By MARIA LORENA CLETO

I have always had a thing for fields.

Wide open spaces – they represent freedom. I want to have a field, somewhere I can go anytime I feel like lying down in wild grass. But I want my field to be dotted with trees, here and there. I like climbing trees. I like climbing. In Chuyo, what remains of my family’s ancestral land (and they are on the verge of taking this away from us), my cousins and I would run through hills of grass and climb rocks left from times when even the Cordillera was underwater.

But it is summer now, 2010, and submersion is only a distant memory for these mountains. At present, the Cordillera’s streams have been reduced to trickles, and there have been episodes of spontaneous combustion in her pine forests, fields, and grasslands. The region is experiencing a crisis of water; timely, in a way, because it is April again, the month in which the Indigenous Peoples of the Cordillera commemorate a man – a chieftain from Kalinga – who gave up his life in a battle over water.

April 1980 – Military troops of the Marcos dictatorship gun down Macliing Dulag for leading protests against the construction of a dam that will sink the fields and villages of thousands deep, deep under the Chico River’s waters.

It is this death, this hero that we remember on April 24, Cordillera Day.

On this day, the Igorots hold a traditional gathering called a Cañao. When my twin brother and I were younger, we would go and sing with our people:

Our songs would echo the sentiments expressed by Macliing Dulag before his death:

Aanak ti Kordilyera (Children of the Cordillera)
Aanak iti daga (Children of the land)

or

Ina apay a nagadu (Mother, why are there so many)
ti makina ditoy ayan tayo? (machines, here where we are?)
anya kadi ti aramiden da? (what are they going to do?)

My brother’s song about land rights, not mining.

or

Ti Kabanbantayan (The mountains)
Kayo, bakir, karayan (Trees, forests, rivers)
Amin a kinabaknang (All the riches of the land)

Tawid Kaigorotan (Heritage of Kaigorotan)

My song, Remember Your Children.

I remember the day my aunty Judy first called me into her room and asked me to sing that song. She had a guitar with her, and she kept adjusting the pitch – higher and higher, as far as my vocal chords could be stretched:

Remember your children
Remember our future
Remember your children
Remember mother nature

You look at the forests
You look at the trees
Is it money, is it business?
Is it profit that you see?

You say you need the power
And you draw up all your plans
You look at the rivers
And you think of building dams

You look at the mountains
Full of riches, so you’re told
Do you think of the children
Or is it only the gold?

Soon, it will be Cordillera Day. I will spend it in Baguio with the other indigenous peoples of our mountains, and we will celebrate Tawid Kaigorotan – our world worth fighting and dying for.

Song (wma): “Gusi”

Ti inbaga na, (She told me)

Nu agpamilya ka (When you have your own family)

Ipasamonto kenni anak mo (Pass this on to your child)

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Maria Lorena Cleto is currently finishing her MA in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Philippines Diliman, where she also works as a researcher. She is now in the field writing her Master’s thesis on waste management practices in Benguet province in the Cordillera.
Her spare hours are typically spent at the gym, outdoors doing outdoorsy things like running trails and climbing mountains in inclement weather, or at home with a pile of Korean dramas by her side.