THE IGOROTS AND THE DAMS

...But people in the area say the military is really the main force...

...Some of the men cradled sleeping babies while the mothers pounded rice behind us...

...We fought together during the war," the President told the Igorots...

...The omens showed that "the struggle will be a protracted one, but the people will triumph in the end...

...The presidential lecture had little effect on the Igorots, since they view their own survival as threatened by what the regime defines as national development...

...The government had been considering the dams since the 1960s, but the high cost of construction made them economically unfeasible until 1973, when the increased price of oil persuaded officials to revise the cost/benefit equation...

...However, the PANAMIN head of the resettlement area told me people would not be able to resettle by village...

...Today the country and the whole nation faces an even greater peril as a result of the fuel and energy crisis...

...Since the rice terraces are inherited in most villages, holdings get progressively smaller as they are divided among new generations...

...the project was blocked by angry tribespeople armed with spears...

...Possibly the most serious consequence will be the destruction of the intricate system of peace-keeping contracts (peace pacts...

...The opposition of the Igorots is based on a number of considerations...

...The need for weapons and organized opposition became more acute in mid-1976, when the government moved a 700-man battalion into the area to reinforce the 150-man provincial force...

...A wealthy class is never permanently formed, for it is up to each family to increase its own rice paddy holding according to its needs and efforts...

...The village of the Kalinga tribespeo-ple is a compact cluster of 120 thatch-roofed houses set amid terraced rice paddies and pine-decked hillsides...

...The village headman, Lum-baya Gayudan, told me that all 400 residents fled into the hills when the attack began, except for two old men who were killed...

...One is the fact that their traditions revolve around ancestor and spirit worship, and their ancestral graves will be submerged by the dams...

...He claims that if these costs are included, the cost/benefit equation does not justify construction, given the current price of crude oil...

...Bernard Wideman is a free-lance writer who recently returned to the United States after an extended stay in the Philippines...

...They also raise domestic pigs, but kill them only sacrificially for village ceremonies...

...The officer cautioned the villagers to "follow the government" so that such incidents would not happen again...

...PANAMIN has used both monetary incentives and armed strength to diminish the resistance of the villagers...

...As soon as the government began moving engineers into the area in 1974, the Kalinga and Bontoc tribespeople began to resist...

...We discussed the fate of their village and of the many other villages along the Chico River, 300 miles north of Manila, which are due to be washed away by a proposed government dam...

...The agency has offered scholarships to all Kalinga high school and college students...

...As I toured the villages along the river, it was evident that the people were following the communist guerrillas rather than the government...

...The Igorots and the dams A Philippine tribe's struggle to preserve its ancient culture Bernard Wideman Not long ago I sat in a small circle of men gathered around a fire of blazing pitch pine chips which illuminated their intent faces in the gathering darkness...

...A Palace statement at that time noted that the President "appealed to their sense of patriotism...

...When Marcos removed PANAMIN from its preeminent position, he said he was alarmed that opposition to the government itself had arisen out of opposition to the dams...

...The martial-law regime, however, meets the people's opposition with more oppression, instead of canceling the dam project...

...The village leaders have voiced their opposition to President Marcos...

...The terrace buildings not only provide the staple but also form the basis of the communal social structure...

...The pacts provide the rules for restoring peace in case of a transgression between villages...

...When those inducements failed, armed guards were added as persuasive measures...

...The demands of the people are simple: Take out the battalion of troops...

...PANAMIN's largest project prior to Chico River was the resettlement of 10,000 T'boli tribespeople in Mindanao out of the path of encroaching lowlanders...

...Money is used only to buy the few items required from town, and occasionally to send a child to high school or even college...

...stop all work on the dams and declare they will not be built...

...The firelight deepened the bronze of their powerful arms and thighs...

...The government agency conducting the campaign to enlist Kalinga support is the cabinet ministry known as PANAMIN (Presidential Assistant on National Minorities), which operates much like its American counterpart, the Bureau of Indian Affairs...

...The tribespeople have been trying to convince the World Bank to end its support for the dams...

...In 1977, the military arrested ninety-six villagers opposed to the dam, threatening to hold them until they signed papers approving the government project...

...The provincial military commander in Kalinga Province says he has trained seventy tribesmen as PANAMIN guards...

...The National Power Corporation (NPC), a government-owned entity responsible for building the dams, had originally planned for another site, Chico 2, which would have flooded three Bontoc villages containing 1,000 families...

...This idyllic setting will be destroyed if the martial-law regime of Ferdinand E. Marcos has its way...

...The Kalingas and the other tribes, collectively known as Igorots, supposedly retreated into the mountains thousands of years ago in the face of large-scale migrations of Malays to the Philippine Islands...

...One of them, a tour leader whose business is being damaged by the occasional searches of foreign tourists by 'The presidential lecture had little effect....' soldiers, says sourly, "It's all the fault of the dam...

...His particular area will accommodate only fifty-five families, and they will be chosen from three different villages...

...Having been deceived by the government in mid-1975, when Marcos said he was dropping plans to build the dams, the tribespeople have since taken to armed struggle in place of passive resistance...

...It is enough.'1 It might be enough for the com-munalism in which the Igorots live, but it probably will not be enough for the international capitalist system that is presently being forced upon them...

...The men around the fire were naked except for loin cloths...

...While internal affairs in the villages are decided by a consensus of males, external (inter-village) affairs are based on the pacts, which grew from the need to limit violence...

...The rice terraces for which the Igorots are famous illustrate how primitive man was able to innovate for survival...

...At a meeting in February 1975, the leaders told him they were unalterably opposed to any dams...

...It also has promised that a school and clinic will be built on the settlement...

...The priority was then shifted from Chico 2 to Chico 4, where the Kalingas, comparatively weaker than the Bontocs in tribal cohesion, are expected to offer less resistance...

...The government has managed to rally support for Chico 4 from a few Kalinga villages not directly involved in the dislocation, and has enlisted a platoon of these "friendly" villagers to guard the "dissidents...

...Gayudan's report of the unprovoked attack to the military authorities resulted in a visit from the commanding officer of the 60 th Philippine Constabulary Battalion, whose troops are believed to be responsible for the attack...

...The houses of the village still carry the scars of rifle bullets and fire grenades...

...Marcos's technocrats are planning to build, along the Chico River, a series of hydroelectric dams which will submerge many of the self-sufficient Igorot villages...

...Another is the unwillingness of the tribespeople to give up their rice terraces, which are both their livelihood and the matrix of their highly communal life...

...Every village maintains peace pacts with the other villages of the Igorot culture...

...As one man said to me, "In the lowlands you have many laws,' but people break them all...

...With his powerful body bent into a human boulder, Macliing leaned towards me and said quietly, "I told him finally that if he kept insisting that I take the money, he should just shoot me because I would never accept...

...If the government is going to try to improve our life, it should be in such a way as to make us even more content...

...The government, with loans from the World Bank and the West German government, has been surveying four dam sites since 1974...

...We must, therefore, all stick together and fight for our very survival...

...However, an independent economist who has reviewed the economic analysis of the project says the government economists did not bother to calculate costs for the lost production of the lands to be flooded, nor for the expenses of purchasing the village lands and the resettlement area lands, let alone the social costs...

...For months the people refused to sign, and the government finally released them...

...One man recalled his trip to Manila, where he stood in his loin cloth in the air-conditioned chill of Marcos's office: "We explained that we are perfectly contented with our life even without any government assistance...

...Construction is about to begin on a dam called Chico 4, which would displace 1,500 Kalinga families — 9,000 persons...

...The tribal elders, in a petition to the World Bank in October 1976, said, "Our people oppose the Chico River Basin Development Project even at the expense of our lives...

...Faced with this resentment, Marcos replaced PANAMIN in July 1978 with the Ministry of Energy (the parent body of the NPC...

...They vowed to prohibit their people from taking jobs with those agencies, and further vowed to absolve from blame anyone killing a tribesman found aiding the government...

...Both agencies are ostensibly responsible for preserving the lifestyles of national minorities, but both accomplish their mission by corralling the minorities into reservations so that settlers can take over aboriginal lands...

...Even the nearby townspeople side with the villagers and their NPA supporters...

...But the NPC had not taken account of the strong resistance of the Bontocs...

...The director of PANAMIN told me that the agency, realizing that the dam would destroy the Bontoc and Kalinga culture, accepted the assignment in order to minimize the damage...

...In response, the armed force of the Communist Party of the Philippines — the New People's Army (NPA) — sent four cadres into the Chico area...

...The Igorot leaders signed a peace pact among themselves declaring that they would work together against any activities of government agencies involved with the dams...

...However, PANAMIN was no more successful than NPC...

...Our people, therefore, strongly demand that the World Bank withdraw from any kind of involvement in the dam project...

...They finally slaughtered a pig to read the "omens" in the liver — a tribal custom...

...In May 1975, a meeting was held in Manila of 150 Bontoc and Kalinga leaders...

...The dams, it is claimed, are needed to reduce import expenditures for crude oil used in power generation, and to provide electricity for industries in the adjacent Cagayan River valley...

...In the Philippines, those reservations are called "resettlement areas...

...The World Bank replied, "We have taken no final decision regarding financial assistance for the Chico River development," but it continues to fund preliminary work on the dam...

...The agency's aim, according to Director Oscar Trinidad, is to resettle the people by village so that their culture, based on communalism, ancestor worship, and the peace pact, would remain largely intact...

...The most powerful of the Kalinga elders, Macliing Dulag, told me he was offered a large sum of money by a cabinet minister if he would agree to convince his people to accede to the dam project...

...The families will be given house lots and farm lands in what is currently a bare hillside with some patches of trees...

...Except for clothing, plows, salt, and kitchen utensils, each village produces almost everything it needs...

...Children stand at the side of the road when PANAMIN vehicles go by and shout, "PANAMIN get out...

...take out the platoon of PANAMIN guards...

...The regime's goals and tribal goals remain in conflict...

...When it began to rain we all went into the house of the village chief — a house no bigger than any of the others — and were served a plain but delicious dinner of freshly killed boiled chicken, boiled vegetables, and fragrant mountain rice...

...The main beneficiaries of the electricity generated by the dams would be Mar-cos's wife's brothers and his defense minister, who are the chief landholders in the Cagayan River valley...

...Two years later, the four had become 115, and ambushes of government troops had become a weekly occurrence...

...Later, another six were arrested for the same reason...

...When shortages arise, they are met by barter between villages...

...What is most amazing about the Ig-orot way of life is its self-sufficiency...

...Sitting around the campfires in village councils, I listened as teenagers sang guerrilla songs and older men chanted improvised verses against the dam and against the government...

...Igorots even today are active hunters, and a goodly portion of their diet comes from the wild boar and deer they hunt with dog packs and long spears...

...Here we have only the peace pact...

...Tensions reached a new high in March of last year, when twenty-one members of the PANAMIN tribal force attacked the village of Ngibat one night...