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More than thirty years after they had been evicted to make way for giraffes and zebras, the native Tagbanua have reclaimed their homes in Calawit Island. The islanders now share their home with the creatures that found themselves marooned in the island after President Ferdinand Marcos visited Africa and dreamt up the scheme of an African savannah in the Philippines. It all makes a bizarre juxtaposition: a steamy and hilly tropical island fringed with beaches or thick mangrove forests, fronted by azure seas home to dugongs, populated by beleaguered Tagbanua hunkered down in picturesque nipa huts, and then the incongruously bizarre African animals that saunter around devouring trees and turning tropical forests into bare ground.
But will the Tagbanua now keep the animals as a tourist gimmick, or finally banish the alien and invasive environmental tumor that these creatures represent? It’s up to the Tagbanua, who now exercise autonomous rule over their ‘ancestral domain’ under the provisions of the Indigenous People’s Rights Act of 1997.
It’s a progressive law that has unleashed a force for social and environmental justice in the Philippines. In the Calamian Islands, an archipelago of 163 islands in the northern fringe of Palawan province, waves of poor fishermen immigrants have usurped beaches and other coastal lands, and denuded coral reefs with destructive fishing – and the original indigenous Tagbanua became like refugees in their own land. Now the NGO Saragpunta, founded to assist the Tagbanua in regaining ownership of their ancestral lands, had managed to secure ancestral domain titles for two geographical subgroups of Tagbanua before my visit, in Calawit Island and Coron Island. “We are working on the remaining five areas,” told me Josefa Garcia, a senior member of Saragpunta. “It’s a long process that involves many studies.”
Coron Island was the first place to gain legal definition of ancestral domain, way back in 2003, on a parcel of land comprising the island and a band of 200 meters around its coast. The island’s beaches and lakes have since become the top tourist destination in the Calamian Islands for island-hopping excursions – it’s indeed one of the most enchanting outposts in tropical Asia. Seen from a distance, the island’s profile of cliffs girdling its coast and rotund mountains in its interior is reminiscent of a crown. Up close, it’s even more bewitching: karst forests in the rugged terrain, healthy coral reefs in the coastal shallows, hidden lagoons set in folds and creases of terrain contours, eight inland lakes carved in bowls of purple-grey cliffs, and several beaches of pure strips of white sand. The island’s illustrious inhabitants are the sea swallows, whose highly-valued nests make exquisite Cantonese bird’s nest soup, and gathering the nests is the economic mainstay for the island’s 2,000 resident Tagbanua. The tiny swallows – which I watched darting and dashing over the water one day – are fascinating and enigmatic, like the island itself.
The political body that now administers the island, known as the konseho, consists of three layers that are headed by the council of elders – sixteen elected wise-old-men that hold ultimate sway. Administrative funds are raised from tourism: visitors are levied a landing fee at any of the half a dozen spots open for tourists (two lakes and a couple of beaches), raising tens of thousands of US dollars annually.
I started my explorations by using an intermediary to set up a meeting with the Coron Island elders to get permission to visit the island’s hinterland, and stay overnight, in parts not open for outsiders. The meeting was in Kayangan Lake, and when I arrived at our rendezvous, I found a small wiry man with graying hair and glazed eyes: Rudolpho Aguilar, father of 10 children, chairperson of the konseho. We sat in the shade of a makeshift nipa shelter, surrounded by a rowdy scene of boats easing ashore and disgorging groups of day-trippers who were visiting Kayangan Lake five-minutes-walk upslope. Tourists are charged PHP200 apiece to land ashore, and then have to pay more to visit any of the other spots too. Rudolpho didn’t stop chewing betel nuts and spitting red globs throughout our conversation.
I asked Rudolpho what the money is being used for. “We have a plan to lay a piping system to feed water from lakes to the villages to alleviate water shortages in the dry season,” he said. “We also give grants to members of the community who need hospitalization, or bright students who want to further their studies.” Rudolpho mentioned other projects: bungalows and a restaurant in the lagoon near Kayangan Lake, and developing trekking and rock climbing in other parts of the island.
Would Cabugao Lake ever be opened for tourists? It’s the largest lake, and reputedly magnificent. It’s also sacred and forbidden, said to be the realm of powerful spirits that would take avenge on anyone who encroaches onto their territory. “Locals aren’t allowed to fish, but they can collect bird’s nest from the area of the lake,” Rudolpho told me. “Before they visit, they have to see the spirit doctor who would perform a ritual to appease the spirits. Anyone who doesn’t get the spirits’ appeasement will become sick and die.”
I then asked for permission to visit the villages and stay overnight, and Rudolpho told me I had to have more meetings and consultations. So I expedited the process by using contacts, and a week later I arrived in the island’s Banung-daan village as the invitee of one of the islanders who would host me in his home. I was accompanied by Al Linsangan, a 32-year-old photographer who had spent two years living on the island as the outreach official in an environmental awareness project. We arrived at a picturesque village set behind a mangrove forest in a large bay, the village consisting of a scattering of rustic houses set in spacious enclosures where utilitarian trees are cultivated – tamarinds, betel palms, bananas, mangoes, and cashew nuts.
Our first stop was the home of Ernesto Aguilar, Rudopho’s older brother, and the island’s most influential man: he is an elder as well as a minister in the local protestant church. He found him pottering outside his wooden hut, and he showed us bundles of swallows’ nests; there was more than 1kg of premium nests, worth PHP250,000, that his family had harvested in two months. He also showed us the bible in the Tagbanua language. “I was one member of the team that translated the bible,” Ernesto said. “It took us 48 years to finish the translation, from 1960 to 2008.”
Then he invited us to attend his daughter’s wedding the following week. Unfortunately it was too long to wait, and later as we walked across the island to Cabugao village, the island’s largest, Al told me: “Wedding ceremonies are one of the major events – together with death and birth – in which the Tagbanua still practice their traditional culture.”
Wedding parties take the whole night, but more elaborate are the death rituals, which also involve singing and dancing, and presenting a basketful of foodstuffs to the dead spirit in the cave where the spirit supposedly abodes. Otherwise, as Al pointed out, the Tagbanua have lost much of their traditional cultural practices. They don’t even have any spiritual markings or shrines in the villages or homes, nothing even that commemorates the legendary ancestors – the three heroes who lived in caves and could fly, and who protected the islanders from the Moro marauders.
But I noticed something else that indicates a sense of cultural wholesomeness and community belonging: unlike many other villages of Filipino immigrant fishermen in the Calamians, the Tagbanua villages are cleaner, the buildings more spacious, and there are no signs of alcoholism or gambling (in cock-fighting). I was surprised by orderliness; there is poverty, but there is no squalor – and that is perhaps the cultural consolidation and greatest achievement brought about by self-rule.
Cabugao village also sprawls at the back of another large bay whose shoreline is embroidered by mangroves. As in Banung-daan, I asked to see the spirit doctor, and again I got the same answer: there is no spirit doctor in the island at all. So Rudolpho had lied. I mentioned this to Al, and he said: “They don’t want people to visit the lake as they believe it would disturb the swallows.”
I couldn’t tell if the issue was spiritual pollution or temporal disturbance. But perhaps the lie is a ploy designed to keep away the rapacious fishermen that inhabit nearby islands. Some of these same fishermen were already encroaching on Tagbanua waters, destroying the reefs by fishing with cyanide. So fanning the story of wrathful and vengeful spirits in Cabugao Lake is the surest way of keeping out these fishermen who are superstitiously terrified of spirits. (One morning I managed to walk half-way to the lake; the treacherous and sharp karst rocks in the up-cliff trail ruined my trekking boots, and I envied the bird’s nest collectors who could walk to the lake in five hours wearing flip-flops.)
I also caught Rudolpho exaggerating about other things. The project to get water to the villages had been stuck at the ‘planning stage’, and the commoners complain that only a few families had access to the money for schooling or hospitalization. Most islanders only just scrape a living from fishing with home-made harpoons and limited farming, some bird’s nest collecting (best nesting sites are controlled by few families), and the hunting of wild boar in the forest with spears. Tourism, or the income derived from tourists, has yet to make a difference to the lives of most Tagbanua in the island.
“Not everything is going well in Coron Island,” told me Saragpunta’s Josefa when I later went to see her. “The harmonious unity has degenerated into strife now that money is pouring in. The leaders have been fighting one another, dividing under the two factions of the warring brothers, Ernesto and Rudolpho.”
The power struggle arose in the early days of self-rule when Banul Beach was taken over by the ruling body for tourist purposes. This alarmed Ernesto, whose family had historical ownership of the beach, and who feared that his brother – as chairperson – would first usurp the beach and later commandeer the caves up-cliff that are home to colonies of swallows. Ernesto has since prevailed: his sons now man the beach and collect the tourist levy, and rumors swirled during my visit that Rudolpho had already been forced to ‘resign’ the chairpersonship.
“The problem in Coron Island is about the mismanagement of funds, and now the National Commission for Indigenous People is planning to intervene and mediate a solution,” told me Josefa. “As for us, we are doing things differently in other areas to avoid the same problems from recurring: now we draw up the Sustainable Development and Protection Plan in advance and that way ‘lock’ the management plan into the application for ancestral ownership.”
In a larger way, Josefa insists, the ancestral domains are indeed serving the purpose of better environmental management partly by thwarting unscrupulous developers. Tourism is booming in the Calamian Islands, and a clique of powerful people, allegedly protected at the highest political level in Palawan, are grabbing land that is ripe for tourism-related developments. “When you you're an official in the local government, you can twist papers about land ownership,” told me Josefa. “But it's harder to shift ownership if the land is under the ancestral domain title.”
The Tagbanua might not be the innocent natives they project themselves to be, but getting back control of their ancestral lands serves the cause of social redress and justice, and the hope is that it will lead to better environmental guardianship. If anything, the Tagbanua might be less likely to approve projects that would bury important landscapes because they fear retribution from the sacred spirits who ‘own’ the land.
Article © Victor Paul Borg
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Itineraries that go into the back regions, beyond the tourist circuits
Light adventures, cultural immersion, interactive holidays
Experience, sensitivity and passion 
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Craft Asian accessories or implements from bamboo, rattan, and other natural materials
