The Malitan
Preserving Seeds, A Way of Life and Tradition
By Aene Comiling
Volume 26, no. 2, Ways of Knowing
There was once a one-eyed giant named Ologasi. Ologasi lived in schools built by lowlanders. The Indigenous women, especially grandmothers, had forbidden the children to go to these schools. The elders warned that if Lumad children go to school to learn the language and ways of the lowland, they would be put into a huge boiling cauldron to be served as a meal for the giant. Once eaten, their souls would never return.
Mindanao, a southern island in the Philippines, was once home to many Indigenous peoples collectively known as the Lumad. Mindanao teemed with different species of native flora and fauna. The Lumad were able to cultivate the edible varieties found in the wild for sustenance, and until the mid-1900s, hunting was part of the practice for many of their community rituals and celebrations. Today, Lumad primarily rely on agriculture for a living; their livelihood, culture, and way of life are connected to their land. Traditionally, for the Lumad of the Ovu Manobo tribe, agriculture is a responsibility handed down to Malitan, the term used for Indigenous women of the Matigsalug, Djangan, and Bagobo tribes, of which the Ovu Manobo are part of. 1 Seed preservation and cultivation is considered a treasured knowledge handed down and shared by mothers unto their daughters, as their women ancestors have done before them–a collection of culture and practices spanning across generations.
As with many Indigenous peoples around the globe, the Lumad were subjected to state-funded purging–either by means of violent military and paramilitary killings, harassment, and assault to subdue resistance or through cultural assimilation through government services and programs, thus slowly erasing traces of their identity and existence. The logging industries; encroachment into ancestral domains, which were converted into plantations during American occupation; government-imposed programs backed by transnational agribusiness corporations; and conscious systematic marginalization and discrimination have forced many Lumad to follow the ways of non-Indigenous people.2 Years of imperialist plunder of ancestral domains resulted in diminished native and traditional seeds and forgotten identity and culture.
Although the Lumad have assimilated to the ways of non-indigenous folk, agriculture has remained a responsibility of Malitan. In Davao, a metropolitan city located in Southern Mindanao, this unchanging culture has become the grounding values of a women’s federation. For these women, traditional and native seeds are proof of the unyielding existence of the Lumad people.
Safekeeping Seeds and Agricultural Tradition
Upon meeting Anita, she seems ordinary at first, yet nothing Anita does is ordinary. Anita is the president of KababaihangNagtataglay ng Bihirang Lakas (KNBL), or Women with Extraordinary Strength, a federation of Indigenous and peasant women ardently dedicated to preserving and safeguarding native and traditional seeds lost over time due to habitat loss and seed privatization by corporations. Founded in 2004, KNBL started when a group of women from Indigenous and peasant communities formed an independent federation outside the grasp of local political leaders. KNBL became vital in pushing local legislation protecting the rights of peasant and Indigenous women, including their rights to practice sustainable farming, incorporating their own traditional practices and avoiding chemical practices that harm communities.
In her recollection, beginning when she was five, Anita’s mother would bring her to the fields and teach her everything she needed to learn about Ovu Manobo farming tradition and their culture. For the Lumad, farming was first discovered by women. While the men were out hunting or fishing, the seeds found in baskets from wild forages they had gathered were planted by their wives. This was how Indigenous people learned to grow food and to cultivate land. This is the story Anita had grown up hearing, and agriculture became a task she grew up doing.
Anita was first taught how to choose the best quality seeds and how to safely save them for planting the next season. Seed saving practice is vital to Malitan, for the farming cycle begins with seeds. For the Lumad, seeds, like land, are life. Anita, moreover, believes that seeds are alive, and because of this, she values them more than her life. According to Anita, she cannot explain why she has such strong emotional connections to seeds, but her eloquent stories of Malitan practices and belief demonstrate her feelings.
Seed saving has many beliefs and cultural practices, such as the belief surrounding lihi. In Filipino culture, it is believed that a woman will experience the unique phenomenon of lihi during conception or the first trimester of pregnancy, where she craves certain food or has an inclination to living or inanimate objects. This will then manifest in traits and behaviors of a child once it is born. It is uncertain if lihi has Indigenous roots, but for the Ovu Manobo, this belief is very much part of their seed saving and whole farming cycle.
It is believed that seeds can feel and hear misfortunes, death, and birth in the family. For this reason, storing corn kernels and harvested rice grains inside the family’s main house is strictly forbidden. After the harvest, seeds are stored in separate huts. Corn, both for consumption and seedlings for next planting season, is stored in a smaller hut called sagbong. Meanwhile, rice is stored in a taller hut called a kamarin. Although birth is something that is celebrated, it also means death and uncertainty for mothers due to the amount of blood loss. Therefore, such tumultuous events must not be witnessed nor heard by something as sacred as seeds.
This sharing and respect for all life is the basic tenet of Ovu Manobo. Their tribe believes that this world belongs to all living creatures and that nature provides. Thus it is essential for all living things to equally benefit from its resources.
During planting season, it is customary for the Ovu Manobo to perform a ritual called panubad as their way of asking for guidance and blessings from the gods. Usually planting is done in a form known as bayanihan, by which everyone belonging in the community partakes in planting for each individual farm land. Food for individual households is a collective responsibility and bayanihan serves as their community bond.
Traditionally, Ovu Manobo men prepare and dig the ground for seeds to be planted by Malitan. During this occasion, no words must be uttered and conversations are forbidden. The whole duration of planting is performed in silence out of fear that conversations might result in fighting and foul words, which might affect the growth of seeds. “You are what you eat”is a common adage in the modern world. For the Ovu Manobo, this is both literal and figuratively lived: if they plant good seeds, they can eat good meals, and will only do good deeds.
For the Ovu Manobo it is necessary to allot areas of their farm purely for consumption by wild animals and for their neighbors. Allotting land with planted food produced solely for consumption by forest rats, birds, and insects will prevent pest infestation in areas where the family’s own food supply is planted. Additionally, other areas are intended for their neighbors to share and consume if food supply from the previous harvest had been lost due to unforeseen circumstances.
Moreover, during harvest season, the Ovu Manobo perform a celebration called patilaw where everyone in the community enjoys every harvest. Patilaw signifies the abundance of present and future harvest to be collectively shared among everyone, whether that might be with the community or with hungry passerby.
To Anita, this sharing and respect for all life is the basic tenet of Ovu Manobo. Their tribe believes that this world belongs to all living creatures and that nature provides. Thus it is essential for all living things to equally benefit from its resources. In Anita’s childhood memory, they were uneducated and had no money. By modern standards, they were poor, but they were never starving—not even the wildlife can go hungry.
Land Encroachment and Loss of Identity
Anita can still recall how, while growing up, she could always see big trucks owned by companies passing by to the innermost part of the mountains, paving roads and clearing trees to sell as timber in the name of economic progress. As their communities had become more accessible and reachable, the Lumad had been deceived by opportunistic and greedy lowlanders.
Anita grew up hearing stories about how huge portions of their ancestral lands were now owned by big landowners and logging corporations because their ancestors were fooled into signing papers containing words they could not understand. Since then, the Lumad have become wary of lowlanders and warn their children to stay away from their ways.Nevertheless, many Ovu Manobo children like Anita herself longed for education to reach them so they would no longer be exploited.
Eventually, as a form of service exchange for extracted resources in ancestral lands owned by the Lumad, the government started building schools in nearby areas. During the early years, the elders would tell tales about a giant named Ologasi residing inside the schools, whose intention was to eat children hungry for the learning taught by these institutions. The children never believed this warning. Even though the majority of Anita’s peers and herself never finished primary school or reached secondary education, the school system subconsciously, yet intentionally, taught the children of the Ovu Manobo assimilation. The children of the Ovu Manobo did learn how to read and write, but, in return for their learning, they lost their Indigenous values and identities. The tribe of Ovu Manobo had been eaten and were not able to return.
Eventually, many of the Lumad, including the tribes of Ovu Manobo, had become like the lowlanders they used to be wary of; harming the community like the settlers and colonizers had done in the past. The mountains, already devoid of trees, had become even more barren due to the massive extraction of resources. The changing landscape is a reflection ofthe changes experienced by the Lumad. Their situation remained the same yet everything about them is unrecognizable.
Green Revolution and Cultural Decay
When Ferdinand Marcos Sr. brought the Green Revolution to the Philippines through a program called Masagana 99 in 1973, not only were the farmers heavily affected, but also Indigenous peoples. Despite their own warnings to their children, many of Anita’s community elders became enamored with the idea of planting high-yielding varieties (HYV) of their crops upon seeing the income earned by their non-Indigenous counterparts. Ovu Manobo used to hike mountains to reach lowland markets to sell their products, but with the introduction of HYVs, the traders would come to the far-flung hinterlands to buy their produce. Alongside the HYVs, synthetic fertilizers and promises of bountiful yield were sold to Indigenous peoples. For a community deprived of services and progress in a rapidly changing society, these modern farming practices endorsed by government and big business seemed to be the answer and provide a glimpse of hope.
Anita, barely a teenager then, had seen the changes this new program made in her community. For a time the Ovu Manobo did experience double or triple in yields, and Anita believed in the promises of the Green Revolution and Masagana 99.
But eventually the effects of Masagana 99 were felt, not first in income but in the decaying culture of the Ovu Manobo. Bayanihan culture was destroyed upon the introduction of HYVs to communities. HYVs cannot thrive without synthetic fertilizers, but because they had to buy them from big stores in the lowland market, the bayanihan practice shifted to cash payment. The income of the community increased, but so did their monetary inputs. Yield had increased but hunger had become rampant.
In the long run, the Ovu Manobo could no longer afford the inputs to sustain the usual targeted volume of HYV harvest and had to resort to fertilizer and cash loans. Moreover, unlike the traditional seed varieties which often can be stored for ten years, HYVs are short-lived and intended for a single cropping alone. Previously, seeds were exchanged with fellow farmers in the community while harvested seeds were saved for the next cropping. However, with HYVs, the Indigenous peoples now had to sell all of their produce and buy seeds for the next planting season. Due to this, many of the Ovu Manobo no longer participate in bayanihan but had to be paid for their labor.
Anita concluded that maybe the reason the Indigenous people are experiencing hunger is because they sold everything, even the kayag, or souls of their seeds. When kayag is sold there will be no one to bless and guide them towards abundance and bountiful living. Purchased foreign seeds have no soul and are lifeless. Because their origin is unknown, when planted and eaten they harm the body. Like the food that Indigenous peoples of present are planting and growing, to Anita, the Ovu Manobo have become malnourished in body, wisdom, and in spirit. The Ovu Manobo had become detached from their seeds, and consequently detached from their way of life. Losing their connection to seeds meant losing their ability to value the purpose of life and its essence.
Seeds are like children: when one goes missing, a mother must not stop looking until it is safely found.
Anita, although grateful for the education provided by the government, cannot help but express her dismay. If only there was specialized education for the Lumad that incorporated their culture and belief into their lessons, maybe the Indigenous peoples would have never experienced cultural amnesia. True to what their elders had warned, the Indigenous people were eaten by the one-eyed giant, in the form of an imposed system that never celebrates diversity in food, culture, or even in individual identities.
Saving Seeds, Saving Tradition
Over the years, the diet of the Lumad evolved alongside the seeds they cultivate. It seems to Anita as though the Lumad were cast under a spell–modernity had enchanted them. The previous years had felt like a long dream, waking up to find that everything they owned as part of their identity—seeds, land and the life they lived—were long gone. At that point, the Lumad, especially their women, realized they should desperately protect what was left.
To Anita, seeds are like children: when one goes missing, a mother must not stop looking until it is safely found. She added that maybe the reason why Malitan were given such responsibility was that life came from women, and caring for it is their natural trait. This perspective concurs with realities of Lumad women, for although Malitan are the preserver of seeds, it is also true that agriculture was handed down unto them as an extension of domesticated life. Historically, in the Lumad culture, women are wives and mothers first before they are their own person. Ecofeminism has been criticized for gender essentialism, labeling women as natural carers and caretakers of the land, which binds women once again to a role that oppresses them. Nevertheless, to Anita and the Indigenous women of KNBL, agriculture and saving seeds are their way of reclaiming their power.
Seed saving has empowered Anita and Indigenous women leaders to advocate for issues intersecting environment protection, agriculture, and food control. Collectively owning seeds for the betterment of community and people is power, and Anita, alongside the women of KNBL, are fighting on the front lines of this battle. Currently, Anita, together with Indigenous and women farmers of KNBL, have acquired and regained numerous traditional seed varieties propagated and properly stored in their sagbong and kamarin. Anita believes the only treasure she can leave behind for her children are the native seeds that hold so much of their stories, culture, and tradition. Her life may perish but the seeds will grow and flourish into thousands more.
Aene Comiling: Aene is a Filipino Community Development Worker based in Mindanao, Philippines. A graduate of Psychology, she takes interest in learning about the struggle of indigenous and peasant women for it is also connected to her own. She also photographs the everyday lives of women she came across and had conversations with, in hope that their seemingly mundane experiences and stories will never be forgotten. Twitter: @ayni_dc / IG: @aynzzz.zzz @adadolcom
Estelle Therese Estrellado: Estelle Therese Estrellado is an illustrator and graphic designer from a small town in the Philippines. Twitter @itsestherese / IG: @itsestherese
Notes
- The Ovu Manobo are a sub-tribe of Bagobo originating from intermarriages between two major Bagobo tribes of Bagobo Klata and Bagobo Tagabawa found in island of Mindanao, particularly in hinterlands of northeastern Davao and southern Bukidnon.
- Oosterhout Van, “Spatial Conflicts in Rural Mindanao, The Philippines,” Pacific Viewpoints 24, no. 1 (1979): 32–57.
