#lumad

Photographed by Gabriel Nivera for the May 2024 Issue of Vogue Philippines.

[Bundos Bansil Fara] is one of the three Tboli artists who were recognized as Manlilikha ng Bayan (GAMABA) or National Living Treasures in December 2023. The award is given to Filipinos whose “distinctive skills have reached such a high level of technical and artistic excellence and have been passed on to and widely practiced by the present generation.” … This is the first time a brass caster has been awarded since the GAMABA’s inception in 1992.

Brass casting is a skill learnt from one’s forebears, and Fara’s father and grandfather were all metalworkers. “I started in the process of brass casting when I was eight years old,” Fara says. Now 58, he has been working with molten materials for half a century. “My eyesight has gotten blurry.” Fortunately, he has a team of four sons working with him—one will be melting the wax, a mixture of beeswax, candle wax, and asphalt that forms a black putty; another will be tending to the blazing hot fires, fanning coals inside two holes in the ground, one for melting the metals, another for firing the clay molds.

Ginton is the Tboli god of metallurgy and the son of the supreme being Dwata. It is believed that he gifted the people with brass anklets, chain belts, rings, and swords—all of which still intricately adorn, protect, and tell the story of the Tboli today. As for the beginnings of brass, Fr. Gabriel Casal notes in his book T’Boli Art in its Socio-Cultural Context (1977), “The T’bolis give no indication of having ever possessed any knowledge of mining their own metals. These, they seem to have always obtained from old broken agong (gongs) or any of their other metal objects that break, and which they melt and re-employ for new substitutes.”

The recycling/upcycling of metals is still how Fara and other brass casters source their materials today. “We would melt down old gongs to create new items, but now there are many other things we can find at the junk shop, like padlocks, bullet shells, pipes.” The products they make are not strictly made of brass, but an alloy of brass, bronze, steel, and whatever else can be liquified in Fara’s smoldering hot pot.

Davao Today on Facebook:

JUST IN: THE cases of human trafficking against Talaingod Datu Benito Bay-ao and slain Lumad school teachers Chad Booc and Jurain Ngujo II in relation to their custody of Lumad students in Cebu in 2021 were dismissed by Tagum RTC Branch 2.

Judge Jimmy Boco ruled that the prosecution, in this case, police authorities, failed to prove the allegation that Bay-ao, Booc, and Ngujo exploited the Lumad students to join the New People's Army.

via Kath M. Cortez/ DavaoToday

Filipino here. I'm not of the cultures that practice tattoos (it was lost to a large part of the country), I'm Tagalog. Closest I could ask about the tattoos was a Cordilleran, which is at least in the same region.

Symbolic tattoos have to look exactly the same to matter. In the example given (the triangles and lines, going around the collar), the tattoos look similar. But not the same, not really. Maybe combining the patterns is part of the culture and that's what they're seeing, but it wasn't clear from the example.

Autopsy reports stare that young Lenie Rivas was raped.

The #Bagobo tribe of Mindanao, 🇵🇭

Personally, I like to think he's Southeast Asian, specifically a Filipino. My mother is Kapampangan and my father is part of the Lumad (an indigenous group of Filipinos), and so my family's skin tone leans more to Oscar's skin tone. One of my brothers have freckles like him, and we all have hazel eyes that are similar as well. Of course, not everyone in that ethnicity have that, and I'm pretty sure my family are Asian mutts with all sorts of ethnicities in the blood.

Still, it makes me happy that I can look at Oscar and think he could be like me since I feel a lot of Southeast Asians don't get a lot of representation in American media.

By Rubi del Mundo, National Democratic Front of the Philippines