Beginning at the Foothills

A Funeral

June in Bontoc was hot. The warm winds glided over rice paddies cut into squares by

footpaths. The year is 2016 and my uncle’s body lay cold in a pine coffin in the center of the

small living room. A crowd sat gathered, half of them caught up in funeral tasks, the other half

sulking and whispering disapprovals at a sign posted on the wall. The thick black letters in the

Ilocano language read:

“SO THAT ALL MAY KNOW:

BELOVED BROTHERS AND SISTERS,

FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS AND RELATIVES

WHO HAVE COME TO MOURN, WE ASK

THAT NO ONE SHALL CHANT OR TALK

TO THE DEAD OR SING A RELIGIOUS

SONG OTHER THAN THE SONGS OF THE

JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES. HE, ______

_______, AS A JEHOVAH’S WITNESS, HAD

LEARNED THAT THE DEAD KNOW

NOTHING AS IS TOLD IN ECCLESIASTES

9:5, 10.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING

AND COOPERATION.”

The dead is a Jehovah’s Witness. Before that, he was my uncle.

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 For over 18 years, my uncle struggled with a neuro-motor illness that had caused him

to become increasingly unrecognizable. His speech had become incoherent, his thoughts

perpetually trapped in an exasperating dream. He recognized me one minute then thought I was

someone else right after, before going into seizure. As a child, I knew him for the lines in his

wide palm, incised like the reverse side of healed scars. I feared him. He was the first-born of

nine siblings who would lift his hand at his children when incensed. He was a dogmatist created

by a pseud-theocracy that had, in less than a century, built its parishes along the riverbanks and

hillsides of the Cordillera.

In 1911, the Catholics built a school near a sacred dead tree and a year later, the

Anglicans would build theirs by the Chico River across the village of Samoki. At that time, the

tribal wars flourished in Bontoc until the 1930s. Around the same time, a group of First Century

Christianity believers half a world away in the American Midwest started calling themselves the

Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I imagine with dread what it must have been like growing up in Bontoc in my uncle’s

time in the 1970s: the remaining thatched roofs crumbling away to the promised permanence of

galvanized iron; the roads no longer dusty, scalding asphalt poured over them; the young women

and men covering up an acquired shame with bras and briefs when their parents wore the tapis

and the wanes to protect their bodies from cold.

Uncle’s house sits among the fields in the village of Samoki, home of weavers and

healers, where the early potteries were. American colonizers like Dean Worcester came in the

1890s taking snapshots of their specimen “primitives.” Now, the “savages” study their history.

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 The past is too often talked about in Bontoc, either in the comfort of a brief longing

for remembrance or a promise for those who have chosen to remain when so many have resettled

in cities in search of jobs and formal education. Many left and yet are insufferably proud of their

roots. Those who remained must decide the fates of rice paddies, weaving patterns, and ritual

spaces. The nostalgia of those that leave and the melancholy of being left behind encourage a

fever of ethnocentrism against any form of diminution of indigenous symbols, of fossilized

material culture.

On the third day of the wake, in her traditional tapis and with beads wrapped around

a head of silver-grey hair, a grandaunt entered the house, having just attended Catholic mass. In a

few chosen words before the dead body she chanted in the local tongue, replacing “Lumawig,”

with the Christian “Apo Chios,” or “High God.” The names “Lumawig” or “Kafunian” seemed

relegated to a historical primer in the town library that no one visits. She managed to break the

strangled writings on the wall. She exited the door before the Jehovah’s Witnesses could

admonish her action. Other grandmas did the same, making directives in the wind, “Then what is

the point? Let us leave!” The words seeped into my skin, a rash, a bruise. One does not wish to

banish elders, much less make them banish themselves. The grandaunt had come strictly for the

dead. She left making certain she came out of obligation but forbidden to perform a ritual in her

own Samoki. I grieved for myself, my relatives, as much as I did for the dead.

Rumors started spreading that my uncle had signed a letter wherein the request

posted on the wall was detailed. It was by this letter that the congregation had taken authority to

enforce dogmas excerpted from the bible verses they preached when knocking on people’s doors.

It was by this letter that they managed to estrange themselves from an indigenous community

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whose practices, though blended into predominant Catholic and Anglican values and rituals, still

maintain traditional indigenous practices and beliefs.

During the wake and up until the dead had been encased in his concrete tomb beside

the house, my relatives swung to and fro in states of grief, frustration, and bewilderment. The

Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, maintained an air of nervous nonchalance. Many times,

I would remind myself that their zealotry is also forged by thousands of rejections when they go

on their missionary conversion visits to so many homes. How many times have I rudely

prevented so many of these saksi from barging through the door?

In the series of late nights during the wake, old women chattered outside by the

doorway in their tapis and beads, barking the hard inflections of the Bontoc language. It took a

turn as religion and spirituality were debated around the dead. Even a funeral could not spare my

relatives and the congregation from being cruel and abrasive when discussing their religious

differences. Any form of curiosity was dissent, or worse, disrespect.

I have always thought that in Bontoc, theology is bound to the lectern whereas the

indigenous collects its spiritual reason from the ato or the dap-ay, that ring of stones where a

council of elders representing their clans contemplate village issues in communion.

My aunt, the one who reads esoteric spiritual books, never sweats when making

speeches. She looks twenty years younger when she is angry. I always remind everyone that she

was the very first to win the Miss Mountain Province beauty pageant as if I worry that people

will forget her.

“Since we are on the subject of respect which you so boldly express as virtue, aren’t

you and your congregation bothered that you have come here disrespecting traditions? I come

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here and I am made to feel like a stranger in my own brother’s wake!” The last time I heard her

that determined was at a student protest at the local college.

“But manang, the dead has written a will, it is his wish!” The man, an unknown face

like so many of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, opened his hands toward my uncle as if he was

listening, feigning sleep.

“He signed this when? At the peak of his illness? These decisions change! You have

owned him. He is my brother! Before you owned him, he was with us, part of this village. I

simply ask for respect!”

I saw another aunt, the youngest sister of the dead. She was quietly protesting since

she had arrived. On the day of the burial, she wailed, like the unpleasant cry of the nocturnal bird

that no one ever saw, an omen for disaster, but hers was of sorrow, a deep, honest one. “I will

carry my brother’s body to the market!” She referred to my grandfather’s house in the center of

Bontoc, across the road from the market. She wanted her brother back. Another traditional burial

ritual was forbidden by the congregation. The entire village seemed to have appeared by the door

during the last hours before the dead was entombed. They started singing Catholic songs

translated into Ifontok. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, seated inside surrounding the body, were

alarmed by the sudden crowd but continued singing praises from little yellow pamphlets (the

only hymns they allowed to be sung). One of them explained that their songs were for

themselves and the grieving. A Catholic pointed out the irony: to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the

dead is dead, there was nothing to sing for. Why sing at all? A fuming Jehovah’s Witness

charged to the door clasping a microphone, shouting her hymn to the crowd of villagers who,

unbent, drowned her protest.

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 The American missionaries were good at converting village upon village of natives.

But were the Bontok less aggressive a hundred years ago? Then again, along with the rest of the

Cordillera, hadn’t they prevented politically assimilating themselves to the Spaniards for 377

years before the Americans?

A Drinking Party

Nica stumbled drunk as a fish in a bottle of gin, the cheapest on the market. The bar

stank from three days of sweat, a doorless urinal, and alcohol and vomit that evaporated on the

floor into a layer of matted black scum. The new health warning on a cigarette box was the

image of a decomposing foot: GANGRENE! “Pass me a stick of Gangrene?” Nica laughed.

Nica at that moment was a still image of the young Igorot whose baby boom parents

went to a formal school. My mother once told me that it was their generation, equipped with

college diplomas, that first travelled abroad en masse to find work, returning with dollars to buy

more iron roofs and concrete walls, then leaving the ili, the community, for the city. Many have

made the brave new world decision of resettling in the city or made their children do so to attend

college. In the universities, they put on the traditional loincloth and wrap skirt for school events

that ironically slogan cultural empowerment. Somewhere in the geographical uprooting from

rural to urban, these youths have become an American Rockstar’s expletive: the spit on the stage

before the guitar is smashed, the colonial performance of a memory of pre-colonial freedom

amidst a postcolonial drinking habit. I stared at Nica as if staring at a mirror. I saw myself as part

of this imagination. I suddenly didn’t find myself confused by the switching of languages or a

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keen awareness about the way I would dress differently before travelling from Bontoc to Baguio

City.

Nica and I seemed to abide by an ethics of shared experience, of being uprooted then

transplanted, regenerating the same type of leaves, but now thriving on chlorinated water. A

week prior to seeing Nica, I had just come from my uncle’s funeral. It thrilled me to find the old

bar along Magsaysay Road still the same, still our temple of the indigenous youth’s embrace of

modernity: Nica’s new smartphone with a wallpaper of the vegetable gardens and rice terraces

and a playlist of Kankanaey versions of American country songs.

Baguio City and neighboring La Trinidad have so many of these little corners, little

temples of third-world dive bars that remind me of the ato, as if a trace of that communal space

has taken new shape: plastic stools, a pine table, and bottles of gin. Too much gin. No one will

admit it. This was where Nica and I talked about our villages, real ones that linger unimagined.

At length we would go on until our words started describing similar footpaths, the same plants,

the same soil. Then the gin seeped in. Men would start to occupy the empty seats beside Nica.

They would flirt, we would flirt and talk about our villages, trace our genealogies between jokes

filled with ethnic slurs, misogyny and gibberish. The gin scratched the surface of lucidity and

liberated the macho Igorot. But the excess was somehow rarely suffocating. We would get drunk

and stumble on the dance floor to American country songs. Drunken miners, farmers and

university students crouched, calculating the beat as they twitched their wrists and hopped and

slid into a circle. We would dance the tayaw, half stumbling, unaggressive, like birds circling

around an absent tree, an absent bonfire. When the band switched to a gaudy pop song, the circle

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would break into gyrating chaos, half-drunk women escaping whirlpools of men. But Nica would

already be back at the table. She would always be smart enough not to miss the song change.

At one point, the bar was momentarily quiet while the band unstrapped their guitars.

At the next table, a group of men hailed the new president. They agreed with death by hanging.

They did not like the human rights activists. I was lost in translation. I just heard news that my

friend’s husband was arrested without a warrant by the police, a single cannabis plant happened

to grow from their back yard. The arrest warrant was made after the search. “Let’s set aside due

process for now,” said the police officer. I pictured my friend sitting alone, her three-year old

daughter running around the house. At that time, no elders had come up to stand beside their

accused sons and daughters. Had they bowed down to a regime? I found that suspect even

though so many had been proselytized by theo-political rules from little yellow pamphlets and

translated hymnals. I decided quickly that that bar, that temple, was not the ato. There were no

elders there, no one to argue communal wisdom. Another bottle of gin, the first drops offered to

the anitos, the spirits. The new president was called taraki. He is an elder.

“Taraki!” A friend calls me that because I know how to build a fire, use a hammer,

cook dinner, wash clothes by the river, can be resourceful when needed. The mountains teach

you stuff like that. I roll my eyes at the thought that the taraki is being redefined into the ultimate

macho, the patriarch breadwinner, the superman. I told Nica this. She agreed. Nodded but

wanted to talk about something else. In my gin mind, I was happy she agreed. She had been

beaten several times by her husband even when she was pregnant. She knew the macho culture

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from her side of the mountain. She had had it on her skin: first red, then blue. Broken tissues

healed, then she would take another hit. Red. Blue. Blue black.

“Why do you come to this bar?” A man asked me. He spilled some of his gin. “You

guys don’t look the type to come to a place like this?” I stared at him and smiled. Three young

men were passed out on the floor, one beside a pool of vomit. Then bottles were smashed, plastic

chairs were overturned. The bar-fight lasted five minutes. Someone mopped the floor. How does

one decolonize? I wanted to ask Nica but she was too drunk. I was too drunk. If I asked her, she

would no longer mirror me. Ginheads don’t talk about decolonization, often only muscle drivel

then vomit. Someone once told me that to decolonize, one needed to go home, however imagined

that home may be, and start from the soil, plant rice, plant sweet potatoes.

A Missing Photograph

June in Baguio City was raining. I started junior high school anxious and frantically

aware of my insecurities about being rural. Elevators, packed lunches, never ending glass panels,

long commutes, pine trees wedged between concrete buildings, flower-lined parks, polluted

streets, properly working televisions that one didn’t have to kick to work. Then later it became

easy. We built dust pans for Technology and Home Economics class. I guided my male

classmates through the process. They didn’t think we already built dust pans in primary school in

Bontoc. Even they somehow thought we were monkeys living in jungles.

Then I made friends. I went to a friend’s house. It looked clean and pastel. The house

help glanced at me robotically. There were curtains with golden fibers, a huge sofa that could fit

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my entire family, and a set of ornately framed photographs on the mantle. It felt alien. I

remembered my mother. She had cut me and my sister out of photographs and set them on felt

paper and framed them in cheap plastic frames bought from Sunday market. When we moved to

the city, all the family photographs were piled in a box, and then the misty weather stripped the

colors and left rectangular oceans of distorted faces. I wished we had a mantle.

I know very little about my mother and father’s pasts. I am often asked, “What

language did you first speak?”

“Mostly mountain Ilocano. My mother is Ifontok and my father is Kankanaey. They

spoke to each other in the lingua franca: Ilocano.”

What were my parents like before Ilocano? Did they think in Ifontok or Kankanaey

when they first wore their school uniforms and prayed to a god in English?

“What language do you often think in?” Strange question. It was clear, though I

couldn’t think of an answer. “But I speak Bontoc. Learned it from my relatives.”

I met an old man in an outskirt village in the tourist town of Sagada. “I know your

grandfather. He is like a father to me. I worked for him. We went to his orange farms and he

would always bring your mother with him.” The singsong tone of his Tetep-an Kanakanaey was

infectious. I wondered if he spoke that way to my mom who spoke Ifontok. He went on and I

listened to his stories until what I thought I knew about my mother became a mildewed

photograph.

My mother caught me staring at a photo of a pale-skinned guy wearing a loincloth

bent under an old hut in Samoki. She said the guy was a Nepali Red Cross volunteer whom she

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had fallen in love with. My father threw the other photos of him away. I was ten when I found

the photo stuck between pictures of birthday cakes, funerals, and weddings.

When I was sent to school in the city, my mother would say, “Focus on school!

Learn to love the city! You’re lucky you’re in the city!” School led me to love books. I read

unknown narratives as there were barely any books about the Cordilleras among the stacks of

outdated textbooks and science and math magazines in the school library. Had they been there, I

would have probably recognized my mother between the pages, or the intricate landscapes of the

Luzon Mountains. Instead, I read about towers, castles, unknown wildlife, and conflicted heroes

who felt it so extraordinary to help others that it became a solitary burden of a responsibility.

But it’s also easy to understand that the absence of these books could be because of

the presence of oral storytelling. Yet, growing up among so many old men and women, I have

not heard a lot of folklores or legends. That much can be said about my parents. If I begged for a

story, there was surely one ready but I never learned to ask for them. I fear a time when elders

and parents no longer tell mountain lore beyond the ritual master or healer’s prayer or a child

needing to pull at the skirt of a grandmother. At the heart of it, perhaps it is fear that this lore

may be pagan, may be primitive, may be the ways of the unschooled and illiterate, or simply,

that the natural topography that the lore was designed to respond to had been poured over, six

feet deep, by nothing less than cement. How does one decolonize?

The oral lore told in the ato by elders to the young has a stage set: the birds are real,

brown swallows fly over golden rice. The acacia tree is not an imagination but drops hundreds of

yellow flowers before it welcomes the rainy season.

I phoned my mother to ask her about forbidden activities within the Papattay, the

sacred ritual space marked by a dead tree most likely struck by lightning. I remembered a tree,

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the one near my elementary school. I imagined it in the same square image as I had pictured the

cross of Bontoc’s Santa Rita Catholic Church whose roof architecturally emulates the steep

triangular roofing of the Bontoc house.

“It is not allowed to bring fish near the Papattay. It is also not allowed for pregnant

women… Remember the hill facing your grandmother’s rice field? Hello?... yes, that is where

pregnant women…”

I stopped listening. I was stuck with the vision of the cross.

At the foot of the hill facing my grandmother’s rice field, there is a cavernous

darkness before the line of shrubs disappeared into several layers of rice paddies, then rocks,

sand, and a small river that flowed down to be part of the Chico River. I was reminded of the

smell of sulphur soap. We would bathe by that small river and my uncle, the one who died a

Jehovah’s Witness, always made us use sulphur soap.

When I was volunteering for an environmental organization, I went around

Sabangan, less than an hour’s drive from Bontoc. Elderly women there told me the story of a

giant snake that lurked in the Chico River. It devoured a woman and brought her to a far end at a

river-cross in Kalinga where a young Kalinga warrior found her and married her. The woman

escaped the snake’s belly by slicing it with her hair pin (others say she had a small knife for

cutting rice stalks). The Chico River, as it roared downriver, slid and stroked ravines and little

valleys before it ended up in Cagayan. The elderly women continued with other stories, “That is

where the dap-ay is, where the barangay hall now sits,” or “… where the basketball court now

stands.” The stage set had been erased. When the lore is retold, children may have to reconstruct

images from fantastical Disney worlds.

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 On one of those hot summer days in Bontoc after my uncle was buried, I woke up

one morning and went to the Bontoc Museum inside the premises of my former primary school.

The beads, baskets, potteries, and woven fabric stared back at me. A familiar disconnect

permeated through the glass of the old cabinets. A disconnect that my mother wouldn’t have

realized, when she told me to love the city, was the result of a strange corruption she was also led

into. Outside the museum gate, a fresh wind scattered the perfume of cypress bushes. I observed

the century old buildings where I was taught to write the Roman alphabet longhand, the same

school where strict nuns taught my mother to enunciate prayers in neutral English phonation.

Some hundred meters behind the buildings, the Papattay tree seemed so distant, so far away, a

mangled photograph.

A Trade Route

The Chico River still thins out and rapidly turns a frothing brown after the short

summer rains. An erwap is danced to call for these rains during the deadliest droughts. Thick

layers of heavily cracked earth would run like a sore throat across the rice fields. At the end of

harvest, children would play baseball on the fields.

On a dry day in third grade, my friends and I took a dusty ochre road heading for a

festival in Tocucan. Along the river, the god Lumawig had left a trace of his worldly adventures

in the form of a man whom he punished and turned into a river boulder. The boulder was shaped

like buttocks and spewed freshwater from what appeared to be the anus. We walked under the

spell of warmth and gossip, trite as rural children who were allowed to take matters of survival

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into their own hands. Tocucan remains a small village of rusting tin-roofed houses overlooking

the Chico River as it dramatically snakes towards Kalinga.

The air became thick at the start of the sugarcane festival. The whole village was

surrounded by a euphoric glow of moonlight and bonfire, and the sweet aroma of molasses. A

carabao moving in a circle thumped the ground and pulled a log that spun the two wheels of the

crusher. Men fed the rotating contraption with freshly cut sugarcane. Juices and bits of pulp

trickled into a monolithic metal wok over blazing chunks of pinewood. The hardened molasses

would be shared among families. Sometimes, they would make it to the Bontoc Sunday market.

I thought that the area surrounding my grandfather’s movie theater in the middle of

Poblacion was the only place in Bontoc that had life. The main highway connecting four

provincial capitals of the Cordillera Region passed in front of the movie theater. Across this

highway was the public market where in earlier times trade flourished from the pottery

workshops and weaving industries supplying tapestries for buyers from barrios as far downriver

as Kalinga. Today, as in my childhood, the public market sells a variety of highland vegetables

sourced from farming communities near the Benguet border and lowland vegetables all the way

from places like Isabela. But plastic wares and metal pots have replaced the pottery. Chinese

fruits and factory clothes mix with local produce. A few old women sell their woven tapestries

on street sides.

From the movie theater in front of the market gate, I would slip into suffocating

alleyways between tightly packed commercial buildings. I would make my way to Bontoc Ili

through a maze of footpaths connecting houses, pigpens, and atos. The ato is where the council

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of elders, composed of the heads of clans or families, congregated to discuss social matters.

Bontoc Ili, one of the oldest settlements in the region, has around 16 atos, a grand exercise of

political will. Now, only half of them are active.

Almost all households owned a pen and fed a pig or two twice a day. Sometimes,

while inside the projector room of the movie theater, the smell of pig would crawl up the

windows from my grandparents’ old house. As I sat through Hollywood movies depicting

imposing landscapes of canyons, snow-capped mountains and endless deserts, my nose would

catch the smell. When I travelled to Nepal in 2013, the same smell would come back to me as if

to remind me, finally, that Bontoc was not an imagination. It is a place I could finally call home.

On a cold and windy day, I found myself in Tserok, a Tibetan refugee settlement in

the Nepali Himalayas. There was a pervasive smell of animal manure. Cows and sheep arrived

in the afternoon streaming into front yards after grazing far and wide over the sparsely-vegetated

mountains. Although Tserok is tiny with a population of only around 200, it had its school, two

temples, and even a guesthouse for the many trekkers along the popular trade route between

Tibet and India.

In Pokhara, Nepal’s other famous city besides Kathmandu, herds of tourists walked

the streets, hung out in cafés blasting world-techno music, received instructions from tour guides

before setting out paragliding. The hubbub was a distant contrast to the stillness of Lake Phewa,

an impressive lake at the foot of the mountains. Among the rows of shops selling souvenirs and

imitation trekking gear, Tibetan women vendors sold their goods in the streets, stopping tourists

in their tracks with stories of their flight from Tibet. I met Pema sitting by a storefront. She was a

plump woman who spoke in broken English as she sold her trinkets to tourists marveling at the

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view of Dhaulagiri, the gray mountain shaped like a fishtail. In 1959, Pema was a child learning

to turn her prayer wheels when she escaped the bullets of Chinese guards shooting at her family

from a hilltop near Mount Kailash. Pema-aama, now a gray-haired grandmother fiddling with her

threads and beads sat poised like an empress on her two-square-meter kingdom. Her scent was

like my Lola Udni who wore her fukas beads as a necklace or my Lola Ligawa who wore hers on

her head in the traditional way.

Pema often apologized for her broken English, sticking her tongue out from time to

time. I stayed the night in her house inside the Tashi Palkhiel Tibetan Refugee Settlement, the

largest Tibetan settlement in Nepal with around 800 Tibetans including those born in the camp

since the exodus from the motherland half a century ago. Her son, Sonam, Nepal-born, ran a

small shop selling Tibetan souvenirs mass-manufactured by Newari artisans. While he was

telling me his mother’s story, he undid the turquoise chips from an ornate brass conch shell,

unhappy about the way the stones were set.

I went to Tserok by way of Sonam’s instructions. That’s how I ended up in Miss

Palzom’s home feasting on dhal-bhaat and slices of sautéed venison, the best I’ve had. Miss

Palzom was Sonam’s cousin, also Nepal-born and a teacher like Sonam’s wife who was also

named Pema, like Sonam’s mother.

In Miss Palzom’s front yard, one woman loosened fresh wool and another spun the

fibers into thread. Grains of barley and black beans were drying on mats under the afternoon sun.

Miss Palzom and I sat combing the grains, plucking out tiny stones and dirt. An elderly woman,

heavily decked with turquoise and coral, entered the gate struggling with the weight of a stone

grinder. She put it down and poured a handful of beans into a hole and rotated the top stone.

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Before leaving, she basked under the sun like a cat, lying on the ground, her head resting on the

stone step.

Dolma “Small,” a shop owner I had met in Marpha, invited me to dinner in her

home. Dolma’s house was on the other strip of linked houses behind Miss Palzom’s. The walls

were bare inside. A little boy sat on a hemp rug. Dolma and her husband took the child in from

distant cousins in Upper Mustang so the child could attend the Tibetan English School. Miss

Palzom said the boy had adjusted well in Tserok. We ate bowls of thukpa quietly. Like families

back home in the Cordillera, a child was raised by so many hands and faces, sometimes passed

from families in the outskirt villages to relatives in town centers so the child could be sent to

school.

Miss Palzom rolled some dough and made pieces of chapatti. I took my last sip of

salted butter tea in Tserok observing the side of a mountain where a small pile of snow stuck out

from the bare slope. Little by little, the morning breeze scattered the snow, erasing its existence.

Miss Palzom wrapped three pieces of chapatti and handed it to me. She unraveled a folded katag

and placed it around my neck.

The scenic road from Tserok to Beni is reminiscent of a fifty-year-old photograph of

the Halsema Highway that connects Bontoc to Baguio. At the time, the Halsema was just a

strand of rubble and dust carved on the sides of mountains. It allowed so many families from the

deep corners of the mountains to move into Baguio City, and the surrounding towns of La

Trinidad, Sablan, Tuba, and Itogon.

My parents and my two younger brothers moved to the city to be with my father who

was assigned his new job in La Trinidad. My sister and I stayed one more year in Bontoc before

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leaving everything behind, taking with us only an obfuscated idea of an ancestral town we were

just beginning to thoroughly understand. This shadow of melancholy was the kind that hit me as

Miss Palzom tied the ends of the katag over my chest. To recognize the smell of an unimagined

home in unfamiliar time and space, a map of that home sits under one’s nose, concrete and

unfailing.

When I left Tserok and returned to the Tashi Palkhiel Tibetan Refugee Settlement, I

found Pema-aama in her yard getting ready for her sunset prayers. She was happy to see me

again. Pema-aama and I shared a taxi with the other vendors the next day as we headed down to

Pokhara at the hub of tourists in an area called Lakeside. Some of Pema-aama’s goods were in a

backpack she kept with the owners of a guest house. I carried the bag to her patch by the

storefront. We spread a wide piece of cloth on the dirt while she took out bundles of coral and

turquoise necklaces.

Pema-aama handed me a small trinket to remember her by. I accepted it although it

was an unnecessary ritual. I would not forget her scent, or the way she hissed before speaking in

English, or the way she wobbled to her room turning her prayer wheel and counting the glass

beads of her malla. A remembered image is recovered beneath the mangled photograph: I see my

mother clasping her glow-in-the-dark rosary.

I woke up as the van rolled on in the dark of night to Kathmandu. I had dreamt of

myself as a child sneaking inside the projector room in my grandfather’s now defunct movie

theater staring at moving images of snow-capped mountains. I thought of the pig sties of Bontoc

Ili. Little by little, an odor formed under my nose.

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 A Museum

Inside the Bontoc Museum, downstairs on a wall by the toilet is a reproduction of an

old black and white photo of a headless human body. It is a small photograph and familiar to

many. The skin on the body has the supple brown sheen of roasting chestnuts. Roped in fetal

position to a bamboo pole, the body is carried on both ends of the pole by two males in

loincloths. This small photograph is placed inconspicuously among other documentary evidence

of the exploits of colonizers. It has oppressed the memory of too many visitors looking to assume

a token understanding of Bontoc. But that memory often solidifies, simplistically whole, like a

good poem.

The other objects in the museum that are rendered footnotes due to the violent and

exotic nature of the mentioned photograph, are kitchen and farming utensils; woven rattan for

food, clothing, and fishing; old Chinese jars for storing wine and salted meat; woven skirts,

blankets, loincloths, and capes in the different weaving patterns unique to certain communities;

war implements including a variety of spears, axes and shields; trade beads strung into necklaces

and bracelets; Mother-of-pearl and animal bone and teeth jewelry; and all sorts of items that

evoke the lives of the Bontok and other surrounding indigenous communities.

Like many small and local cultural museums built to imitate the history of its focus

community, it is a repository of singular objects that concretize the shadows of lived memories.

But, in the compartmentalization of objects, these memories are hijacked into a linear and single

organism. To begin to tell the story of the decolonial project in the Bontok community requires a

questioning of the archival nature of the Bontoc Museum as an auto-colonizing and godly

machine. I attempt to do this by referring to a reimagining of a repository of objects from

personal history detailed in this piece of writing: a new museum.

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 At the moment, the new museum I imagine is a collection of the following objects: a

Christian yellow hymnal from a funeral in Samoki, a box of rectangular gin bottles collected

from a bar along Magsaysay Road in Baguio City, a photograph of two local children placed on

felt paper and set in a black plastic frame (circa 1990s), a silk katag from a Tibetan woman, and

an antique wood and metal knife used to cut rice stalks (found in Sabangan, Mountain Province;

believed to be the same knife in the folklore about a woman devoured by a snake).

But important to this repository is the imagined drawing of an indigenous woman.

She is believed to have moved to the city and converted as a Christian. She is seated on a rock by

the river near the foot of a hill somewhere past the village of Samoki. She clasps a glow-in-the

dark rosary. On her lap is the dead headless body of a brother, or perhaps, a son.

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