Manobos try to preserve identity in age of Facebook

SCHOOL children of Sabayan Elementary School in Kidapawan City attend the village’s anniversary in their traditional Manobo garbs. EDWIN FERNANDEZ/INQUIRER MINDANAO

KIDAPAWAN CITY—With modernization invading even the remotest villages in the country, a Manobo village at the foot of Mt. Apo—the country’s highest peak—struggles to preserve its lumad culture.

Village councilman Gerry Siago, a Manobo tribal leader of Barangay Ilomavis, Kidapawan City, said cultural preservation remains a priority in the face of modernization that has made many practices of other indigenous tribes now obscure.

“Some of our children are into Facebook and the Internet but it should not make us forget our culture and tradition,” Siago said as the village celebrated its foundation anniversary Thursday.

Siago said to make children always aware of their roots, village elders had forged an agreement with officials of the Sayaban Elementary School to make Fridays cultural day.

“Our tradition and culture should remain alive, very alive,” he said.

So on Fridays, Siago said Manobo children, who make are majority of the more than 800 pupils at the school, get to wear their traditional garbs in class.

Manobo schoolchildren also gather on Fridays to play such games as “kadang-kadang (bamboo stilts) racing and “palo sebo” (grease pole) in school.

Datu Nelson Tula, a tribal elder, said adults normally wear tribal garbs most of the time and they want the children to emulate them.

“Even on ordinary days, we still wear our traditional dress in the face of cheaper, modern ukay-ukay clothes that proliferate in our village,” he said of the clothes fashioned from abaca strands.

Tula said as a means of preserving the traditional garbs, residents of Sayaban also continue to plant abaca within the 701-hectare Mt. Apo. Edwin Fernandez, Inquirer Mindanao