Project Report - La Trobe University

Appendix 4. Connect Magazine article
What more could we ask for?
By Maria Cameron and Edwin Wise
Indigenizing Education in a Kalinga Public School | 37
Published in the April-June 2009 edition of Connect Magazine, the quarterly publication of
the Volunteering for International Development from Australia. Also available online at the
AYAD-VIDA Portal Philippines (http://ayad-vida.devconceptsph.com/news-andfeatures/290-preserving-ip-culture-in-kalinga)
Edwin Wise and Maria Cameron, the
authors, are VIDA volunteers working at
Dananao, Kalinga as Educational
Materials Developer, Cultural Documenter
and Networking Advisor.
After two hours of hiking – first climbing
up the steep road from Tinglayan, then
horizontally along the walking track, we
reach the footbridge across a tributary of
the Chico River. The last stretch before we
reach our destination in the hardest:
almost-vertical much of the way. We stop
to rest, breathless, at the terraced rice
fields along the track. Clouds fill the valley
below, the afternoon sun streams from
the west. Thankfully, this last stretch we
hike in full shade.
At last, we arrive. First, we see a cluster of
rice granaries and a stand of coffee trees.
We enter the village from the east: a
collection of 102 houses form a loose
crescent moon around a series of
terraced, irrigated rice fields, bathed in
gold by late afternoon light. Only just
planted out with pachug (rice seedlings),
the fields are a vibrant green.
We hear the dull thud of rice being
pounded, by hand, with aru and rusung –
implements best described as giant,
wooden mortar and pestle. Groups of
children can be heard – singing, laughing,
crying, shouting. A few scrub the black
from the bottom of big cooking pots in the
irrigation channels, using the grit of sand
and their feet as scrubbers. Pigs and
chooks scratch in the village paths.
Farmers with heavy loads make their way
home from a hard day’s work in their
fields.
We sit on the porch of the house where
we are hosted by our dear friends Agom
and Gaspar. We sip sweet, hot coffee, and
watch the village life unfold before us
until dusk, in a theatre-like arrangement
of houses.
This is Chananaw (formally Dananao),
original home of the Ichananaw tribe of
Kalinga, located in the north of the
Cordillera mountain range of Luzon (the
largest island in the Philippines). It is also
our ‘office’ for the next five months.
The Cordilleras, along with the Muslim
south, was the only area of the Philippines
never under direct Spanish control,
although this was not without 300 years
of attempts. The Spaniards’ desire to reap
souls as well as gold left a bloody mark on
the Cordilleras’ history, as well as
demarcating ‘lowlanders’ from
‘uplanders’, ‘civilised’ from ‘barbarians’,
or ‘Christians’ from ‘pagans’. Today’s
Cordilleras still reflect this history of
autonomy, although the cross was
brought, along with Western education,
by the Americans – after they purchased
the Philippines from Spain for $20
million, along with Cuba, in 1898.
Today’s Chananaw reflects a shared yet
singular history: public education only
arrived in the 1950s and the church
followed in the 1960s. Even now, no road