Woven In Mountains, Written In Thread

Woven in the Mountains, Written in Thread 

The Distinct Textile Identity of the i-Besao and What It Tells the World

By Ginawang

A word of candor before we begin: the i-Besao; the indigenous people of Besao, Mountain Province; are, by communal temperament and ancestral habit, meticulous. Scholars who have published on Cordillera textile traditions, from ethnologist H. Otley Beyer to the mathematicians who analyzed Kankana-ey weaving symmetry in the 2012 Bridges Conference on Mathematics and Art, have all navigated this community's exacting relationship with accuracy. The present essay follows that same discipline. Where a specific claim about Besao practice cannot be verifiably distinguished from broader Kankana-ey tradition, it is stated as such. Where Besao is distinct, that distinction is named. The i-Besao will know the difference, and they deserve the truth.

I. Who Are the i-Besao, and Why Does It Matter That They Are Not Simply "Igorot"?

The word Igorot; from the Tagalog rendering of "i-golot," meaning people of the mountains; is a collective label that has served administrators and lowlanders since the Spanish colonial period as a convenient container for the diverse highland peoples of the Cordillera Administrative Region. But within that container are at least six major ethnolinguistic groups- the Kankana-ey, Ibaloy, Bontok, Kalinga, Isneg, and Ifugao, each internally differentiated into local sub-traditions that can distinguish a man's village of origin from the cut of his wanes alone.

The i-Besao belong to the Northern Kankana-ey ethnolinguistic cluster, specifically to the sub-group known as Applai, a designation shared most closely with the neighboring municipality of Sagada. The Applai identity, documented by SIL International and affirmed by the communities themselves, defines the people of the western municipalities of Mountain Province- Besao, Sagada, Tadian, Bauko, and Sabangan. Within this geography, Besao and Sagada share the strongest linguistic and cultural proximity, but the i-Besao are not the i-Sagada. The two communities maintain distinct oral traditions, ritual calendars, and critically for this essay, subtle but intentional differences in textile design and ornamentation that any elder from either village can identify at a glance.

The Northern Kankana-ey are also called "hard-speaking" Kankanaey in linguistic literature, a reference to their more emphatic consonantal intonation that sets them apart from the "soft-speaking" Southern Kankana-ey of Benguet. This linguistic distinction runs parallel to a textile distinction- the Southern Kankana-ey of Benguet tend toward a color palette dominated by red, black, and white in their woven garments, while the Northern Kankana-ey, the Applai group that includes Besao, favor configurations in which white and indigo-blue assume greater compositional weight, with red appearing in measured, deliberate proportion. That difference in proportion is not decorative accident. It is identity.

II. The Tapis and the Getap (What the Skirt Says)

The central garment of the i-Besao woman is the tapis, the wraparound skirt that in Kankana-ey usage carries the alternate names getap, bakget, or gateng depending on community and occasion. The Northern Kankana-ey tapis, as described in ethnographic sources, is distinctive in its foundational aesthetic- the everyday garment is white with indigo-blue bands, a color arrangement scholars of the Kankana-ey textile tradition describe as its most elemental form. A variant called the kinteg inverts this arrangement, presenting as indigo black with white-and-blue bands, and carries ceremonial significance tied to death rites and solemn occasions.

The tapis of the Southern Kankana-ey, those of Benguet Province, tends toward a heavier presence of red and black, with white appearing as an accent rather than as a ground. The practical eye of an i-Besao elder can read this difference immediately. The Northern tapis speaks in a cooler, more restrained voice, indigo speaks of depth, of water, of the sky above the pine canopy. White speaks of purity, of ritually clean states, of the rice grain before the husking. Red, when it appears; in the borders of the tapis, in the decorative ends of the wanes, in the wakes belt; speaks of vitality, of blood-life, of the energy that sustains ceremony and harvest alike.

The tapis is held in place by the inandolo, also called wakes or bakget, a belt between 7.5 and 15 centimeters wide, made of tightly woven cotton yarn and wound twice around the waist. This wrapping is not incidental. The double winding creates a visible band of structured design at the hips, and the belt itself becomes a second site of symbolic encoding, its woven patterns complementing the larger grammar of the tapis beneath.

The Grammar of Color- What Red, Indigo, and White Carry

To understand why the i-Besao weave what they weave, one must understand what their ancestors understood about color as language. In the Cordillera textile tradition documented by the SIL International cultural surveys and the Scribd-archived study of Cordillera Indigenous Weaving Symbols, the color relationships encoded in highland textiles function as tribal identification, a visual passport that allowed the spirits of ancestors, it was believed, to recognize their own dead and guide them to the correct community in the afterlife. A person buried in the wrong textile was, spiritually speaking, lost.

For the Northern Kankana-ey, white carries associations of purity and ritual cleanliness. It is the color of rice, specifically of the glutinous diket rice that anchors ceremonial life, and of the ritual states that precede and follow sacrifice. Indigo, derived from the tayum plant (Indigofera tinctoria and related species) that was historically cultivated in the Cordillera region, carries depth and permanence. Anthropologists studying Cordillera textile symbolism note that the color blue-indigo broadly references the sky, the heavens, and the domains of Kabunyan, the supreme deity of the Kankana-ey cosmology. Red, derived in early practice from natural dyes, carries the vital energies of blood, abundance, and the human will to celebrate. In the Kalinga textile tradition documented by Narda's Handwoven Arts and Craft, red explicitly represents the ground and the human community upon it; indigo represents the sky. The same cosmic pairing operates across Cordillera weaving traditions, including Besao's.

What distinguishes the Applai Besao palette from that of other Igorot groups is the balance of these three colors and the specific contexts in which red is permitted to dominate. In the everyday tapis of the Besao woman, white and indigo govern. Red rises; in border bands, in geometric accents; as festivity rises. The more red appears in a garment, the more ceremonial the occasion it marks. This is not a rule written in any colonial document; it is a grammar that i-Besao mothers teach their daughters at the backstrap loom.

The Geometry of the Cloth- Tiktiko, Matmata, and the Language of Figures

A Northern Kankana-ey tapis is never merely striped. Within and between its bands of color, the i-Besao weaver inscribes a vocabulary of geometric forms that the academic mathematicians Arceo and Lara analyzed in their 2012 Bridges Conference paper, "Weaving Symmetry of the Philippine Northern Kankana-ey," as rigorous bilateral and translational symmetry systems. The weaver does not think in group theory; she thinks in inheritance and in meaning. But the precision is the same.

The most fundamental motif is the tiktiko, a zigzag pattern that appears across Kankana-ey textiles in multiple scales and arrangements. Arceo and Lara explain that tiktiko zigzags are widely interpreted as representations of mountain ridges and forest terrain, the landscape that the i-Besao inhabit and from which their rice terraces are carved. To look at a tapis with tiktiko borders is, in a sense, to look at an aerial map of the Cordillera as the i-Besao have always lived it, ridge after ridge, each transition between high and low carrying risk and beauty in equal measure. Zigzag also carries a temporal meaning in many indigenous Austronesian textile traditions, it marks the understood truth that nothing in life moves in a straight line, that the path of the ancestors and the path of their descendants alike is a negotiation between ascent and descent.

Equally significant is the matmata, a diamond or lozenge motif that Arceo and Lara identify as carrying meanings of abundance, reverence, and high regard. The diamond form, the rotated square, appears in Kankana-ey textiles as a figure of completeness- four corners, four directions, a center that holds. It is believed to represent the eye, mata in Filipino and in many Austronesian languages means eye, and by extension the watchful awareness of the community, the ancestors, and the divine. A tapis dense with matmata marks is a tapis that communicates aspiration toward fullness of life.

The X-form, which Arceo and Lara describe as a tiktiko variant, is associated with similar meanings of abundance and reverence. Weaving scholars note that the X is a figure of intersection and crossing, the meeting of forces, the joining of lineages, the convergence of human effort and ancestral blessing. In the context of the ules or tapis, these figures are not decorative ornament layered on top of color. They are structural arguments woven into the fabric itself, inseparable from the ground.

There is also the anthropomorphic figure, what Kankana-ey weavers sometimes call the "dancing man" or "dancing woman", that appears in the more elaborate ules blankets and festive tapis. This figure, woven in a frontal stance with arms raised or extended, is a reference to the tayaw and pattong dancers who appear at every major Kankana-ey ceremony. To weave the human figure is to weave community into the cloth.

III. The Wanes (How the i-Besao Man Wears His Lineage)

The wanes is the traditional loincloth of the Northern Kankana-ey male, and it is the term by which the garment is specifically known among the people of Besao and Sagada, the Applai community. The word itself marks ethnolinguistic affiliation; neighboring groups call the same garment bahag (lowland Tagalog), bag, or tayag depending on their tradition. When a man in Besao says wanes, he is not merely naming a piece of cloth. He is identifying himself.

Among the Northern Kankana-ey, the wanes is typically red with colored borders, or alternatively dark blue with red stripes and decorated ends. This color arrangement is again distinct from the Southern Kankana-ey, whose G-string variants tend toward the red-dominant configurations of Benguet textile convention. The decorated ends of the Besao wanes, the panels that hang at the front and back, serve as the primary site of design articulation. The geometric vocabulary of tiktiko and matmata appears here in miniature, concentrated in the terminal bands that frame the body.

The design of the wanes also varies according to social status and occasion. In early colonial-era documentation and in oral tradition preserved by elders, the kadangyan, the aristocratic or prosperous class of Kankana-ey society, wore wanes of more elaborate design and finer weave, sometimes incorporating additional color bands or more complex geometric patterning. The kado, those of ordinary means, wore simpler configurations. To read a man's wanes in the traditional community was to read something of his household's standing. Contemporary practice has softened these hierarchical distinctions, but the aesthetic grammar persists.

The Bedbed (The Headcloth That Crowns the Wanes)

The wanes does not stand alone as the complete dress of the Besao man at ceremony. It is completed by the bedbed, the headcloth that the Northern Kankana-ey male wears wrapped around the crown of the head in a distinctive configuration that differs from the headband styles of other Cordillera groups. The bedbed is a rectangular woven cloth, its design drawn from the same geometric vocabulary as the tapis and wanes, though in a more compact and often more densely patterned form.

The way the bedbed is wrapped matters. The Northern Kankana-ey wrap it with the ends tucked and secured at the back or side of the head, creating a cloth crown that distinguishes the i-Besao and i-Sagada male immediately from the headband configurations of the Bontok, Kalinga, and Ifugao men. Where a Kalinga warrior might wear a beaded headband or an Ifugao might wear a woven fillet decorated with shells, the Northern Kankana-ey man wraps cloth, and that wrapped cloth is the bedbed.

Additionally, the Kankana-ey documentation from Yodisphere confirms that feathers, leaves, and even carabao horns may be used to decorate the headcloth on specific occasions. Among the i-Besao, the use of rooster tail feathers inserted into or attached to the bedbed at ceremony is well attested in visual documentation of Besao traditional dress, including photography by Eduardo Masferré, the renowned photojournalist of the Cordillera who documented Sagada and Besao communities in the mid-twentieth century.

The Rooster Feather (Why the Manok Speaks on a Man's Head)

The chicken, and specifically the rooster, holds a position in the spiritual and ritual life of the Northern Kankana-ey that is difficult to overstate. The manok is the primary sacrificial animal in most household and community-level rituals. It is butchered at healing ceremonies, at life-passage events, at the begnas agricultural ritual documented by ProjectGora, and at the foundational rites of the dap-ay civic institution. Before every major decision, the bile of the sacrificed chicken, the pidis, as it is called in the Besao tradition, is read by an elder to divine the will of the ancestors and the disposition of Kabunyan.

Given this, the use of rooster tail feathers in ceremonial headgear carries a meaning that is not merely decorative. The rooster feather on a man's head at a tayaw or pattong gathering announces his readiness to participate in the ritual-communal life of the dap-ay. It is a sign of eligibility, that the man has been through the ritual processes that authorize him to dance and to stand among other initiated men. In some contexts, the type of feather, tail feathers versus wing feathers, their color, and the manner of their attachment, further differentiates the occasion- whether the man is dancing at a wedding, at an agricultural ritual, or at a more solemn community gathering.

This is consistent with the broader Igorot tradition, in which the Ifugao documentary record shows rooster feathers on ritual headdresses associated with harvest and planting rites. But the manner in which the i-Besao wear the feather, inserted upright into the wrapped bedbed at the crown or side of the head, is their own.

Armbands (The Copper Coil and Its Communal Grammar)

The armbands worn by Northern Kankana-ey men at ceremony are most commonly made of copper or brass wire coiled around the upper and lower arms. These are not the same as the rattan or beaded arm ornaments of the Kalinga or the tattooed arm markers of the Benguet Kankana-ey. The i-Besao armband in its traditional form is a metal coil, sometimes a single coil, sometimes multiple bands stacked at the bicep or wrist, that carries associations of martial readiness and of communal standing.

The Kankana-ey documentation confirms that stone and seed bracelets as well as copper wire forms are attested across the ethnolinguistic group, but among the Northern Kankana-ey the coiled copper form predominates at ceremonial occasions. Some accounts suggest that the heavier the armband accumulation; more coils, more bands worn simultaneously; the more elaborate the occasion being marked. A man attending a kagkatayan (the ritual associated with a high-status funeral or cañao feast) would wear more ornament than a man at an ordinary community gathering.

IV. The Beads of the Women (Counting the Strands)

If the wanes and bedbed constitute the grammar of male dress, the necklace system of the i-Besao woman constitutes a complete sentence about who she is, where she stands in the community, and what ritual state she currently occupies. The beaded necklace, worn in stacked multiple strands close to the collarbone and throat, is the most immediately legible element of the Northern Kankana-ey woman's ceremonial dress.

The Kankana-ey documentation confirms that women's necklaces are adorned with various kinds of stones and beads, and that women's accessories include collars made of brass or matted rattan, stone and seed bracelets, earrings of copper wire, and head decorations made of beads, beans, and grass. But the specific convention of wearing three strands l; neither two nor four, but three; at particular ritual occasions reflects a numerological practice rooted in Kankana-ey cosmological belief.

Why Three Strands?

The number three appears throughout Northern Kankana-ey ritual life as a structuring principle. The Southern Kankana-ey documentation from the Aswang Project records the tolo ritual, performed after a year of marriage, in which three pigs are required alongside other sacrificial animals. The word tolo in Kankana-ey means three, and the ritual completion of a marriage cycle requires its tripling. The number three structures time (the three-day duration of many major ceremonies), sacrifice (the minimum of three chickens for household rites in many contexts), and spatial organization (the three-fire arrangement of major cañao feasts).

In the context of beaded necklaces, the three-strand convention among the i-Besao at major ceremonies carries this tripling logic into the body of the woman herself. Three strands speak of the three relational domains that a Kankana-ey woman holds simultaneously- her family of origin (the sinba-ey), her community of dap-ay and ebgan affiliation, and the domain of the ancestors and divine beings who watch over both. She stands at the intersection of all three, and the three strands of beads encircling her throat make that intersection visible.

The beads themselves are not random. Traditionally, the most valued beads in the Northern Kankana-ey bead tradition were trade beads; glass beads obtained through the long-distance trade networks that connected the Cordillera highlands to the Ilocos coast and, through coastal intermediaries, to Chinese and Southeast Asian merchant systems. Red glass beads, blue glass beads, and white or cream shell beads circulated through these networks as prestige objects, and the woman who wore a necklace of old trade beads was wearing, in a sense, a record of her family's historical engagement with the wider world. Some of the most valuable bead necklaces in Besao families today are heirlooms that have been passed from grandmother to granddaughter across several generations, the beads themselves pre-dating living memory.

The Collar Ornaments and the Aklang

The beaded necklaces do not appear in isolation. They are worn in combination with the aklang; the woman's cotton blouse, white, short-sleeved, and collarless, open in front but buttoned at the upper end; and over the tapis with its inandolo belt. The white of the aklang creates a neutral field against which the beads read with maximum clarity. Brass collar ornaments made of matted rattan or cast metal may also appear, worn against the collarbone below the beaded strands. These collars, in some communities, denote specific status transitions, a woman who has hosted a major cañao may wear a brass collar as a permanent marker of that achieved status.

The C-shaped earrings confirmed in Kankana-ey documentation as worn by both male and female community members are also part of the i-Besao woman's complete ceremonial look. These copper or brass forms, curving from the ear lobe in a characteristic arc, appear in nineteenth-century photographs of Northern Kankana-ey women and in Eduardo Masferré's mid-twentieth-century documentation of Besao and Sagada community members at ceremony.

V. What Besao Wears That Others Do Not

The serious reader, and the i-Besao are, in this respect as in others, serious readers , will want a precise accounting of what distinguishes the i-Besao tradition from the broader Cordillera textile world. The distinctions are both formal and functional.

Against the Bontok, the Bontok of central Mountain Province favor a tapis with a dark blue or red ground with white horizontal stripes and woven geometric figures in yellow, green, and red. Their wanes has its own variant names (tayag in the Samoki-Bontok tradition) and their headgear tends toward feathered configurations on woven frames that differ from the wrapped-cloth bedbed of the Besao man. The Bontok weaving tradition also incorporates a wider range of representational figures, dancing human forms, rice paddies, than the Besao tradition, whose figures tend to remain within a more restrained geometric vocabulary.

Against the Kalinga, the Kalinga tapis tradition, documented by Narda's Handwoven Arts and uses the ilaglis ikat weaving technique that is entirely absent from the Besao tradition. The Kalinga palette places indigo and red in explicit cosmological opposition (sky and ground), while the Besao palette integrates these colors into a more unified compositional field. Kalinga women are also known for extensive bead adornment with shell platelets and mother-of-pearl attachments on their tapis, a practice of embellishment that the Northern Kankana-ey tradition does not adopt for the skirt itself, reserving bead ornament for the necklace and the hair.

Against the Ifugao, the Ifugao weaving tradition is dominated by red-and-black combinations, a palette that reads as strikingly different from the white-indigo ground of the Northern Kankana-ey everyday tapis. The Ifugao ritual headdress, with its woven frame supporting a carved Bulul figure and feather sprays, is an elaborate construction entirely unlike the wrapped bedbed of the Besao man.

Against the Southern Kankana-ey of Benguet, as noted throughout this essay, the Southern Kankana-ey favor a red-dominant, red-and-black color convention in both their tapis and their kuba (G-string variants). Their garments are closer in visual feel to the Benguet Ibaloy tradition than to the white-and-indigo Applai convention of Besao and Sagada. The i-Besao would not mistake a Southern Kankana-ey tapis for their own, and the error would not be made in the other direction either.

VI. The Loom Behind the Cloth (Who Weaves and What Is at Stake)

In the Besao tradition, weaving, called impaot, impagod, or pinnagod ("strapped," in reference to the backstrap loom), is the primary textile art of women, practiced from adolescence onward. The backstrap loom is a body-integrated instrument: one end is tied to a fixed post or tree, the other to a band that wraps around the weaver's lower back. The tension of the warp threads is controlled entirely by the weaver's own body weight and posture. This means that the cloth is, in a literal sense, woven with the body of the woman who made it.

This embodied relationship between weaver and cloth has spiritual implications that the i-Besao recognize. A woman's tapis, if made by her own hands, carries something of her body's own rhythm into its weft. The weight of the thread, the evenness of the beat, the precision of the geometric motif, all of these are expressions of the weaver's skill, attention, and ritual state at the time of weaving. Elders in Besao communities, as in Sagada and other Northern Kankana-ey communities, recognize fine weaving as a form of cultural testimony, and a woman who weaves well is a woman who has been properly formed by her community.

This is why the question of who may wear which garment matters so acutely. A tapis worn at the tayaw dance at a wedding is not the same garment, even if it looks the same to an outside eye, as a tapis worn at a solemn cañao. The context completes the meaning. The garment without its occasion is a body without its dap-ay.

VII. A Note on Sources and the Limits of This Essay

The i-Besao are, as noted at the outset, meticulous, and appropriately so. The above essay draws on the following verifiable sources- the SIL International and academic ethnographic documentation of the Northern Kankana-ey as published in Yodisphere's cultural survey and in the Kankana-ey Igorotage blog (itself drawing from Beyer and subsequent scholars); the 2012 Bridges Conference mathematical analysis of Northern Kankana-ey weaving symmetry by Arceo and Lara; the Aswang Project's peer-reviewed cultural documentation of Northern and Southern Kankana-ey religious practice; the Scribd-archived Cordillera Indigenous Weaving Symbols study and the Benguet Ethnic Weaving Patterns document; the Narda's Handwoven Arts documentation of Cordillera weaving traditions; and the widely published ethnographic work on Kankana-ey traditional dress that distinguishes the Applai (Besao and Sagada) from the Southern Kankana-ey of Benguet and from neighboring ethnolinguistic groups.

Certain claims in this essay;  particularly those touching on the specific numerological significance of three-strand necklaces and the specific occasions on which rooster feathers are worn; are grounded in the consistent ethnographic pattern of the Northern Kankana-ey tradition but are not documented in a single definitive primary source. They represent the best current synthesis of available evidence. Where living i-Besao elders and recognized cultural practitioners have published corrections or refinements to any of the above, those corrections take precedence over everything written here. This essay is a beginning, not a verdict.

The cloth does not need us to explain it. It has been speaking for centuries. What this essay attempts, with all appropriate humility before the weavers and the woven, is simply to help a wider world hear what it says.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

1. Arceo, A. and Lara, L. (2012). "Weaving Symmetry of the Philippine Northern Kankana-ey." Bridges Conference on Mathematics and Art. Retrieved from archive.bridgesmathart.org/2012/bridges2012-267.pdf

2. Aswang Project (2022). "Northern Kankana-ey Religious Beliefs and Rituals." aswangproject.com/northern-kankanaey

3. Igorotage (2025). "The Kankana-ey People of the Cordilleras." igorotage.com/blog/kankana-ey-people

4. Narda's Handwoven Arts & Craft (2018). "Cordilleran Weaving Culture." nardas.com/cordilleran-weaving-culture

5. ProjectGora (2024). "Begnas Ritual in Sagada, Mountain Province." projectgora.com/begnas-ritual-sagada-mountain-province

6. Scribd. "Cordillera Indigenous Weaving Symbols." scribd.com/document/848482648/Weaving-Designs-and-Symbols

7. Scribd. "Kinds, Uses, and Implications of Benguet Textiles." scribd.com/document/601937803

8. Yodisphere (2022). "The Kankanaey People of the Philippines: History, Culture, Customs and Tradition." yodisphere.com/2022/09/Kankanaey-Tribe-Culture.html

9. Rappler (2022). "Beyond the bahag: Male pageant reignites debate on use of Cordillera culture." rappler.com

10. Rags2Riches. "The Partner Artisan Communities of Rags2Riches." r2r.ph/pages/rags2riches-partner-artisan-communities