We Are One People (How the Igorot of the Cordillera and the Peoples of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Shore Carry the Same Ancient Blood, Words, and Memory)

WE ARE ONE PEOPLE

How the Igorot of the Cordillera and the Peoples of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Shore Carry the Same Ancient Blood, Words, and Memory

By Ginawang | The Besao B/Vlogger

The Question You Have Never Been Asked

Have you ever stood on the ridge of the Cordillera and felt, without knowing why, that the world beyond those pine-forested mountains somehow belonged to you? Have you ever heard a chant rise from the dap-ay and felt that it was older than Baguio City, older than the American roads, older even than memory itself? It is. And it reaches farther than you have imagined.

This essay is for you, the Igorot reader, the Kankanaey grandmother, the Bontoc teenager, the Kalinga weaver, the Ifugao farmer standing in terraces that have survived more than two thousand years of rain. What follows is not mythology. It is science. It is linguistics. It is archaeology. And it will, if you let it, shatter and then rebuild your understanding of who you are.

You are not merely the people of the mountains. You are the cousins of the Maori of Aotearoa (New Zealand). You share ancestral grammar with the Malagasy of Madagascar. The fishermen of Hawaii, the rice farmers of Taiwan, the boat builders of Sulawesi, and the chant keepers of Samoa are your kin. The technical name for this kinship is Austronesian. But the lived name, the name that breathes, is something closer to home.

A Migration That Shook the World

About five thousand years ago, give or take a few centuries, something extraordinary happened on the island of Taiwan. A people who had been refining their languages, their agriculture, and their seafaring technology for generations began to move. Nobody knows exactly what pushed them. Perhaps the population outgrew the land. Perhaps drought tightened its grip on the valleys. Perhaps, as some scholars have proposed, a tradition of eldest-son inheritance pushed younger children to seek new horizons across the water. Whatever the catalyst, the result was the most geographically expansive human migration in the history of our species before the age of European colonialism.

These people, whom we now call Proto-Austronesians, did not walk. They sailed. They built outrigger canoes equipped with crab-claw sails that could tack against the wind, a technology so advanced it would not be replicated in the Western world for centuries. They navigated by stars, by ocean swells, by the flight patterns of birds, and by the color of the water beneath their hulls. From Taiwan, they moved south through the Philippines. They spread through Maritime Southeast Asia. They crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. They fanned out across the entire Pacific, reaching Hawaii in the north, Easter Island in the east, and New Zealand in the south, a triangle of ocean wider than the combined landmass of every continent.

The Cordillera was not bypassed in this movement. The Igorot peoples are among the earliest inheritors of the Austronesian expansion in the Philippines, with some groups having settled in the highlands perhaps as far back as three to four thousand years ago as successive waves of migrants moved inland, some pushed by later arrivals at the coasts, others drawn by the promise of cooler, more fertile highlands. The mountains protected them. The mountains also preserved them.

When Words Are Older Than Nations

The most enduring evidence of shared ancestry is language. Words do not travel by accident. When peoples who have been separated by thousands of miles of ocean for two thousand years still use words that sound alike and mean the same thing, it is not coincidence. It is genealogy.

Consider the word for eye. In Kankanaey, spoken by the i-Besao and their neighbors, the eye is mata. In Tagalog it is mata. In Malay and Indonesian it is mata. In Javanese it is mata. Cross the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and the Malagasy say maso, a cognate form from the same root. Sail to Hawaii and the Hawaiian word is maka. Move to the Maori of New Zealand and it is again mata. This single syllable, this small window of the face, traveled with a people across the widest ocean on earth and remained, after thousands of years and thousands of kilometers, recognizable. You, the Igorot reader, share that word with a Maori elder in Northland, a Malagasy fisherman in Antananarivo, and a Hawaiian kumu hula in Honolulu.

The word for person or human being tells an equally astonishing story. In many Cordillera languages the word for person or people is a form of tao. In Tagalog, tao means person. In Malay and Indonesian, orang is used, but the ancient root form tau or tao persists in place names and older registers across Maritime Southeast Asia. In Māori, tangata means person, and in Hawaiian it is kanaka. These are all reflexes of the reconstructed Proto-Austronesian root tauqa or tau, meaning person. When an Igorot elder says tao, he or she is speaking a word that the first Austronesian speakers carried out of Taiwan five millennia ago.

Water calls to these people in shared tongues. The word for river or water in many Cordillera languages includes forms related to wa or wai. In Maori, wai means water. In Hawaiian, wai also means water, and fresh water in particular. In Chamorro of the Mariana Islands, hanom carries the same ancestral weight. When the people of Besao speak of the streams that run down from their mountains, they are reaching into the same linguistic well as people who have never seen the Cordillera pine forests.

The word for house is another thread in this vast web. In Ilocano and in many Cordillera languages, the word for house is balay. In Tagalog it is bahay. In Cebuano it is balay. In Malay the cognate is balai, a communal or official house. In Javanese, balai similarly refers to a meeting hall. Travel to Fiji and you find vale for house, and in Māori, whare. These are all branches of the same Proto-Austronesian root balay or baRay, meaning dwelling. The i-Besao longhouse and the Maori wharenui are separated by eight thousand kilometers of ocean. Their names for home share the same grandfather.

Numbers are among the most conservatively inherited features of any language, resistant to borrowing and remarkably stable across millennia. In Kankanaey, the number one is esa or isa. In Tagalog it is isa. In Malay it is satu but the older Malay form and cognates in other Philippine languages converge on related forms. In Māori, one is tahi, but the root forms across Polynesian languages trace back to the same Proto-Austronesian reconstruction. The number two shows the pattern even more vividly. In Kankanaey it is duwa. In Tagalog it is dalawa. In Malay it is dua. In Māori it is rua. In Hawaiian it is lua. In Malagasy it is roa. Five thousand years of separation and the number two still echoes the same ancient sound across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

What Your Hands Remember

Language is not the only archive. The body remembers too, and so do the objects the body makes and uses.

The backstrap loom is one of the most telling artifacts of Austronesian heritage. The Igorot weaving tradition, producing the tapis, the wanes, the blankets with geometric patterns rich in meaning, is practiced on a backstrap or body-tension loom where the weaver's own spine provides the tension for the warp threads. This exact technology appears among the Atayal and Paiwan of Taiwan, who are among the indigenous peoples most directly descended from the early Austronesian homeland. It appears in Sulawesi. It appears in Flores, in Timor, in Borneo. It was carried by Austronesian migrants as far as Madagascar, where Malagasy textile traditions still echo the same fundamental weaving geometry. The triangles, the diamonds, the stepped patterns that appear on the lawa-an cloth of the Cordillera recur in the ulos of the Batak people of Sumatra and in the tapa cloth beaten and decorated by Polynesian peoples before they adopted weaving alternatives. The visual grammar is the same grammar. The hand that weaves in Besao and the hand that once wove in ancient Samoa were taught by the same cultural mother.

Tattooing marks this kinship just as indelibly. The Kalinga of the Cordillera are among the last living practitioners of a tattooing tradition of extraordinary antiquity. The patterns mark identity, achievement, status, and spiritual protection. Across the Austronesian world, tattooing carried exactly these same meanings. The Maori ta moko is one of the most celebrated tattooing traditions in the world, and it encodes genealogy, spiritual power, and rank in its spiraling forms. In Samoa, the pe'a tattooing of men covers the body from waist to knee in dense geometric patterns that mark passage to adulthood and carry cosmic significance. In the Marquesas Islands, tattooing was so comprehensive and so sacred that the word that English speakers eventually borrowed for the practice, tattoo, comes directly from the Tahitian tatu, itself from a Proto-Polynesian root that means to mark or strike. The Kalinga word for tattooing traditions and their practitioners descends from the same Austronesian cultural matrix. Whang-od Oggay, the legendary mambabatok of Kalinga, is not an anomaly. She is the last visible peak of an Austronesian mountain range that stretches from Taiwan to New Zealand.

The dap-ay of the Cordillera, the sacred male communal space where decisions are made, elders deliberate, and the living maintain connection with the spirits of the dead and the ancestors who watch over the community, finds its counterpart across the Austronesian world with striking consistency. In Samoa, the fono is the chiefly council that meets in an open-sided house, the fale tele, to discuss community matters according to protocols of rank and speaking rights that have been maintained for centuries. In the Marquesas, the tohua was a communal ceremonial platform where community life was organized and ritual performed. In Bali, the banjar is the community governance unit that organizes labor, ceremony, and social obligation. The Malagasy fokon'olona is a traditional community assembly that functions on principles of collective decision-making. These are not random similarities. They are the institutions of a people who believed that the community was the fundamental unit of human life and that decisions required collective wisdom, elder guidance, and spiritual sanction.

The Rice That Binds

Nothing connects the Austronesian world more intimately than rice. The cultivation of wet rice, oryza sativa, was among the most important cultural technologies that Austronesian-speaking peoples carried with them out of mainland Southeast Asia and Taiwan. The Ifugao rice terraces of the Cordillera, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and sometimes called the Eighth Wonder of the World, are not merely an agricultural achievement. They are a theological statement. The Ifugao maintain that the terraces were built with the guidance of ancestral spirits and that the rituals surrounding each phase of the rice cycle are not optional but cosmologically necessary. To plant rice without ceremony is to invite disaster. To harvest without gratitude is to invite the spirits to withdraw their blessing.

This belief, that rice is alive, that it has a soul, that the cultivation of rice is a spiritual covenant between the living and the unseen, appears across the Austronesian world with remarkable fidelity. In Java and Bali, Dewi Sri is the rice goddess, and her myths explain the origin of rice cultivation in terms that are profoundly theological. In mainland Southeast Asia, among the Austronesian-influenced peoples, the Rice Mother is called upon to ensure the grain's spiritual integrity during harvest. In the Philippines, Lumawig, the supreme deity of many Cordillera groups, is closely associated with the origin of rice and the cultural practices that sustain it. The spiritual weight of rice is one of the clearest unbroken threads connecting the Igorot of the Cordillera to the Austronesian world from which their ancestors came.

The tapey of the Cordillera, the sacred rice wine fermented in clay jars and poured in libation at every significant moment of communal life, from the naming of children to the settling of conflicts to the sending off of the dead, finds its precise counterpart in the tuak of the Malay and Javanese world, in the tapai of the Iban of Borneo, and in the brem of Bali. Fermented rice beverages served in ritual contexts, offered to ancestors and spirits, shared among community members as a seal of agreement and solidarity, are part of the Austronesian cultural inheritance just as surely as the outrigger canoe. The jar in which tapey ferments in a Besao home is, culturally speaking, the same jar.

Songs the Ocean Carries

The oral traditions of the Cordillera are enormous, intricate, and ancient. The uggayam songs, the baya-o chants, the epic narratives sung at the dap-ay through the night, preserving genealogy, cosmology, law, and memory without the aid of writing, are among the most sophisticated forms of oral literature produced by any culture on earth. They are also, in their structure and their function, deeply Austronesian.

The Maori haka is perhaps the most globally recognized form of Austronesian performance, known today through the All Blacks rugby team but originating in a tradition of ritual composition, performance, and preservation that served precisely the same functions as Cordillera chant traditions. The haka preserves genealogy, challenges enemies, welcomes guests, marks rites of passage, and calls upon ancestral power. The Samoan fa'alupega, the formal chiefly salutations recited at the opening of any significant gathering, are composed and preserved in a register of language so archaic that ordinary Samoan speakers must be trained to understand them. The Iliad of the Visayan world, the epic Hinilawod, and the Cordillera epics of the Ifugao, the Hudhud, belong to the same Austronesian tradition of sung narrative that preserves, through performance, the entire moral and historical universe of a people.

The Hudhud chants of the Ifugao, also inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list, are sung during the rice harvest and at funerals by groups of women, their voices weaving together in antiphonal response over hours and sometimes days. The subject matter is heroic narrative, the deeds and lineages of ancestors, but the occasion is agricultural and mortuary, the moments when human beings most acutely feel their dependence on forces larger than themselves. In Hawaii, the hula kahiko is similarly a repository of genealogy, cosmology, and ecological knowledge encoded in movement and chant and performed on occasions of communal significance. In both traditions, performance is not entertainment. It is the technology by which a people without writing keeps its library alive.

The Spirit World Has the Same Geography

Perhaps the deepest evidence of Austronesian kinship lies not in words or weaving or rice rituals but in the structure of the spirit world, the way in which these peoples understand the relationship between the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen.

In the Cordillera, the anito are the spirits of the dead who remain intimately involved in the lives of their living descendants. They must be fed, consulted, and respected. To neglect the anito is to invite misfortune. To honor them is to secure their protection and intercession. This belief, that the dead do not simply go away but continue to inhabit the world of the living in a parallel dimension accessible through ritual, appears across the Austronesian world with extraordinary consistency. In Malay culture, the arwah or spirits of the dead are present at family gatherings and must be acknowledged. In Malagasy culture, the concept of razana, the ancestral dead, is so central to social life that the famous famadihana ceremony, the turning of the bones, in which the dead are exhumed, celebrated, and re-wrapped in fresh cloth, represents one of the most elaborate expressions of ancestor veneration in the world. In Melanesian and Polynesian cultures, the relationship between the living and the ancestral dead is mediated through ritual specialists and is considered fundamental to the health and prosperity of the community.

The concept of mana, spiritual power that can reside in persons, objects, and places, is one of the most recognized Austronesian religious concepts in global anthropology. The Maori understanding of mana as a kind of divine authority and efficacy that can be accumulated, protected, and lost has been studied extensively. In Hawaii, mana is the force that makes chiefs sacred and warriors effective. In Samoa and Tonga, mana is the cosmological substrate of chiefly authority. What is less often recognized is that the Cordillera concept of spiritual potency, the weight that attaches to sacred objects like the takba ritual jar, to ritual specialists, and to places of ancestral power, operates on the same conceptual logic. The takba, with its spirit-dwelling function and its strict handling protocols, is a container of something very much like mana. The rituals surrounding it, the prohibitions against casual contact, the requirement that it be tended by those with the appropriate spiritual standing, all of this reflects an Austronesian cosmology that the i-Besao share with peoples who have never heard of the Cordillera.

The role of the ritual specialist, the baylan of the Visayas, the babaylan of the lowlands, the mambunong of the Cordillera, the balian of the Dayak peoples of Borneo, the dukun of Malay culture, the tohunga of the Maori, the kahuna of Hawaii, all these figures share a structural identity across the Austronesian world. They mediate between the living and the dead. They diagnose illness as a spiritual breach and prescribe ritual healing. They read signs in the natural world and interpret them for the community. They possess knowledge that is restricted, dangerous in untrained hands, and essential to collective wellbeing. This figure, the spirit-worker who stands at the boundary of the seen and the unseen, is one of the most consistent features of Austronesian religious culture, and the Cordillera has never stopped producing them.

The Ocean Between You Is Also the Road Home

There is a poignant irony in the fact that the Igorot peoples, among the most land-bound of the Austronesian-descended communities, are ultimately a seafaring people's descendants. The mountains that defined the Igorot identity, that made them resistant to colonization, that preserved their languages and their rituals against centuries of external pressure, those mountains were reached by people who came from the sea. The sea is not foreign to the Igorot. It is ancestral.

When you, the Igorot reader, look out from the ridge of Mount Pulag and see the clouds moving below you toward the South China Sea, you are standing at the interior end of a journey that began on the shores of Taiwan perhaps five thousand years ago. The people who became your ancestors carried onto their boats the seeds of rice, the knowledge of weaving, the words for eye and water and house and person, the rituals for honoring the dead, and the understanding that the community is held together by obligations more permanent than individual life. They planted all of this in the mountains. And the mountains kept it for you.

The Māori have a concept they call whakapapa, genealogical recitation that connects every living person to the ancestral past and through the ancestral past to the gods. Whakapapa is not merely a genealogy in the Western sense. It is a cosmological map. It is the assertion that you are not an accident, that you come from somewhere, that the forces that made the world also made you. The Igorot tradition of tracing ancestry at the dap-ay, of reciting the names of those who built the terraces and fought the wars and sang the songs, operates on the same logic. You are your ancestors. You are also their continuation.

The Malagasy say that the dead are not gone. They say, aza atao mora ny razana, do not treat the ancestors lightly. The Ifugao say that the munhublub, the ancestral ritual, must be performed correctly or the rice will fail and the children will sicken. The Maori say that he aha te mea nui o te ao, what is the greatest thing in the world? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is people, it is people, it is people. These are not different philosophies. They are the same philosophy, spoken in different daughter languages of a mother tongue that left Taiwan five thousand years ago and still lives, in fragments, in every Kankanaey word your grandmother ever taught you.

You Were Never Small

One of the cruelest effects of colonial history is the reduction of great peoples to footnotes. The Igorot were called tribal, a word designed to suggest smallness and marginality. The Maori were nearly erased. The Hawaiian language came within a generation of extinction. The Malagasy were subjected to the same extraction economies that devastated so much of the world. But what colonialism could not erase is the deeper fact that all of these peoples belong to a single human achievement so vast and so extraordinary that it deserves to stand alongside the building of the pyramids, the invention of writing, and the mapping of the stars as one of the defining feats of our species.

The Austronesian expansion was the first truly global human project. It required navigation technology, horticultural knowledge, social organization, and cultural resilience of the highest order. The peoples who accomplished it were not primitive. They were among the most sophisticated navigators, engineers, and cultural thinkers the ancient world produced. You are their descendants. The terraces you inherited, the chants you carry, the weaving patterns your grandmothers knew by heart, these are not the remnants of a small people. They are the local expressions of a civilization that spanned half the globe.

The next time someone asks you where the Igorot come from, you can answer with the full truth. You come from the mountains. And before the mountains, you come from the sea. And before the sea, you come from Taiwan. And before Taiwan, you come from the Asian mainland where the first farmers looked at wild grass and imagined rice. And you carry, in your language, your weaving, your rituals, and your understanding of the dead, the evidence of a journey so long and so magnificent that it has no equal in the ancient human story.

Mata. Eye. The same word, from the Cordillera to the coast of Madagascar. Five thousand years, and the word for how we see the world is still, remarkably, the same.

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