Princesa Urduja, suddenly, is in the consciousness of people these days because of an animation film  now showing in the metropolis. I would like to share with you an old piece that I wrote under an old byline...

I originally wrote this for Gabriela, the women's org, then t he Women's Feature Service (WFS), a feminist news agency, syndicated it. This version was culled from Filipinas magazine USA.

You may view the graphic version @ this link -http://www.urduja.com/princess.html

By Chit Balmaceda Guiterrez

Princess Urduja, ancient accounts say, was a 14th century woman ruler of the dynastic Kingdom of Tawalisi in Pangasinan, a vast area lying by the shores of the Lingayen Gulf and the China Sea.

Pangasinan was an important kingdom then, and the sovereign was equal to the King of China.

Known far and wide, Princess Urduja was famous for leading a retinue of woman warriors who were skilled fighters and equestrians. They developed a high art of warfare to preserve their political state.

"These womenfolk took to the battlefields because the male population was depleted by the series of wars which came with the rise and prominence of the Shri-Visayan Empire in the sixth to the 13th centuries," the accounts said. Strong and masculine in physique, they were called kinalakian or Amazons.

The saga of this unique princess was the stuff of legend. Parents and teachers tell her story like they would a fairytale, or the biography of Gabriela Silang, an 18th-century revolutionary, or Tandang Sora, a granny who fed members of the Katipunan.

The legend of Princess Urduja can be attributed to the famous story of a Mohammedan traveler, Ibn Batuta of India. In 1347 he was a passenger on a Chinese junk, which has just come from the port of Kakula, north of Java and Sumatra and passed by Pangasinan on the way to Canton, China.

Urduja, who had a particular fascination for the renowed "Pepper Country"--pepper being considered black gold then--was quoted by Batuta as saying, "I must positively go to war with that country, and get possession of it, for its great wealth and great forces attract me."

For a time, feminists tried to revive the Urduja story but were discouraged to learn that Batuta's account of the voyage to Tawalisi was labeled as either an intrigue or a fantasy. Scholars, considering the story absurd, declared Urduja a myth.

The Philippines' national hero Dr. Jose Rizal, in Dr. Austin Craig's 1916 paper "Particulars of the Philippines' Pre-Spanish Past" was quoted as saying in one of his letters: "While I may have doubts regarding the accuracy of Ibn Batuta's details, I still beleive in the voyage to Tawalisi". He went as far as to calculate the distance and time of travel from the port of Kakula. Rizal's commentary was triggered by a scholar, Sir Henry Yule, who wrote in his time that: "Tawalisi may be found only in a Gulliver geography."

Today, years after scholars have passionately debated whether the 14th-century heroine is a product of mythology or history, Princess Urduja continues to fascinate Filipinos. In Pangasinan, the Governor's office building in the coastal town of Lingayen is called the Urduja Palace. So is a hotel along the highway.

Urduja's name still has great resonance among the Ibaloi, one of the major ethnolinguistic tribes in the Cordillera region.

Dr. Morr Tadeo Pungayan, a respected scholar of Ibaloi culture and professor at the St. Louis University of Baguio City, said, "Linguistically, Urduja is Deboxah (pronounced Debuca) in Ibaloi. We've always had a woman named Deboxah from time immemorial among the generations of Ibaloi. The name usually describes a woman of strong quality and character who's nobly descended. That name is an Ibaloi name. That's why Ibaloi trace their ancestry from Urduja".

The Cordillera tribes, also known collectively as Igorots, pride themselves as being the only ethnic group that doesn't talk about the origin of man according to Spanish chronicles. Among the tribes, genealogy and family history are orally passed or transmitted. The Ibaloi, just like other highland tribes, could easily trace their ancestry. This is ensured by their custom of naming newborns after ancestors to help keep their memory alive and evoke affection and protection.

"No Ibaloi will bear the name of an ancestor unless she's related," Dr. Pungayan explained. While the Bontoc tribe bestows the name of an ancestor to a grandchild, the Ibaloi style is namesaking the great-grandchild, he added.

A book on the history of Benguet province, written by Anavic Bagamasbad and Zenaida Hamada-Pawid, shows the Benguet genealogy tracing tribal family lines from the year 1380 to 1899.

The book says, "The extent of inter-settlement alliances is climaxed in the memory of Tublay informants with the reign of Deboxah, Princess Urduja, in Pinga. She's acknowledged as the granddaughter of Udayan, an outstanding warrior of Darew. Her death signaled continuous decline of kinship and alliance between highland and lowland settlements."

The Darew mountain range is remembered as the earliest settlement in the mining town of Tublay.

The close relations between the Cordilleras and Lingayen are well-accounted for in Batuta's chronicle. It said that the Kingdom of Tawalisi was very extensive, including the vast areas up to the fringes of the Benguet mountains and the Cordillera ranges in the east of Luzon.

"The ruler," Batuta further said,"possesses numerous junks with which he makes war upon the Chinese until they sue for peace and consent to grant him certain concessions."

Despite recent research, however, most academicians remain cold to oral history, saying that such accounts still have to pass through the stringent rigors of scholarship.

Today, some historians consider the issue of Urduja's historicity as closed. Compounding the issue is the lack of archaelogical evidence on the existence of the Shri-Visayan Empire.

In fact, other aspects of Philippine history are being doubted,too, especially since the late William Henry Scott, an American historian in the Cordillera, proved that the so-called pre-Hispanic laws--the Kalantiaw and Maragtas Codes--were faked or invented by psuedo historians who only wanted fame or riches for themselves.

Dr. Jaime Veneracion, the University of the Philippines head of history department, said that the old Chinese scripts which may have chronicled Urduja's kingdom have remained inaccessible for their archaic language and calligraphy.

But history buffs like writer Ed Reyes remain undaunted. He says: "The researchers aren't conclusive, given the fact that the Philippine history has only been covered in writing for the last 500 years".

Filipinas Magazine, June l999
Visit their site at www.filipinasmag.com

 

(From what's left of my 
 Personal Archive,
 written on said date:)


Oct. 29, 1999

Manila Standard

c/o Mr. DON REYES

BENGUET'S BACKYARD CEMETERIES

by Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez

   Baguio City-- Benguet Highlands hogged the headlines 
a few months back because of its famous ancient mummies, 
such as the almost-mythic Ibaloi warrior, Apo Anno. 

(see recent post -- 
http://chaddaw.multiply.com/photos/album/66/the_mummy>)

   The entry of Christianity into the matrix 
of the Cordillera's life and death rituals-- which were 
centered upon mummification and ancestor worship-- 
had put a stop to all that, rendering the mummies 

as relics of Cordillera's ancient past civilization.

   Unknown to many lowlanders, burying the dead within 
the house yard is also a prevalent practice up to now 
among the Ibaloi and Kankana-ey tribal descendants.

   It would surely dawn on the unwitting outsider as some 
kind of spooky, horror stuff, but it is a common site in 
the mountains to see white-washed tombs by the roadside. 
Beside family-owned cutflower gardens, private mines, 
vegetable patch or fields, and even right within the 
household domain -- ancestral graves could be found.

    For example, the remains of the Laoyan family ancestors, 
a famous Igorot family in La Trinidad, Benguet, could be found 
right within their living room, said Cordillera Resource Center's 
Paul Fianza and photojournalist Dave Chan Leprozo.

    In the mining district of Tuding in Itogon, the Moncado family 
has two stark white pantheons near their gold milling  workshop, 
right beside a bedroom window. Former DENR employee Bong Tuvera's 
father's grave is found right in front of the yard, while his 
grandmother's is in the backyard. The same with his neighbors like 
the Gamiaos and Segundos, as well as the nearby Sisters of the
Immaculate Heart of Mary which has a picturesque little convent 
cemetery bearing seven of its nuns' remains.

    Although there are communal Christian cemeteries now in the 

Cordilleras, Claire Alumno of Kabayan, a town very famous for its 

numerous burial caves said, "No member of our family has been 
buried in any Christian public cemetery, although I have no 
memory when the family stopped the practice of interment in the 
burial caves." 

    Kalinga's Marie Balwayan, 32, said the same thing about the 
practices in her hometown.

    As a way of coping with loss and pain, the highlanders still 
have a fairly strong belief in traditional customs. Last 
October 19, Baguio Gold District's Josie Tuling had her father 
exhumed. In a dream, the father said he felt uncomfortable with 
his blanket, and so Josie had the heirloom blanket changed. 
It was the second time they had ever excavated their patriarch's 
grave. The first time was when he complained in a another dream 
within this year that his grave was wet. Indeed, they found out 
that water was running through the burial site, and they had his 
grave transferred.

    Lowlander Linda Perez who used to own a bakery said, "When 

delivering bread in the hillside towns, I used to cringe with 
goose bumps seeing graves anywhere, but not anymore. I've gotten 
used to them. Even old-timer lowlanders have adopted to the 
custom."

    Gabby Pawid Keith, Mayor Mauricio Domogan's information 
officer, said that it was usually their lowlander-maids who 
found their backyard spooky. Their backyard cemetery along 
the Marcos Highway, which has four graves from four 
generations of the Pawid clan, was his playground as a child. 

    In fact, he added, "All Saints' Day is more important 
to us than Christmas day, because every Nov. 1, we get to 
have the biggest family reunion. It is very convenient 
and we don't get caught up in downtown traffic."

    Through the years, however, as the Benguet backyard 
burial practices seem to have crowded some neighborhoods, 
some commentaries over the radio have been heard. Jokes 
about fears of ghosts and even the issues of sanitation, 
gore and aesthetics were mentioned.

    "There is a national law -- but no local ordinance -- 
prohibiting the burying of the dead in residential areas," 
said Regional Health Department's OIC Susan Cabalda. 
"Are there any complaints?" she asked.
 

    It is not an issue at the moment, she said, as they 
have not received any complaint.-- end

                               * * *

< DOLORES: 
   Her name
   means
   'pain.'

    I finally found the time to join a close friend in oneof his rare visits to his family farm. As yesterday’s downpour seemed headed as a full-blown storm, today’s blue-sky-sunny-weather was a generous gift from nature.

    Two vehicles, one driven by his older brother and the other, by a brother-in-law, snaked their way down to the zigzag, the scenic mountain highway Kennon Road, then up a rough road that wound  deeper into the lush greens and, apparently, last remaining virgin forests at the foothills of a towering Benguet mountain.

     View of the lowlland ricefields from The Secret Farm

    The farm was way off the road, so we had no choice but to leave the vehicles off gaping abyss by the narrow roadsides.

    A welcome party was there to meet us: The caretaker kin himself, a brown dog, and an old Ibaloi woman  farmer who -- amazingly like a waking dream – was carrying upon her back a kayabang, the iconic native basket of her vanishing tribe, that is now more in use in museums than in real life.

    This mirage of a woman with a kayabang hammered in a very subtle message that we were very lucky to be suddenly in Ivadoy/Ibaloi country, a rather strange step back in time, having just driven out of
cosmopolitan tourist town of Baguio a few minutes ago.

    It was the melding of worlds upon worlds-- the past, the present. Dolores, as the Ibaloi woman said her name was, dawned on me like a golden tongue of wisdom, with her very name meaning ‘pain’ -- the Spanish word that, in its plural form, throbs with many more memories of the punitive expeditions against the Ibalois in the mid 1700s.

Better than any theme park

    With a few packs of junk food on our backs and the caretaker and the Ibaloi woman as our guides, we hit a bushy footpath dotted from time to time with red, wild flowers.

  

    The footpath was sometimes dark, then emerald green under the bursting sunlight. Thick, wild undergrowths

interspersed with springs, runoff rainwater, little brooks and puddles.
Some spots were muddy and wet, characteristics of virgin forest beds that are not penetrated by the sun's rays

because of the dense growth of trees which, strangely, didn’t include the ubiquitous Benguet pine.

    Further up, rock boulders larger than houses loomed over us. But suffice it to say that Dolores, the old Ibaloi woman, walking with us into the

deep greens on her way back to her mountain abode, was a comforting sort of nostalgia in our midst, except that she was a living nostalgia and I couldn’t quite believe it with my own my eyes.

   

After another kilometer under the late morning sun, we got a glimpse of a bamboo hut starkly alone in the middle of the lilting greens of forests and farms. My friend, my walking buddy, bandied to his two young nephews, “That’s our own country  club.”

The "Club" hut

    Further up was the nearest neighbor, the only other hut, where Dolores lives.

    In a gurgling, flowing spring, we washed our muddied sandals and took some walking sticks to navigate our way into steeper descents.

    Finally, into the cool embrace
of the bamboo hut, the boys immediately retired to the fishponds to catch tilapia for lunch. The fishponds, two in all, were aerated by natural spring water, coaxed through PVC pipes, for regular oxygen.

                                                                                                                Fishing for lunch

    There were also some koi species swimming with the viewers’ eyes, while red dragonflies echoed their colors circling in flight.
 

 

        This, indeed, was a farm.

    The little hut with a few basic necessities had the
bounties of grains, a few heads of  newly harvested

Etag, dried meat

pumpkins, chops of dried meat dangling by an earthen stove, stacks of firewood, a clay jar that cools water the traditional way, chickens fumbling about for food chaffs outside, flowering fruit trees, medicinal herbs within reach, and stretches of planted flats, corn rows and vines that we’d have to see some other time for they were quite far.

Farm adventure

    Later, our farm adventure led us to a pictorial mode by a larger natural spring where we drank more fresh water. There were even big pipes leading downhill into
the lowland towns, their length indeterminable from end to end. The many ravines by the spring were lush with wild growths, darkly mysterious in some spots. My walking buddy promised he’ll take me some other time to the river boundaries which he
thinks is an enchanted
area because of its eerily relaxing  peace.

At high noon, while somebody was cooking rice by the stove where the pieces of etag, a kind of preserved meat, were dangling above the fireplace – we took to grilling the fishes that we caught from the ponds.

          

    As a lacto-vegetarian, I was tormented seeing the fishes squirm to their last hurrah over glowing charcoals, and I swore I’d never eat anything that has a face ever again (hoping I’d succeed this time, he-he-heh).

Storytelling time

    After lunch, as the blue-sky sunny day wore on, the conversations centered upon how the Ibalois lost their land.

    A visiting literary kin from Shakespeare Country, a new graduate of Literature from Oxford University, hearing all the stories, requested to get a hand on the family tree which goes back to as far as the 12th century. He was scheduled to go with his mom to China in a few days’ time to scout for a post-graduate university.

    In the midst of Old Daddy’s bedside memoirs and Old Mommy’s ‘ambushes’ by her apos over “something” from the Baguio market, the conversations segued to my friend’s many researches about the Ibaloi, particularly about Otto Scheerer’s accounts on the Ibaloi’s penchant for retreat and suicide when unduly vexed to extremes by the conquering colonial forces.

On Baguio’s past

     Scheerer’s account of the long forgotten "Tonglo Massacre" --the near decimation of the Ibalois by the punitive expeditions of the Spanish guardia civil in 1759-- must have been a low point in Ibaloi history, said a sister.  Very few of the tribal folk, within a span of only three generations into the Scheerer interview after the genocide, could fairly remember the bitter incident of Tonglo, a major but vanished Ibaloi settlement in Benguet, where 35 rancherias were burned down to ashes, where women and children were killed, massacred.

    A German anthropologist who lived in pre-American Baguio days, Scheerer augmented his narrative,“On Baguio’s Past,” with Spanish friar accounts.

    When the Tonglo Massacre occurred, the Spanish friars were severely collecting tributes or taxes from the natives, having established a fairly reputable worship service among a sizeable number of the Ibalois, including those settled in old Chuyo, that piece of family ancestral land occupied by the Bureau of Animal Industry since the time of the Commonwealth Government.

    The sister from London, the first ever indigenous woman to have addressed the United Nations General Assembly, said that the Ibalois -- their ancestors -- probably blocked the Tonglo Massacre from their memory, a behavioral pattern similarly observed among the other indigenous peoples worldwide.

Walk back

    The walk back to where we began the trek had something for us -- my friend and his brother found some gleaming stones on the footpath. Having touched such a stone for the first time, I took a piece of gold ore home as a fitting souvenir, my own “golden coin,” an unexpected gift from nature.

    When we left the farm at about 3:30 pm, the sun was still sunny, the weather gods had been good to us. Back on the zigzag road to the clouds, the rains suddenly fell in torrents, then it stopped and onwards to the ascending stretches of the road, it caught up with us again, cascading gently down the mountainsides like swishing sprays.

    Drenched and cleansed, the zigzag road to Baguio, the city in mist, was not only a refreshing sight, the aquifers of the highlands were singing, in fact!

Text & Photos

by Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez

August 24, 2007

Baguio City                        

Philippines

                        * * *                             

     

        

....What was being alluded to, first and foremost, was the proliferation of kitsch (objects/realities/ manifestations borne out of taste worse than "baduy." Bad-uy, take note of the etymology. Ha-ha)....

LINK ---
http://igorotblogger.blogspot.com/2007/06/chi-balmaceda-gutierrez-on-uglification.html

Related LINK --
http://www.i-baguio.com/baguio-city-local-elections-2007-part-1/

Activist turned writer-publisher Joaquin JACK Cariño is knocking at the hearts of all the people of Baguio and the Cordillera who have made the land of his ancestors their own home.