Tasaday in Transiton

Change comes in the 1980s and 90s

Tasaday in Transition

    The Tasaday experienced some extremely difficult times adjusting to contact with the world beyond the forest. One of the most troubling times came in the late l980s when heavily armed Communist guerrillas of the New People’s Army arrived at the caves and told the Tasaday they must join them as “soldiers of the poor.” When the Tasaday said they didn’t want to do that, the guerrillas threatened to use their rifles on them. The Tasaday fled to the lowlands, finding refuge in the Tboli community of Mai Tuan. Eventually, the Philippine Army attacked the guerrillas, bombed their positions and forced them to flee. The military then flew the Tasaday back to their caves in helicopters. Soldiers stayed with the Tasaday for six months, supplied them arms and trained them to protect themselves. 

    The Tasaday also faced problems as many other tribespeople moved into the reserve area, using forest products that formerly had been exclusively for the Tasaday.  That, plus the sharp increase in Tasaday population, because of the many babies coming from marriages with the Blit, meant that Tasaday had to find greater sources of food. They did not know agriculture, did not plant gardens.  Also, they did not have any trade, did not know about money and how to earn it, spend it, use it; and many other things common to outsiders--the measurement of time in minutes and hours, days, months, years; directions such as north, south, east, west; laws governing relations between people and property.

    By this time, Elizalde had cut back on his work with tribes, but maintained limited contact with the Tasaday, and in

1997 died. His death left them feeling even more alone and without support. Members of group began moving out of the reserve.Then a visiting American saw their problems and established a small organizaiton, Friends of the Tasaday, to provide support. Through a modest fund-raising program he was able, first, to finance the establishment of an administrative office near the Tasaday with a team of college-educated Tboli trained as community developers.They brought elementary school teachers into the reserve to provide basic education to Tasaday adults, and then established a program for Tasaday youngsters to attend schools outside the reserve, supplied by the Friends with food allotments, school supplies, and clothing. It started slowly but by 2008 more than thirty Tasaday and Blit young people attended schools, including one Tasaday and two Blit in lowland colleges.

    A fulltime nurse was hired and a clinic built in Blit to provide medical care-- treatment of minor ailments and injuries (patients with major problems were taken to a lowland hospi-tal), providing midwifery, immunizations, and teaching of general health, sanitation, birth control, and hygiene. In 2007, more than 1,700 patients were treated at the clinic.

    To assist the Tasaday in becoming self-sufficient in food, Friends hired an agronomist to go into the reserve, establish nursuries,  teach and supervise the practice of forest-friendly organic agriculture. By 2005 the Tasaday planted their first rice paddies and fruit orchards and by 2008 some families were self-sufficient and sold surplus farm produce.

    A fourth project of Friends of the Tasaday was to obtain from the government a certification of  the Tasaday’s traditional homeland as an Ancestral Domain, which would earn them title to the land and remove it from the category of a Presidential Proclomation, which another president could rescind or  change . Over six years teams worked to map the Tasaday’s ancestral domain, conduct meetings with neighbors over boundaries, survey

the land,

make and plant boundary markers, and then go through stacks of paperwork required to acquire the land titles. By mid-2008, government officials reported the Tasaday and Blit were just one step away from receiving the land titles. In selecting their ancestral domain area, the Tasaday specified only about 10,000 of the 45,000-acre reserve, saying that marked the limits of the land they regularly used. Some of the remaining land belonged to the Blti and the rest was divided among a dozen new tribal communiities that had been established inside the reserve. Total population was estimated at more than 4,000.

    Through all of this the Tasaday have been compelled to learn how to deal with outsiders and with themselves in new ways as they have increased in population and adopted many new cultural ideas and material things. Governing themselves has gone through trials as they have worked to keep the Tasaday together. The total population of Tasady in 2008 was 216 Tasaday; and of the original twenty six, thirteen were still alive.  All but two--Dula and Dina, who married Tboli men--continued to live inside the reserved area, divided into three small communiities about a half-hour walk from one another.

     The passing years have seen many cultural changes, in addition to polygamy. For instance, the Tasaday’s unique unrecorded dialect of Tasaday-Manobo has given away to speech much closer to that of the Blit, whose language included words for many things the Tasaday had not known.Consequently, younger Tasaday spoke of the earlier Tasaday speech as “the language of our fathers.”   It is notable that despite the many changes, the Tasaday have maintained traditional values of sharing and cooperation; of peaceful, non-violent behavior; and of decision-making by consensus.

     Through these last two decades, the Tasaday have repeatedly  had to fend off outsiders with intentions to extract the minerals and trees from the Tasaday’s homeland.  far they have succeeded, with the assistance of Friends, legal organizations, and the government’s National Commission for Indigenous People.

Through the 1980’s and 90’s