The Bagobo-Tagabawas, a tribe in Santa Cruz, Davao del Sur, fear not only their displacement if an Aboitiz-owned power company succeeded in building a power plant in Tudaya. Ultimately, their leaders say, the children will pay the price. Text and photos by Davao Todays Germelina A. Lacorte.
Related story: The Ritual at Tudaya Falls
TUDAYA, Davao del Sur — In this hinterland sitio in Santa Cruz town, a village the Bagobo-Tagabawas have always known as home, children play with abandon.
Sometimes they are seen climbing the difficult ravine that in the past had protected the tribe against enemies, their nimble feet running up and down the steep slopes with ease and grace – -a feat that newcomers usually find daunting.
But many Bagobo Tagabawas who live in this ancestral land for hundreds of years fear the children’s happy days might soon be over.
The waterfall that had made Tudaya famous to outsiders is now being eyed by a big Davao power firm as site of a hydroelectric power project, a prospect that threaten to displace the tribe.
For respected village elders like 106-year-old Apo Adoc Puroc, this does not augur well for the tribe. Land, according to him, has always been held sacred among their ancestors. “It’s a sacred gift and it’s never for sale,” he says in his own Bagobo-Tagabawa tongue interpreted into Cebuano by Sandawa Sariling Langis tribal pastor Loreto Balido.
Forming part of the Santa Cruz town barangay of Sibulan near the Mount Apo foothills, Tudaya is part of the ancestral land of the Bagobo-Tagabawa, the Mindanao indigenous tribe whose area has been known to span part of Davao city down south to Bansalan in Davao del Sur and Makilala in North Cotabato.
The tribe’s system of beliefs has held nature in high respect. The waterfall has been a crucial part to their way of life, a springboard of their culture, religion and physical well-being. After all, it’s the waterfall that makes the surrounding land more fertile the whole year round, its mist protecting the area’s crops from drought. The people have also been known to observe their own system of communal farming.
But promises of easy money had lured some members of the tribe, among them Apo Adoc’s 80-year-old son Udimay, to sell their land for the project.
Most of those opposed to the project resent the fact that most of the people eagerly pushing for it are not from Tudaya but barangay officials from the neighboring sitio of Pogpog. “They dont even live here,” says Apo Adoc, who recently performed a ritual before the waterfalls to call on the spirits in the light of the tribe’s present dilemma. “We should not abuse the kindness of nature because it will get back on us,” Apo Adoc told the visitors led by the indigenous peoples’ group Sagip, who organized the trip to the area.
Even as the company offered to buy their land, people like Erpincita Ayap, a Bagobo Tagabawa woman making a living out of farming in Tudaya, fears of displacement.
“I did not plant these fruit trees just for these to be uprooted,” says Ayap, who found the prices offered by the company for her abaca and banana crops too cheap for comfort. “They try to lure people with jobs and money,” she says. “But what kind of jobs? And what kind of pay? Even the electricity that they’re going to harness out of our waterfalls will never be for free.”
But for the Bagobo sage like Apo Adoc, it’s never a question of money. “This land has been left to us by our ancestors. We’re supposed to bequeath it to our children,” he says. “If we’re going to sell now, where will the children go?” (Germelina Lacorte/davaotoday.com)
[tags]Davao, Lumads, Davao del Sur, waterfalls, energy, development aggression, indigenous peoples, children, aboitiz, photographs[/tags]
Indigenous Peoples
