Tasaday Proven Authentic

Hoax Claim is the Hoax

Tasaday Proven Authentic--

Hoax Claim is the Hoax 

    Claims that the Tasaday were a hoax began to unravel when a 1987 Philippine Congressional investigation concluded after four months of public hearings that “the Tasaday were authentic beyond a scintilla of doubt.” Next, new President Corazon Acquino conducted an independent investigation and declared that the Tasaday were indeed genuine and had nearly been victimized by

“unscrutipulous scholars and businessmen” who wanted their land and its resources.

    In each of these findings, data from more than a dozen social scientists who had studied the Tasaday in their homeplace was used to establish authenticity.  None of the scholars who said they were fraudulent had spent time with the Tasaday or even met them.

   Then, in l988, on a visit to the lowlands, a group of Tasaday as shown a videotape of the 20/20 TV program called “The Tribe That Never Was”--that contended the Tasaday didn’t exist. It claimed  the people were really Tboli and Manobo Blit farmers. The video was stopped every minute or so for a team of translators to tell the Tasaday what was being said about them. The Tasaday became increasingly grim as they heard the accusations. At one point, two Tasaday young men--Lobo and Adug--appeared on the TV screen saying there were no Tasaday, that they had only pretended to be, and were really Tboli and Manobo Blit.  As soon as this was translated, Lobo and Adug, who were watching, denounced that as a lie, disclosing that they had said that only because the translator--Datu Galang--had promised them “cigarettes, candy, anything we wanted--if we would say what he told us to.”  (Later, Datu Galang confirmed he had done that as part of a scheme to fool the foreign journalists.) After seeing 20/20, the Tasaday wanted to know what they could do to correct the false claims being made about them.

     To do that, and to counter the accusations of two Filipino university professors that the Tasaday were fraudulent, Elizalde flew a dozen Tasaday to Manila. There, with the assistance of lawyers, they filed a lawsuit against the professors for violating their human rights by denying their existence. The two--who became known as the “hoax professors”-- refused to appear in

court and were declared in contempt.

      Meanwhile, Filipino anthropologist Amelia Rogel Ra-ra and her associate, Emmanuel Nabayra, spent nearly  a year in the Tasaday region interviewing residents in and around the forest. Ra-ra and Nabayra  produced a genealogical  chart that depic- ted relationships and named Tasaday who had lived in their ancestral caves for the past seven generations.

        In the early 1990s, linguist Lawrence of the University of Hawaii conducted a series of field studies with the Tasaday --using tape recordings made of their speech in the early 1970s--

and found that they had had no words in their language for cultivated foods, for houses or parts of a house, or for people and places outside the forest. The Tasaday had not known these things, Reid reported, and concluded they could not have been a hoax.

       Also, in the 1990s, Belgian entomologist Pascal Lays spent more than a year  with the Tasaday, learned their language, and  confirmed they were a distinct and authentic group of people who had lived in the rainforest for generations.

        Throughout this period, the government continued to recognize the Tasaday and Blit as the legitimate occupiers of the reservation that was proclaimed in their names. Government agencies include the Tasaday on official lists of Philippine indigenous people.