Cordillera Women Weaving the Life Blanket

© by Edessa Ramos
Published in the Star Quilt, a special book for the Beijing
4th World Conference on Women, Asian Women's Human Rights Council, 1995 (photo taken from Sinaunang Habi, a book written by my friend Marian Pastor Roces and published by Senator Nikki Coseteng)

The mother held out the cloth to her young son before he left for battle. The rich stripes of deep red and earth brown leapt out from the woven surface, the way the mighty Chico River jumps out from the mountain's bosom to nourish the tribe.

This is your life blanket, she told him. It is what we wrapped you with when you were born. It grows as you grow. Every strand is a strand of your life. And when you die, it is what we will bury you with.

I visited the Cordillera in December of 1994. Every year, they said to me, a young woman returns to the mountains where she was born and is told this story - a woman who comes back to recover her lost self. I was privileged enough to hear the story although I was not of the tribe. They must have sensed that I, too, was a woman in search of herself.

The Cordillera mountain ranges are found in Northern Philippines. It is the home of indigenous Filipinos whose fierce resistance to colonial rule over the centuries has preserved for them the culture and way of life that are as old as the mountains. Known collectively as "Kaigorotan" (the Igorot peoples), they are comprised of: the Bontoc, Benguet, Ibaloi, Kalinga, Ifugao, Ibanag, Isneg and Tingguian tribes.

Weaving is part of indigenous culture, not only in the Cordillera but for all indigenous peoples throughout the Philippines. And it is an activity that belongs primarily to women. Their deft fingers work the loom the way their elders weave the legends of the sun, moon, earth, and the origin of the tribe. Details of life and legend in the mountains find their way into the cloth, such as the lizard that graces most Ifugao weaving, or the blood that colors the stripes of Bontoc cloth.

The life blanket is a symbol of sustenance and protection for the tribe, functions that are eternal to the indigenous woman. It is woven as she climbs the terraced mountainsides in early morning to till the fields. As she walks for several kilometers to reach a stream with the clay pots and cleaning gear balanced on her head. As she struggles with backbreaking labor that is the daily toil of the woman of the tribe. This, as she gives birth and raises the future generations of her people. And in more recent years, in the face of militarization and other violent threats to her tribe, the life blanket is woven by the same fingers that carry the warrior's weapons.

The struggle of the Cordillera people is rooted in the national oppression experienced by all indigenous peoples of the Philippines. It is an oppression characterized by government neglect that persists from one regime to another because the cultural minorities, as they are officially called, are not considered priority in national development. This is despite the fact that they comprise around 16% of the population. Their oppression is compounded by discrimination practiced by the lowland Christian majority Filipinos.

In the mountain villages, there are hardly any schools. Children walk as much as 5-7 kilometers a day to reach school. Irrigation facilities are usually poor or totally neglected. Basic social services, particularly healthcare for women and children, are virtually non-existent. Indigenous people live in dire poverty particularly during the lean months of the year. Worse yet, they face the threat of environmental degradation, particularly the loss of watersheds crucial to mountain farming due to the rapid rate of deforestation.

The people say that the government is interested in them only because of the land, the virgin forests that they occupy - which are attractive areas for logging and mining investments and all other forms of development aggression. Constantly threatened with displacement and the loss of their ancestral lands, their situation could spell the death of the tribe.

In 1979, national and world attention turned for the first time to the Cordilleras. It was the height of the protest against the construction of the Chico River Dam, a government hydroelectric project that was meant to boost the electrical supply of the cities but which would have inundated hundreds of tribal villages. The project would have laid to waste in a few months a rich and proud way of life. The price of so-called development went too high when the military assassinated the revered tribal leader Macliing Dulag one night in April in front of his wife and children. The war that broke out took its toll, resulting in the loss of lives and the imprisonment and torture of many tribal leaders.

The people continued to resist and eventually succeeded in deterring the dam construction. The tribal strategy of resistance was the "bodong" or peacepact, forged among the tribes of the Cordillera, cementing their strength into one force against the government that would destroy them.

Kalinga women led several protest actions, including the entry into construction camps at night to dismantle bulldozers and equipment. When confronted by armalite-wielding soldiers, the women bared their breast and boldly declared that the soldiers must dare kill them first. The confrontation ended without incident as the soldiers lowered their rifles in shame. By her action, the Cordillera woman had reclaimed her tradition, flinging aside the western-imposed dress in an act of defiance, and reestablished her identity as a true warrior of her people.

The Cordillera women's struggle did not end with the dam and other political issues confronting the tribe. When problems of alcoholism, wife beating, and abuse of women began, the women took matters into their own hands by organizing themselves into "patrols". At night, for instance, elderly women would send home with a scolding any man they found roaming the village in drunken stupor.

The problem of militarization for the past two decades has become as persistent as the clouds in the Cordillera landscape. The people pay the price for being inhabitants and guardians of one of the richest natural resource areas in the Philippines. Military personnel are sent to the mountains to quell any resistance to government projects and to provide protection to companies investing in the region. The reports of abuses are endless, committed by soldiers from one infantry battalion to another - bombing, strafing, artillery shelling, and other forms of collective punishment of unarmed civilians. Women have been raped, tortured, imprisoned, and summarily executed. The prolonged occupations of villages by military units resulted in the forcible surrender of women to the soldiers, a clear form of sexual slavery in a time of armed conflict.

Several Cordillera women's organizations were developed over the years to address these hardships and to strengthen the social, political and cultural fabric of their society. They seek to align these efforts with the national struggle of Filipino women for equality, freedom and justice. As they weave the life blanket, several of which when joined together become the Cordillera quilt, Cordillera women reweave their society into one that is just and self-determining.