Wisdom from a Rainforest

The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist

Stuart Schlegel

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780820349589
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the early sixties, Stuart Schlegel went into a remote rainforest on the Philippine island of Mindanao as an anthropologist in search of material. What he found was a group of people whose tolerant, gentle way of life would transform his own values and beliefs profoundly. Wisdom from a Rainforest is Schlegel's testament to his experience and to the Teduray people of Figel, from whom he learned such vital, lasting lessons.

Schlegel's lively ethnography of the Teduray portrays how their behavior and traditions revolved around kindness and compassion for humans, animals, and the spirits sharing their worlds. Schlegel describes the Teduray's remarkable legal system and their strong story-telling tradition, their elaborate cosmology, and their ritual celebrations. At the same time, Schlegel recounts his own transformation—how his worldview as a member of an advanced, civilized society was shaken to the core by a so-called primitive people. He begins to realize how culturally determined his own values are and to see with great clarity how much the Teduray can teach him about gender equality, tolerance for difference, generosity, and cooperation.

By turns funny, tender, and gripping, Wisdom from a Rainforest honors the Teduray's legacy and helps us see how much we can learn from a way of life so different from our own.

1 Beginnings

The Philippines is a nation made up entirely of islands, the exposed tops of a long range of undersea volcanoes lying south and east of China. There are two quite large Philippine islands and a whole array of medium-sized and little ones. Luzon is the big island in the north, where Manila is located, and Mindanao is the large southern island. The mists of prehistory hide the origins of the Teduray and of their neighbors, the Maguindanaon, but the ancestral home of both societies is the southwestern quarter of Mindanao. The Teduray live in the rainforest-covered mountains south of the Pulangi, a major river that empties into the Moro Gulf at Cotabato City and from there into the South China Sea. The Maguindanaon, who are Muslim, occupy the lowlands to the north and west of the mountains. The old myths of both people say they have been there since the beginning of time.

The Teduray people number some thirty thousand and are subdivided roughly into three main groups. Until the twentieth century, the majority were “forest people” who were relatively isolated from and unknown to the outside world and who lived by gardening and foraging for wild foods in the mountains of the Cotabato Cordillera. Egalitarian and peaceful, their primary contact with the world outside the rainforest was through trade pacts established with the Maguindanaon. A second type of Teduray was the “coastal people,” a relatively small scattering of families along the beaches of the Moro Gulf who lived and thought much like the forest people but who, in addition, extensively fished in the sea. The third division comprised the Teduray of the Awang area, the northern foothills close to Cotabato City. The Awang people, some of whom lived as far into the hills as the Upi Valley, twenty-five miles south of Awang Village, were the closest neighbors to the Maguindanaon and, as we shall see, interacted with them in many important ways that other Teduray did not.

The Maguindanaon are a larger tribal group than the Teduray, numbering half a million, and their territory spreads widely through the lowlands surrounding the Cotabato Cordillera. Unlike the Teduray, who remained animists, the Maguindanaon adopted the faith of Islam some five hundred years ago. For centuries they have lived by wet-rice paddy farming. Maguindanaon society is hierarchical, with an aristocracy composed of datus, who fight fierce, bitter, and protracted dynastic wars with each other. Until recent times, the forest Teduray allowed a few Maguindanaon traders, representing powerful datus, into the mountains under the terms of strict trade pacts, but on the whole they feared and disliked their Muslim neighbors’ propensity to look down upon them as primitive and ignorant. Indeed, the Maguindanaon treated most Teduray with contempt and occasionally took them as slaves.

The Awang/Upi Teduray, in contrast, came to terms with the Maguindanaon many centuries ago. Living as close to Cotabato City as they do, their long history of greater contact and interaction with the Muslim lowlanders gave their way of life a distinctive flavor. Even before the Maguindanaon converted to Islam, the Awang people were military allies of the “lower-valley” datus in their ancient and seemingly endless dynastic warfare with the more inland “upper-valley” datus. Many bits and pieces of both Awang Teduray and Maguindanaon oral tradition (and even some old Maguindanaon genealogical documents) make reference to Awang people fighting alongside the lowlanders.

Quite early on, Awang Teduray adopted many of the Maguindanaon social and cultural ways. Presumably dazzled by the larger group’s comparative wealth and splendor, their political power, and their demonstrations of military valor, the Awang people must have decided the Maguindanaon made better friends than enemies. The Awang Teduray emulated them, creating chiefs with political titles and power who proceeded to coerce obedience from their followers. They developed concepts of personal ownership of property, including dry rice fields on land that they cleared and plowed in the Maguindanaon manner with draft animals. They learned to prize violence, and to be good at it. Like the datus, Awang Teduray men considered multiple wives to be a sign of high status. Some of the most wealthy and powerful even imitated the Maguindanaon custom of owning slaves.

Awang Teduray never converted to Islam, however; they preserved their animistic belief in a world of spirits. Nonetheless, like their Muslim Maguindanaon allies, they considered their more isolated forest sisters and brothers to be, if not infidels, at least rustic and unsophisticated.

The place of these Teduray and Maguindanaon peoples, the southwestern quarter of Mindanao, is to this day part of one of the world’s great cultural fault lines, running between the Crescent of Islam and the Cross of Christianity.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, when Islam was just beginning to penetrate into the southern islands of the Philippine archipelago, Spanish conquistadors began pushing their way into the central and northern islands. So right from the beginning, the Catholic Spanish battled the Muslims of Mindanao. They named them Moros (Moors), as they had called North African Muslims, and the word persists to this day.

In spite of Spanish imperial claims, southern Mindanao did not become a recognized part of the Philippine nation for three centuries. Two Jesuit padres established a small mission in Cotabato in 1748, but were forced to evacuate just six months later by implacable Muslim hostility. The Spanish began to turn the tide in their three-hundred-year-long campaign against the Muslim peoples of the south only in the early 1860s, when, with the help of newly developed steam-powered gunboats, they were able to establish limited political control in Cotabato.

One of the first moves of Spanish rule in southern Mindanao was to invite the Jesuits to resume missionary work. In 1862 a group of Jesuits opened a mission and school in Tamantaka, between Cotabato City and Awang, and set about trying to convert both the Muslim Maguindanaon of the lowlands and the animist Teduray of the mountains. Awang people were therefore the first Teduray to encounter Christianity. The main Awang Teduray leader, who bore the Maguindanaon title of Datu Bandara, became a protégé of the Jesuits, and the Spanish government soon named him presidente of Awang municipality.

One of the Jesuit priests, Padre Guerrico Bennasar, took responsibility for the Teduray work. The first Teduray people to accept baptism were Bandara’s family, supplied by the Spanish with the last name Tenorio. The baptismal ceremony took place at the Tamantaka Mission in 1863 and included a young man named Sigayan. Given the Christian name of José Tenorio, he became Padre Bennasar’s prize pupil, and at the Jesuit’s request dictated a little volume, which was published in Madrid with the missionary’s rendering of Sigayan’s Teduray on one page and his own Spanish translation on the facing page. The book, titled Costumbres de los indios Tirurayes (Customs of the Teduray People), was surely one of the first times the name of the Teduray people appeared in print, spelled as it must have sounded to a Spaniard, to whom a d sounded like an r and the closest sound to the Teduray e was the Spanish i. It is a fascinating document and, to my knowledge, the earliest “ethnography” to be written by a native Filipino of his own indigenous customs. The Teduray have since been known in Spanish and English as the Tiruray, a practice that at their recent request I no longer follow.

Sigayan’s account of Teduray customs reveals some characteristics common to all Teduray: the same language, the same house styles, similar marriage patterns, many of the same names for spirits. But in matters that pertain to social ranking, political power, and a commitment to violence, Sigayan’s description reflects the heavily Maguindanaon-influenced thinking about heirarchy and domination that was characteristic of the Awang people. Teduray men were portrayed by Sigayan in several places as dominant over women and as warlike raiders led by political headmen or chiefs.*

In spite of Datu Bandara’s influential family, Christianity did not take hold among the Awang Teduray, any more than the Islamic religion had centuries earlier, and when the American period began some two generations later few Teduray Catholics were to be found.

Maguindanaon political factions have made war on each other since well before the late fifteenth century. The United States entered this scene militarily when it wrestled titular control of the Philippines from Spain in 1898 (part of the settlement of the Spanish-American War) and joined the ranks of nations with overseas territorial holdings. The Americans immediately found themselves engaged in a bloody and repressive war in the new colony. From the Filipino point of view, the desperate, losing struggle against the United States Army was merely the second phase of a revolution they had launched against colonial rule in 1896. American journalists and historians of the day, who viewed our military conquest as part of our “manifest destiny” to gain an overseas colony rich in natural resources, as well as an economic foothold in Asia, named the resistance against the United States “the Philippine Insurrection.” The fighting was especially fierce in the Islamic areas of the southern Philippines, where the Spanish had been able to establish only tenuous control over the local Muslims, and even that for only about thirty-five years.

In 1903, just five years after their arrival, the Americans forced the Muslim regions, which they renamed the Moro Province, to become part of the Philippine nation. This threatened the ancient isolation of the forest Teduray as nothing ever had before, and that isolation soon began to break down around the edges. The Americans thus began a historical process that ultimately resulted in destruction of the rainforest and, as a consequence, the radical acculturation of Teduray society.

One of the American officers in the Moro campaigns around Cotabato City was Captain Irving Edwards. Staying on after pacification as a colonial administrator, Edwards became intensely interested in the Teduray people. In 1921 he married a young Teduray woman from the Tenorio family of Awang, a relative of Datu Bandara, the old friend of the Spanish. Edwards lived among the Teduray until his death in the late 1950s, serving in a number of official and unofficial capacities including head of the military constabulary, provincial chief justice, governor, and superintendent of schools. Captain Edwards—as everyone called him throughout his life—devoted himself tirelessly to the furthering of what he considered “progress” among the Teduray: education, proper government, law and order, economic modernization, and religious conversion. In 1916 he established a public school at Awang, and in 1919 opened an agricultural school in the Upi Valley, linked by a winding road with the lowlands. By the 1920s he had established primary and elementary schools in dozens of Awang and Upi Teduray communities.

Encouraged by Captain Edwards, Christian homesteaders from other parts of the Philippines, particularly Cebuanos from the central Philippines and Ilocanos from the large northern island of Luzon, began to settle in the Upi Valley. Maguindanaon Muslim farmers as well, now protected by American rule, for the first time began to occupy and own land in the Teduray area. The number of Maguindanaon settlers in Upi increased greatly after World War II, and they took permanent political control of the area in the mid-1940s, holding it to this day.

Teduray in the rainforest beyond Upi employed a form of forest gardening that had served them well for untold centuries. The Upi agricultural school teachers and the lowlander homesteaders, however, all agreed that the forest Teduray way of cultivation was hopelessly primitive. “Why, they know nothing of plows,” one earnest teacher told me in 1961, “and they don’t even clear the forest. They just poke holes in the ground with pathetic little sharpened sticks!” So everywhere around Upi, and all along the road down through Awang to Cotabato City, the forest was zealously cleared, the fields plowed, and corn and sugar cane planted in neat Iowan rows. Teduray people in deforested places were issued titles to their land, but their unsophisticated grasp of the unfamiliar concept eventually resulted in the loss of almost every Teduray-owned farm to homesteaders.

Captain Edwards organized the villages outside the forest, Teduray and homesteader alike, into units of the Philippine government, with Upi as the main municipal center. There courts administered and police enforced Philippine national law. He wanted to “pacify” all the Teduray, but at that time he had little reach into the remaining rainforest. Although deforestation was proceeding steadily, it did not become intensive until the post–World War II years, when the independent Philippine government began giving franchises to lowlander timber companies to cut and haul away the trees.

In addition to all these drastic changes in local life, Captain Edwards was determined that his Teduray charges would be brought out of “pagan darkness” and made Christians. He asked several church groups, including the Roman Catholics and the Methodists, to establish missions among the Awang/Upi Teduray, but was told by each that there were no funds to support such a venture. In the mid-1920s the Episcopal Church responded to his invitation by sending an American missionary priest to open the Mission of St. Francis of Assisi. By 1960, when I arrived to be a priest at the mission, it had chapels in some fifty-four Teduray communities and a large parish church and medical clinic in Upi. After World War II Roman Catholics and several Protestant churches also began vigorous work among the Awang and Upi Teduray and the homesteader families.

Awang people—who made up most of the Teduray population not only of Awang but also of the Upi Valley—took to the new regime and way of life quite congenially. The changes, however, utterly transformed and bewildered the forest Teduray, who, as the rainforest was progressively cleared, were unwittingly caught up in them. Some responded by moving farther into the forest, in hopes of escaping all the change and confusion. But others—often after several such retreats proved insufficient to keep them ahead of the relentless loggers and homesteaders—simply surrendered and joined the peasant world. Typically, in one great convulsion of change, Teduray families would begin to dress like the homesteaders, learn their languages, send their children to school, ask for Christian baptism, and join a mission congregation. Most essential of all, they sought a landlord who would provide them with a work animal and a field to plow. They still thought of themselves as Teduray, of course, but most of them knew that the peaceful, egalitarian life they had cherished so dearly in the forest was over.

The economic consequences of deforestation and the process of becoming peasants were devastating. In contrast to the rich variety of foods the forest people were accustomed to, the cleared and plowed fields of the Upi Valley specialized in just four crops: rice, corn, tomatoes, and onions. Hunting, fishing, and gathering, of course, played almost no role at all in the cleared regions; the forests were gone and the rivers and creeks all seriously depleted. Besides, the streams were now private property and fishing them was considered trespassing.

In place of the foraging that had always abundantly supplied forest Teduray, assuring them a good life even if their garden crops failed, now the market dominated their lives, with its unfamiliar cash and credit system and its very different values. This meant a far less assured, less varied, and less interesting natural diet. Moreover, it meant that the Teduray outside the forest were now full participants in the rural Philippine peasant market system, as much so as any immigrant or Maguindanaon homesteader in the Upi Valley. And that meant that they lost the significant independence the forest had allowed them. With it gone, they were only a tiny part of the world economy, and sharecroppers to boot, occupying the lowest possible status other than beggars or homeless.

There was, however, one way to rise above this status. Fostered by the school system, a whole new set of elite Teduray emerged, persons of high social standing and influence whose roles reflected not Teduray traditional life but the Filipino mainstream. By 1967 some forty-eight Teduray women and men had become schoolteachers, three men had been ordained Episcopal priests, two more were lawyers working with the national government, two Teduray women were nurses, and one young man had become a provincial agriculturist. But the old specialized roles of the forest folk—as legal sages and shamans, skilled hunters and basket weavers—had disappeared. Captain Edwards felt very proud of all that the Teduray people achieved, but traditional Teduray were far less enthusiastic.

In short, as a consequence of American rule a whole new distinction between Teduray came into being. There were now the “forest people,” the traditional communities still living the old way in the ever-shrinking rainforest, and there were the profoundly acculturated “peasant Teduray” outside the forest. By the 1960s half the Teduray population, some fifteen thousand, had become this new ethnic version of Filipino peasantry and were largely out of touch with their forest counterparts.

My wife, Audrey, and I first arrived in Upi in June 1960, sent by the Episcopal Church in America to be missionaries on the staff of the Mission of St. Francis of Assisi. Our initial task was to found St. Francis High School, the first academic high school in the Teduray mountains. Not long after our arrival, even before the school was built, I was named priest-in-charge of the mission.

At that time, Upi was a frontier town. We often thought that life there must be similar to life in Dodge City in the 1880s. Many people carried guns. The buses plying the slow, rough road between Upi and Cotabato would occasionally be stopped and the passengers robbed. Maguindanaon bandits were common in the mountains, where they took refuge from the law in the lowlands, unofficially protected by the datus who were in control, and every so often gangs of these bandits would come into town, get drunk, and shoot the place up.

Despite this, our life at the mission was virtually idyllic and we always felt safe. Most of the inhabitants of the Upi Valley were either peasant Teduray farmers or Christian homesteaders from other parts of the Philippines. The political power was firmly in the hands of two strong Muslim Maguindanaon datus of the upper-valley faction; one was mayor and the other, his cousin, was police chief. The mission had excellent relations with them both, partly because they had residual respect for Americans and partly because I welcomed their children as students at St. Francis High School and, to their surprise, excused them from Christian worship and religious instruction. I offered to let the Muslim students receive Islamic instruction, if their families would send an instructor. So the Muslim authorities were friends and watched out for our safety. They discouraged the bandits (who were often their relatives) from hassling us and always sent a messenger to warn us if they heard about plans to rob the mission office safe. The police chief once told Audrey that, if anyone came to bother us, we should lock our house up tight and bang a washtub with a wooden mallet; they would hear and come right away. In a place without telephones or even electricity, this was an effective alarm system.

Looking back at those missionary days, I realize that I never felt much fire in my belly to convert anyone. I wanted to care for and serve our parishioners and our community—and the mission did a lot of each—but I was little concerned with people’s beliefs. This was not because I p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Trekking to Figel
• 3 Animals That Fly Are Birds
• 4 Mirab Interlude I
• 5 We Were Created to Care for the Forest
• 6 Mirab Interlude II
• 7 Everyone Needs to Be in a Pot
• 8 Mirab Interlude III
• 9 The Woman Who Was Born a Boy
• 10 Cebu Interlude
• 11 Justice without Domination
• 12 Mirab Interlude IV
• 13 Shamans and Sacred Meals
• 14 Mirab Interlude V
• 15 The People You Cannot See
• 16 Mirab Interlude VI
• 17 Catastrophe at Figel
• 18 Visions We Live By
• Epilogue
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgments
• Index