Besao Mountain Province

The People Who Came from the Sea Where Did the Igorot Come From? The Stunning Prehistoric Truth About the Children of the Cordillera By Ginawang | The Besao B/Vlogger Sit down for this one. Because what you are about to read will rearrange the furniture inside your mind. It will ask you to think of your grandmother, your grandfather, their grandparents, and then keep going back... past the rice terraces, past the dap-ay councils, past the first human hands that ever touched this soil, all the way back to a world so ancient that no living memory can hold it. A world where your ancestors did not yet know they were going to become the people from the mountain. A world where they were still somewhere else entirely, looking up at a different sky. This is the story of where the Igorot people came from. Not the version from a textbook. Not the official summary on a laminated classroom poster. The full, startling, gorgeous, slightly mind-bending version. The one that connects you, ...

When the Sea Became the Sky The Astonishing Geological Story of How the Cordillera Rose from the Ocean Floor By Ginawang | Besao B/Vlogger There is a rock somewhere in the Cordillera. It might be on a trail you have walked a hundred times. It might be in the wall of a farmer's terrace, or along a mountain stream where children splash and laugh on a summer afternoon. And pressed into that rock, if you look closely enough, is the unmistakable spiral of a seashell. Take a breath. Let that sink in. A seashell. On a mountain. Not at sea level. Not along a coastal cliff. But here, thousands of meters above the ocean, in the heart of the Philippine highlands, embedded in the very stone that forms the bones of the land you call home. If you are Igorot... if you are Kankanaey, Ibaloi, Kalanguya, Ifugao, Bontoc, Kalinga, Apayao, or any of the proud peoples who have kept the mountains since time immemorial... this single detail should stop you cold. Because that shell, ancient and...

Sweet Potato Culture in Besao’s Highlands The Humble Camote That Helped Feed a Mountain People By Ginawang • The Besao B/Vlogger If there were a contest for the most underrated hero of the Cordillera highlands, the sweet potato would probably win while quietly sitting in a woven basket, covered in soil, asking for no applause. Rice may be the celebrity. Corn may be the hardworking supporting actor. Yet for generations of i Besao families, the sweet potato, locally known as camote, has often been the dependable friend that never abandoned the household during difficult times. And unlike many heroes, this one occasionally rewards its admirers with a generous amount of flatulence. Such is the complicated relationship between people and camote. A Traveler from Across the Ocean Many people assume that sweet potato has always been native to the Philippines. Surprisingly, it is not. The sweet potato originated in tropical regions of Central and South America, particularly around p...

Lingling-o- The Little Loop That Crossed the Sea A Story About the Lingling-o and How It Found Its Way to the Mountains of Besao By Ginawang • The Besao Blogger Something Hung from the Ears of Your Ancestors: Picture this. It is somewhere around the year 500 BC. No, not Besao yet. Not even the Cordillera as we know it. We are somewhere on a dark, heaving sea, aboard a shallow-draft vessel carved from a single log, riding a trade wind that our ancestors had memorized so thoroughly they could smell it change hours before the sky did. Somewhere in the hands of a trader on that boat is a tiny curved object no bigger than a thumbnail, shaped like an almost-closed letter C, its two tips pointed like the horns of a carabao at rest. It is made of pale green stone. It is older in concept than most civilizations alive today. It is the lingling-o or ling-ling-o. And here is the thing that should make every person from Besao sit a little straighter- that object eventually found its way...

The Fire They Could Not Occupy (Besao's Role in World War II and the Highland Resistance) by Ginawang "The mountains will always remember what the documents forgot." — A saying passed among the i-Besao elders I. Before the Planes Came There is a particular quality to the silence of Besao at the early hours, when the pine forests still hold the night mist and the first roosters have not yet decided what kind of morning it will be. That silence is deceptive. It has always contained within it a readiness, a coiled alertness that the people of this municipality in the southwestern highlands of Mountain Province have carried in their bodies for centuries. Besao sits at an elevation touching nearly 1,400 meters above sea level, its ridgelines folded one against another in the manner of hands pressed together in prayer. Its fourteen barangays cling to slopes that drop with little warning into ravines thick with mossy forest. The place is beautiful in the way that dif...

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; ...