157

PLATE XLVII Facing page

Eating at a headtakers’ ditak. Find the table knives 2

PLATE XLVIII

Poured-Out, of Baay, and the heads that adorned his house.

PLATE XLIX

Women transplanting rice.

PLATE L

The folk of a village assemble before setting out for the third day’s ceremonies.

PLATE LI

A procession, resembling from a distance a “gigantic, gay-colored centipede, rolling and twisting.”

PLATE LII

The procession halts for the leader to shout an invocation. The legs of the body may be seen just beyond the woman, who is shouting to the soul.

PLATE LIII On the Hill.

PLATE LIV

(a) A procession.

(b) Moon God, drinking the pig’s blood.

PLATE LV Facing page

A sentinel, waiting for souls of the enemy.

PLATE LVI

Women on guard while the men eat.

PLATE LVII

The folk were very apathetic at the ceremonies for Brass. The sacrifice to the War Gods was not much bigger than Sun God’s spear.

PLATE LVIII

(a) A procession halts at the body. (b) Breaking an egg at the sepulchre.

PLATE LIX

Lieutenant Governor Jeff D. Gallman and the president who arrested Wild Raspberry.

PLATE LX

Pagan Basketry: 1, 1’, headbaskets; 2, 2’, small backbaskets for carrying lunch; 3, backbasket for sweet potatoes; 4, handbaskets; 5, net with which grasshoppers in flight are captured; 6, hopper into which grasshoppers on bushes are shaken; 7, 7’, 7’’, baskets in which grasshoppers are kept alive; 8, basket for table ware; 9, 9’, 9’’, g’’’, baskets for threshed rice.

PLATE LXI

A group of Kalingas. Clothing and ornamentation are as diverse as ethnic origin.

aoe

PLATE LXII Facing page A far-fetched ethnic element. The ancestors of these girls were pirates deported from the southern islands and dumped into Kalinga by the Spaniards. They have not yet amalgamated with the rest of the tribe. 233

PLATE LXIII

One form of Kalinga house. 236 PLATE LXIV

“T travelled slowly through it all.” 209, PLATE LXV

“Mountains that yield frugally at a cost of much sweat.” 252

PAGAN TRIBES OF NORTHERN LUZON

~

~

Tig tart

Kalinga

Mankanay (Lepanto)

Negrito

Llongot

I

In these days a primitive culture is a burning house. —Frederick Starr

¥ bes

S the supervising teacher of Place-to-Get-Salt district, situated near the middle of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippine group, I had for

eighteen months been riding the rounds of the outlying country schools. More and more often, I had been gazing toward the mountains that rose abruptly to the north. Their blue coolness tantalized throughout the season when the plains surrounding Place-to-Get-Salt were shimmering and dusty. And in the rainy season their distant solidity beckoned invitingly as I tried to travel the plains, transformed now to a swamp of sloughs, rice-fields and nearly impassable roads.

One day in the foothills, I saw some mountaineers who had come down for a trading trip. I liked them, and that very night, applied for a transfer to Mountain Province, then being organized to include most of the wild tribes of Northern Luzon. The new province was almost a half larger than Connecticut, situated in the center of the northern third of the island.

The transfer was quickly sanctioned, and soon I stood newlanded on the little bit of coast that belonged to Mountain Province with eyes avid for every detail of the strangeness that greeted. An enormous lot of freight was strewn over the beach, for Americans had begun to extend government over wild tribes that had resisted Spanish colonization, to establish schools and missions, and to try to stop headhunting. A typhoon had wobbled in from the China Sea and had engendered a contest between mountain trails and landslides in which the latter had been largely victorious. Transportation was just getting under way again. Government officials and missions were clamoring for building materials, canned and bottled goods, supplies for making reports, and the like. Fogg, transportation contractor, was hustling more than is good for a white man in the tropics. But he kept thinking of the greatness of the American Express Company, and would say, ‘““There must be money in Transportation!” an idea always before him— his flag.

There came a troupe of about thirty sober-looking little men, their hair falling almost to their shoulders, coats of all kinds and degrees of disintegration, and no pants. They wore g-strings so narrow as to comply ill with even that region’s unexacting conventionalities.

Fogg led the little men to a pile of corrugated iron roof-

PLATE II

Tagudin.

PLATE III

(a) The national diversion, for which Americans are trying to substitute baseball.

(b) United they stand, though singly they would fall.

ing, each sheet of which weighed twenty-seven and a half pounds.

“Medio peso a sheet, and they’re all just alike, hombres,” he said.

A quarter of a dollar, our money, for carrying a sheet of iron to Cervantes, forty-two miles away!

Some took two, some three, some four sheets. Since they had also to carry rice, a cooking pot, and a blanket, I estimated that several were setting out with a burden nearly equal to their own weight. And their way led over a range of mountains among the steepest in the world, with frequent rocky fords! But when Fogg loaded others at a flat rate with my baggage, they groaned and protested tearfully at burdens of forty pounds.

In Tagudin, a town of lowland Filipinos about two miles from the beach, I found quite a gathering of politicians— which is to say, in the Philippines, the upper class—at a cantina kept by a venerable and handsome Spaniard. They assembled there every day, but when a boat arrived with ice from Manila, came early and stayed late. The beer was not cold yet.

“The beer will go down when its temperature does,” the Spaniard remarked with a touch of cynicism.

I asked him from what part of Spain he came.

“Y am not from Spain, sir. I am from the Balearic Islands—to serve you.”

“Oh! Didn’t Julius Cesar recruit some of his auxiliaries there?”

“Indeed he did!” The old gentleman’s eyes shone. “And was not Cesar always victorious? He was the first general to sense the worth of artillery, and my people were his artillerists.”’

The presidente was there, waiting like the rest for the beer to cool. He sent police to find a horse to carry me to Cervantes, which was to be my station. But they came back after some hours, reporting that all horses not engaged in carrying cargo were dead of glanders. I fretted about trying myself to find one, but concluded that the police were right, and that it would be easier to walk the forty odd miles than to find a horse.

The Spaniard insisted that I lunch with him. Eagerly and joyously he talked of his country and its national weapon, the sling shot, and the feats he had performed with it. Also he told of a time when he and another boy, both ragged, were caught coming out of a great almond orchard, their pockets and caps full, by the owner, Don Enrique.

“You didn’t take half enough! Go back and get some more,” the don had ordered.

But the boys had thrown themselves at his feet. “No, Sefior—we are thieves!”

“Por Déos, you are not!” had thundered the don. “No Balearico is a thief. It might have been better to have told me you were going to take some of our almonds, but the fault is mine—I ought to have invited you. I am not looking out for my people as I ought!”

And soon after that Don Enrique had called the two boys and some other poor folk and had set them making nougat of honey and almonds and sugar. Conscription had brought my host to the Philippines and—“‘Here I am, selling that very candy—the best there is!”

He gave me a tin box of it and a bottle of beer “‘to sustain the journey” and assured me that in Kushkushnon, where Fogg had directed my cargadores to wait me, I would have “wn camarin de palacio!”’ And I departed revising my concepts of Spaniards.

But I was not to reach the palace of a shed that night. The trail had been resurveyed and was being rebuilt at places. Getting lost and caught in a cold rain, I came, about nightfall, to a small village of Filipinos. They gave me to eat of rice, boiled eggs, zaro root and crude, home-made sugar, melting in a coconut cup. Immediately I had eaten, my bed was spread for me; a mat of rattan laid on the slats of the bamboo floor; two long, hard pillows placed at right angles to each other (one of them to lie against); and a cotton blanket about three hundredths of an inch thick, which, perhaps, kept out the coarsest of the cold. The young ladies of the family betook themselves meekly to a tiny closet-like room, and were padlocked in by their father.

At the time I unduly concerned myself that such precautions should be taken against me. Later I learned them to be a measure taken nightly by better class families in some regions against philandering youths.

The rest of the family bound their heads with handkerchiefs, tied the windows and doors shut, and soon were snoring a few feet away. The wind whistled cold through the floor slats, pigs rocked the dwelling by scratching against the house piles, ponies squealed and fought underneath, rats scampered through the roof thatch and came down to nibble tentatively at my ears, deer screamed in the forest, mosquitoes whined all too long before making up their minds to settle, strange food combinations brewed a gastritis, and that night is one that even memory cannot gloss over. I spent it alternating vows never again to become separated from my baggage with wonder that the dormant ones could stay so against such odds.

Years later I was to meet an even more astounding ex-

PUADEIY:

Court in front of men’s club—on the Bontok border.

PLATE V

*S9YO}BU Passo} 1of Suiqqeis UdsIp[Iyo you}uO, ample of depth of slumber. An old woman of the Ifugao * tribe came limping to my house to sell vegetables.

“Why! Was-Made-a-Grasshopper, have you had an accident ?”

“Yes. The rats—may they die!—ate my foot while I was asleep.”

I could hardly believe, but she held the member up for inspection, and, sure enough, there was an area in the heel larger than a dollar, gnawed to the depth of about an eighth of an inch!

Next morning I found the cargadores waiting at the “palace of a shed.” We attacked the mountains zestfully, but the only wnburdened member of the party was soon shamefully calling on the others to wait for him and was not sorry when, about four o’clock, a steady downpour made it necessary to stop at another shed. It was already occupied by a “Turco,” as, in the Philippines, pedlars of jewelry are assumed to be. When a goodly string of cargadores came up a little later, he ordered them, abusively, to stay out in the rain and cold, saying that the shed belonged to those who got into it first. I objected that the shed

* If-u-ga-o, by derivation, “hill (or mountain) people.”

Z belonged to as many as could get into it—especially when the weather was bad.

He acceded amiably, and proved interesting, but hardly attractive. He was the product of an ancestry case-hardened in persecution.

“It is very hard, gentlemen, when they call me “Turco.’ That accursed Turcos! They come with soldiers when I am a little boy and carry two mine sisters away, ten year and twelve year. I suppose now mine sisters, Mohammedans, and lose their soul. When I grow up, my father say better get away, get anywhere, just so got no Turcos. So is bad for me when they call me “Turco.’

“The Americans, gentlemen, is true they can marry anything? They marry with Jews and Mohammedans? We can’t do that—must believe in Christ!”

He then grew confidential about his amours. His ambition was to marry a wealthy mestiza possessed of many lands. His strategy of courtship was to “compromise” the girl to get her into his power. Regretfully he admitted that, having “compromised” her, he seemed not to want her afterwards!

He set me thinking that the converse of “As a man soweth so will he also reap” is more demonstrably true, and might be more socially useful to remember.

The shed, although large, could scarce hold all the 8 cargadores that came. One had to envy the ease with which they went to sleep, and the variety that could answer as bedding, rows of boxes of uneven dimensions, two parallel poles, the bare ground. They slept under the thinnest of blankets, while I shivered under two heavy ones. The whole body surface of these mountain peoples is as callous to cold as our hands and face. But there must be fuel to supply the increased heat radiation. The mountain man eats two or three times as much as a white man has room for.

3:

After two or three hours’ steady climbing next morning, we reached the top of the range and could see, in the valley beneath, the town of Cervantes on a plateau between two confluent rivers. Soon we met some of the cargadores who had carried corrugated iron there at twenty-five cents a sheet and were not returning. I gave one a cigar and asked for a light, having used all my matches. He produced what looked like a pop-gun, made of hardwood, but with the barrel not drilled all the way through. In the end of its air-tight ramrod was a little concavity into which he pressed a bit of lint. Inserting the ramrod slightly, he struck it sharply with the ball of his fist and then withdrew it. There was a spark in the lint which he transferred to a larger dab of lint. From that he lit his own cigar and passed it around to several of us.

A device of this sort compels wonder. Surely no savage knows that compression of a gas generates heat. What sort of accident could have given the primitive inventor the cue?

The fire piston is found in Burma and at various places in Malaysia. In the Philippines it is used only by two widely separated tribes. The blow-gun is found distributed throughout this area, too. Could some accident in connection with that have given the cue? What a supermind among savages must he have been who observed and applied the principle!

Cervantes is a town of lowland Filipinos. I was put in charge of an Igorot—the word means “mountain people” — industrial school located about a mile from town at the point of the plateau, where the rivers joined. The pupils were drawn from some twenty Igorot towns, a few of them a hard day’s journey away. The school was commodious and provided an excellent fare; the dormitory supplied blankets and not the scant pieces of cloth an Igorot has at home, if indeed so fortunate; coats and trousers were issued and regularly washed. (And yet, the boys could not feel decently dressed unless they wore an unwashed g-string underneath the trousers!) All these luxuries free—if they would come and learn new forms of labor. Attendance had to be forced.

The Igorot is more conservative than a Chinaman and a great deal less adaptable. The school’s altitude was fifteen hundred feet; Igorots prefer to live from one to three thousand feet higher than that. There was little level land around the school, but these mountaineers feel at home with none except what they themselves have made. The boys felt sore need of their accustomed amours with the chubby females of their villages. They longed for the men’s club, its pitch fires, and the old men droning bits of the history of headhunting days.

And so they would steal away some night, defying the orden of the government. I used to go on hikes that sometimes lasted a week, visiting the village elders and trying to bring them to accept the views of the government in regard to the younger generation. I was received as a nuisance and met a thousand excuses and evasions. Borrowing from their religious ceremonial a tactic of turning aside evil spirits, they tried to direct my attention elsewhere.

“Go to such and such a town,” they would say, naming their most hated enemies. “The children there badly need education.”

I could sound only a deep wish that the government would in all things leave them alone. Reluctantly, I would usually have to appeal to Governor Reed, who, just as reluctantly, would send police to bring the deserters back.

I lived at the school, and for the sake of my table, kept some chickens. Prowling dogs from the town (a Filipino never kills a pup, but lets it grow up to a hungry death-inlife existence) used to scavenge and fight around the school nightly. One Saturday night, hearing a chicken squawk, I shot a dog—for which I was a bit sorry when I saw she was supporting a family—and pitched the carcass down the hundred-fifty foot steep to the river bed.

Shortly after having returned to my quarters, I heard a hubbub that called to mind a visit to the Chicago Wheat Pit. Going to ascertain the reason, I found that the boys had retrieved the dog and were engaged in a free-for-all scramble over the carcass. The larger boys took the prized portions, the stomach and intestines. One boy screamed a demand that the external genitalia be saved for two covillagers of his who were sick, so the parts were preserved. Little Water Spider, the smallest boy, was allowed the tail, and some of his companions nearly as small, the paws. Each boy roasted his portion individually at a fire out in the open, and the boy who had bespoken the reservation roasted that also. After eating and dancing, some of the boys went into the dormitory to give the sick their portion. These patients had been needing several moments to make up their minds

PLATE VI

Bontok girls harvesting rice.

PLATE VII te

The Bontok tattoo.

to swallow the civilized medicine with which I had been dosing them, but they unhesitatingly chewed and swallowed that now offered.

The rationale is understandable, and is typical of primitive reasoning. It begins with a safe premise, and then, by inferences grounded in magic, keeps getting further and further from reality. These organs, reasons the Igorot, are the means of producing new life. Therefore they are full of vitality. What the sick man needs is more vitality. Let him eat these organs and he will have it within him.

The school ration consisted of beef twice a week, salmon or sardines other days, and rice and vegetables every day. Thinking to popularize the school yet, I told the boys, next morning, that dog would be added to the menus, and that they might, if they liked, construct an ao or court similar to that adjoining the men’s club in their own villages. I pointed out that there was ample supply of dogs: that there was lacking only a nice homey place in which to scramble, cook, and dance. The abandon with which they worked to supply the lack impelled me to a new trend of thought and attitude toward primitive peoples.

They brought flat stones weighing frequently over a hundred pounds up the cliff from the river bed, half a mile away. The patients, lured by a labor that savored of home life—or cured by the treatment of the night before—joined the work parties. Other boys searched out still heavier post-like stones, three, four, even five feet long, of phallic significance in their culture, the largest of which they transported fully three miles. Meanwhile others were excavating a circle about eighteen feet wide to a depth of a foot, right in front of my quarters. They paved the area and made a rim about it of the choicer flat stones set upright to function as a chair back. The phallic stones were set at intervals outside the rim.

Monday was blue as ever, and the sick list was lengthy. It was requested that the ato be dedicated that night, but although suspecting that permission would entail a miraculous recovery of the sick, I refused. That week proved the best in the history of the institution, there being no desertions and a recovery of all the ailing.

To dinner next Saturday, I invited friends from town: Rowley, a geologist, and Grovf, a veterinary. When darkness fell, the boys interned themselves in the dormitory and bated their voices to a whisper so as not to frighten away any dogs. Finally one of their lookouts stole to where we white men were talking and reported a dog. I bagged him and, shortly, another.

Dancing, to the rhythm of pans and cups (beaten in lieu of gongs), continued till midnight. The dogs were scrambled over, and some of the elder boys who knew a little of the religion were prevailed upon to utter the proper prayers, There were no sick, but some of the boys must have considered they needed a prophylactic or tonic. A highly enjoyable time was had by all except Grovf.

Grovf did not carry his liquor well. He developed a crying jag and—Americanlike—a deep pity for the heathen, attended by a strong uplift urge.

“Oh, the poor heathen devils. They don’t know any better—the awful pity of it they should be so low! (Sob, sob!) They . . . they gotta be taught better. It isn’t right for ’em to be so low! . . . It isn’t right for ’em to be so ignorant! (His sobbing turned to soobing) It isn’t right to let ’em even if they wanto. . . . (Soob, soob, soob!)”

Rowley and I tried to mitigate his grief by rationalizing the practice: if the earth’s population should ever increase to an extent that should make food shortage inevitable, we told him, the Igorot’s utilization of this unusual source might prove the very thing to pull him through to survival. But Grovf only “‘soobed” the more.

Captain Cook, the famous explorer, commends the flesh of the South Sea dog as being nothing to despise, as being, in fact, ‘next to our English lamb.” I had a choice cut of dog reserved for myself and properly cooked—so far as one can judge who ventures to pioneer. I concluded that Philippine dog was not South Sea dog. 15

While one ought to be broadminded as to tastes, he can hardly forgive the Igorot’s preferred method of killing the dog (or chicken). The animal is starved for a day or so, then given all the cooked rice it can eat. After a wait of three or four hours, it is slowly beaten to death or near death with a stick. The ante-mortem pounding is believed to make the flesh tender and bring out the flavor. The stomach and intestines with the partially digested rice are said to be a rare delicacy.

At the Industrial School were four or five Filipino teachers. One of these, Maria, an attenuated, gangling, spinsterlike girl from Tagudin, was the “academic” teacher. She would hold an “object” before her class (in our school, owing to its “industrial” nature, it was thought best to use tools as “objects’””) and would ask one of the group itching and sweating in their unwonted clothes,

“What is diss?”

“Dot is a rrrip-saw.”

She would give the boy the object and ask, ‘““What hab you?”

“You hab de rrrip-saw,” he would probably answer.

“No-ah! J do not hab de rrrip-saw. Yow hab de rrrip-saw! Now, what hab you?”

“You hab de rrrip-saw,” would come the answer again.

Then Maria’s voice would rise to higher and higher pitches in the effort, without using the local dialect to explain, to teach our pronouns of the first and second persons. Such was the approved method, and it was a strict rule of the Bureau of Education that teachers must not use the vernacular in the classroom. To the spirit of this rule Maria would religiously adhere, and she would never give up a struggle till she attained at least nominal victory. But she could not repress quick phrases of curse words in her native tongue, interpolations of her opinions of a numbskull’s intellect. I reminded her that only English was allowed in the classroom and offered to teach her substitutes in our language. But none relieved her like those she had learned from her mother, and in view of the fact that she had to abide by the Bureau’s rule, I did not insist.

After a struggle with a dull pupil, Maria would allow herself a period of recuperation. She would engage one of the bright ones in some such conversation as this:

“Can you ply, Tree-Pern?”

“No, I cannot ply.”

“Yes, you cannot ply. Who can ply?’

“De bird can ply.”

“Why you cannot ply?”

“Becoss I hab no wings.”

“Yes, you hab no wings. Therreforrre you cannot ply.”

“Now,” she would ask of another, “why Tree-Pern cannot ply?”