After two hours of hiking – first climbing up the steep road from Tinglayan, then horizontally along the walking track, we reach the footbridge across a tributary of the Chico River. The last stretch before we reach our destination in the hardest: almost-vertical much of the way. We stop to rest, breathless, at the terraced rice fields along the track. Clouds fill the valley below, the afternoon sun streams from the west. Thankfully, this last stretch we hike in full shade.

At last, we arrive. First, we see a cluster of rice granaries and a stand of coffee trees. We enter the village from the east: a collection of 102 houses form a loose crescent moon around a series of terraced, irrigated rice fields, bathed in gold by late afternoon light. Only just planted out with pachug (rice seedlings), the fields are a vibrant green.

We hear the dull thud of rice being pounded, by hand, with aru and rusung – implements best described as giant, wooden mortar and pestle. Groups of children can be heard – singing, laughing, crying, shouting. A few scrub the black from the bottom of big cooking pots in the irrigation channels, using the grit of sand and their feet as scrubbers. Pigs and chooks scratch in the village paths. Farmers with heavy loads make their way home from a hard day’s work in their fields.

We sit on the porch of the house where we are hosted by our dear friends Agom and Gaspar. We sip sweet, hot coffee, and watch the village life unfold before us until dusk, in a theatre-like arrangement of houses.

This is Chananaw (formally Dananao), original home of the Ichananaw tribe of Kalinga, located in the north of the Cordillera mountain range of Luzon (the largest island in the Philippines). It is also our ‘office’ for the next five months.

 

 

Just one of the many magnificent views of the village.

 

The Cordilleras, along with the Muslim south, was the only area of the Philippines never under direct Spanish control, although this was not without 300 years of attempts. The Spaniards’ desire to reap souls as well as gold left a bloody mark on the Cordilleras’ history, as well as demarcating ‘lowlanders’ from ‘uplanders’, ‘civilised’ from ‘barbarians’, or ‘Christians’ from ‘pagans’. Today’s Cordilleras still reflect this history of autonomy, although the cross was brought, along with Western education, by the Americans – after they purchased the Philippines from Spain for $20 million, along with Cuba, in 1898.

Today’s Chananaw reflects a shared yet singular history: public education only arrived in the 1950s and the church followed in the 1960s. Even now, no road reaches the village. It is the only village without electricity in the municipality, and a subsistence economy prevails. Mobile phone reception is temperamental and only from a few locations.

We were introduced to Chananaw by a mutual friend one year ago. Both of us having learnt of many of the negative aspects of globalisation and the international development industry as part of our Social Science training, we quickly struck up a friendship with several members of the tribe who were keen to share with us their ideas and concerns regarding the Ichananaw’s increasing interaction with the outside world, as national and multinational corporations sit poised to extract natural resources from their lands, if only the tribe would consent. Our friends’ key concern is for development on the community’s own terms; life here could be improved in many respects but there is much they want to retain from the old ways.

On our second visit, a tribal elder and friend, Daniel, invited us to live in Chananaw for one year to help them to document their ‘life system’ in order to pass it on to their future generations – a dream of his for many years. We said we’d love to in 2009 when Maria would finish her 11-month AYAD volunteer assignment (working at the Ateneo Center for Educational Development [ACED] in Manila to improve the quality of public education in the Philippines). Edwin decided to put his PhD in Sociology on hold to work on the project, having completed a year’s fieldwork in Manila.

From the seed of Daniel’s initial invitation, we designed a five-month project to document the Ichananaw’s way of life and to develop ‘indigenised’ educational materials for use in their local public school as the means for passing cultural heritage to the next generation.

Our twin goal is to improve the quality of education at the school through making education more culturally appropriate.  This ties in nicely with current national education policy trends in the Philippines regarding education for indigenous peoples. For instance, the value of learning in one’s native language first, before having to learn the country’s two official languages (Filipino and English) is being promoted from several quarters and a bill for mother-tongue languages as the medium of instruction for the first three years of schooling is being considered by congress, to combat poor public educational outcomes across the Philippines.

With the Dananao Elementary School (our host organisation), we managed to arrange support from VIDA for the project. We are also Honorary Research Fellows at La Trobe University’s Philippines Australia Studies Centre, and Edwin is a Research Affiliate of University of the Philippines-Baguio’s Cordillera Studies Center, to support the research aspects of the project. Dananao Elementary School is also partnering with ACED for the development and publication of indigenised educational materials and ACED is applying to the Australian Government for a Direct Aid Program grant to cover publishing costs. So the project really cuts across education, development and academia, with the overall aim of meeting the community’s initial request.

Another goal is to link the Ichananaw to local development organisations. Already, the school has become a partner school of ACED. Also, Cartwheel Foundation – a local NGO supporting education for remote indigenous communities – will be running its Music and Arts Program in Chananaw this May-June. Some of the stories and songs we gather are also likely to be included in a UNICEF Philippines publication to be used in childcare centres and pre-schools across the country.

So, what exactly do we hope to produce in five months? Our wish list is ambitious: an ethnographic account of Ichananaw life; a photo essay or coffee table book; a Chananaw-English dictionary; a history reader and other educational materials; a series of illustrated story books in three languages simultaneously (Chananaw, English and Filipino), telling the Ichananaw’s legends, fables and history; and a ‘knowledge bank’ of materials relevant to the Ichananaw, collected from museums and libraries. We will be pleased even if we only accomplish a few of these, but we like to dream big.

 

Edwin having a blast with the children.

 

And how are we doing it? Maria is staying in Chananaw, gathering stories, elder’s oral histories, and general observations from sharing daily life, as well as working with the teachers to indigenise the educational materials. Our assignment supervisor and close friend, Agom, is working very closely with us on all aspects of the project, as is Daniel, and several others in the community are also involved. Edwin joined Maria for the first month, and is now based in Manila to gather all materials from external sources and to liaise with project partners. Of course, we are both travelling back and forth to see each other from time to time.

In this first month, we have been soaking up all aspects of daily life (planting rice seedlings into knee-deep, soupy mud; documenting bedtime stories; drinking copious amounts of coffee), and mixing structured activities (running art classes for the children) with just taking the experiences and opportunities as they arise (taking up all invitations to share a meal with a new family; staying up late into the night with more than 50 members of the community to attend a songa – the butchering of a pig by a young man in honour of his sick grandmother).

But five months is a very short time, so we see this project more as laying the groundwork for future engagements – by us, by local NGOs, or by any other interested Australians – with the Ichananaw for development on their own terms.

We are also simply enjoying living in what is one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever found, in the company of good friends. What more could we ask for?