A Prodigal Indigene: Locating Myself in Colonialism

         Nu am-ammaam a ajalon tun kultura taku, adsam mavyalin un adsam pipiyaon.                         (If you carefully study our culture, you cannot help but fall in love with it.)

                                                                         ROYCE LAKVYAWAN LINGBAWAN[1]

 The task of locating myself in colonialism  involves reflecting on the various overlapping and interpenetrating influences that have shaped the direction of my life and the worldviews I have embraced at different stages of my intellectual journey.  It is thus an exercise in tracking down various personal existential points of departures, relocations, detours, and returns.

A Westernized Indigene

My parents were from two distinct Cordilleran ethnolinguistic groups — my mother was a Bontok, while my father was a Vanaw-Kalinga.[2] I am thus what many fellow natives would facetiously refer to as an "FBI" (Full-Blooded Igorot),or a "GI" (Genuine Igorot).[3]

Interestingly, our appropriation of these two well-known initialisms actually somehow spell out the heavy influence of American culture over the Cordilleras. No surprise there, because Baguio City was once the USA’s colonial hill station – the so-called "Shimla of the Philippines" -- and the rest of the region became at some points in our local history the center of American anthropological studies, commercial interests, political experimentations, and missionary ventures.

Names

This explains why despite me being short, dark, stout and pug-nosed (like some odd teapot), my father named me after William Henry Scott, the iconic white American Anglican historian who chose to become an Igorot by heart and whose scholarly works led many of us natives to a more nuanced understanding of our country's precolonial or colonial history and to a greater appreciation of our multihued Indigenous cultures.

In my father’s village, one can find a lot of people named after some other famous Americans. For example, one of my uncle Theodore's grandson was named Roosevelt, and two other uncles were christened Washington and Monroe. I even had a friend who called his dog "Wilkey," the surname of his favorite American Protestant preacher – which would have been quite subversive, in hindsight, given the fact that many hobby riders from America have used the almighty dollar to unleash their Filipino hounds of war for what they have imagined as a cosmic battle between good and evil on Philippine soil.

And speaking of war, the older generation of iVanaw[4] had a common bond with the Americans because they fought with or in some other ways supported their white brothers against the Japanese occupiers during the Second World War (Griffiths 2012).

Music

While my father’s tribal culture is suffused with vibrant traditional music, the community is also enamored with country music.  Many among us could play the guitar and belt out American folk and country songs ala Kenny Rogers or George Strait, or even yodel like Slim Clark.  My cousin’s first album, although mostly comprised of his songs in our language, unmistakably sound off American-style folk and country tunes.  Even my father’s few compositions were all in English and notated to western melodies.[5] I must hasten to add though, that the younger generation’s musical repertoire rings with indigenized Rock and Pop. Alongside secular music, American church songs have also become part of our culture especially among our older folks who have been associated with American Anglican and Evangelical missionaries. But more on this later.

Language and Education

In a sense, these personal names and musical preferences are tied to the educational system we had been exposed to early in life.

I was born in Bontoc but spent most of my childhood in Tabuk, then a rural town which was nevertheless a melting pot of lowland and highland cultures and was in itself a huge signpost for things Americana.

Linguistically, this meant that I and many of my contemporaries could speak at least four local languages and English.  In my case, I grew up speaking the lingua franca of the region and most of northern Philippines (Ilokano), my father’s language (Vanaw, one of about a dozen Kalinga languages), my mother’s language (Bontok, which also enabled me to understand another language, Kankana-ey), our national language (Tagalog-based Filipino), and our adopted national language (English).

In most formal and/or official occasions, Filipino/Tagalog was sidelined in favor of English which became our primary medium of communication in government offices and schools. Even our lone radio station at the time used mostly Ilokano and English in their regular broadcasts. In primary and high school, we had well-read teachers who were heavily influenced by American education either because they were taught by Americans or were trained by mentors taught by Americans.

Under the baton of our elementary school teachers, we sang with much gusto American folk songs like Oh, Susanna!, Old Black Joe, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, Clementine, and Red River Valley. We repeatedly chorused the blatantly racist ditty, “Three Little Niggers,” as well as “Oh the Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga” which I realized way into my adolescence was just a musical slur by American soldiers who actually griped at the Filipino’s ability to race up a coconut tree barefooted and glove-less. Most of the declamation and oratorical pieces we performed in intercampus competitions were also English texts written by Filipinos (e.g.“Land of Bondage, Land of the Free” by Raul Manglapus) or Americans (e.g. “The Gettysburg Address”).

All these dovetailed with my education at home where, alongside Philippine folkloric orature, I was exposed to western literature including poetry (e.g. Alexander’s “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”), fiction (e.g., Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood), and nonfiction (e.g. Ann Terry White’s The False Treaty, Grolier’s Encyclopedia).  My journalist father even required me to write a diary at some point in my childhood and I did so mostly in English.  Looking back, it makes sense why our naming and music preferences smack of America.  I now realize as well that the kind of literary exposure I had in my childhood somehow conditioned my education and professional career choices.

 Our colonial education entailed in some ways a skewed version of our own history.  For instance, in our Grade 5 Philippine history class, we got the impression that the southern Philippine warrior-hero Lapu-Lapu was the villain in his epic battle in 1521 with the ill-fated Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan.  I can still distinctly remember our teacher, a devout Roman Catholic, waxing emotional over that part of Pigafetta’s account where he wrote of the death of their captain whom he called “our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide.”  Part of our teacher’s narrativization was her unforgettable trip to the island of Mactan to see Magellan’s Cross, a devotee’s marker for the eventual triumph of Christianity over paganism albeit paid for by the circumnavigator’s ultimate sacrifice.

 Let me segue now to the religious influences that shaped my personal and family history.

 An Evangelized Indigene

Her town being once the center of Catholic proselytization, my mother was educated in the convent of Belgian nuns of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (SIHM). At the same time, the Fundamental Baptists also established a foothold in the area and converted many of our relatives. On the other hand, my father was born and raised in the village of Balbalasang which became an Anglican mission station in the early 1900s and his clan has taken pride in the fact that his eldest brother Theodore became “the first Kalinga Anglican priest,” a soft-spoken clergyman who was fluent in English, Vanaw and Ilokano.  I still have the first and only handwritten letter he wrote to me and his typewritten draft of the history of the Anglican Mission in our tribe – both penned in English.

Tabuk was and continues to be a fertile ground for evangelization dominated by the Catholic, Anglican, Baptist and a few other churches. The local Belgian Catholic priest and the American Fundamental Baptist pastor were family friends whose churches and residences were just a stone’s throw away from our house, and a few relatives became “Charismatic” preachers or proselytizers. As a child then, I had been acquainted with all three Christian traditions – Liturgical, Evangelical and Pentecostal – especially that my parents had quite an irenic type of religiosity which allowed us to attend various denominations, although I and my sisters eventually stayed on with the Fundamental Baptists and my brother with the Anglicans/Episcopalians while my parents remained nominally affiliated with the (amillenial and anti-instrument) Churches of Christ of the Stone-Campbell Movement (SCM) or the American Restoration Movement (ARM).

It was to this Christian sect that I eventually gravitated early in college, right after a brief evangelical sidetrip with the (1611 KJV) Bible Baptist Church as a lay preacher.  My parents were then grooming me for law school and eventually to follow in my father’s political footsteps which was why I took a double bachelors degree in Political Science and English. But my family’s tumultuous experience with local politics had me disillusioned about lawyering and politics, which played well into my conversion into the Churches of Christ. So instead of going to Law school,  I attended  a Bible college run by this denomination. The next ten years saw me deeply involved in all aspects of church work from Wednesday and Sunday Bible Studies, door-to-door evangelistic campaigns, and Bible correspondence recruitment to pulpit preaching, preacher training administration , and church planting. I had spent five years doing full-time preaching, and the other half  doing part-time ministry (or in preaching school parlance, “a tent-making preacher” ala the Apostle Paul).

A Politicized Indigene

 So there I was, christened a Catholic in infancy, baptized into the Fundamental Baptist Church in my childhood, re-baptized into the Bible Baptist Church in my adolescence, and immersed specifically “for the remission of sins”[6] into the Churches of Christ in my early adulthood.

After 10 years of intensive involvement in the Ministry, however, I came to an “epiphanic moment” – my deconversion from organized religion,[7] which coincided with my decision to pursue a master’s degree in Language and Literature at the University of the Philippines Baguio (UPB). Under the mentorship of Professor (now Emeritus) Delfin Lindain Tolentino, Jr., a non-Igorot but one who knows more about Igorot cultures than I do, I was introduced to Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism which enabled me to intellectualize my religious experience and to firm up my postcolonial stance.  At the encouragement of Professor Tolentino, I applied for a teaching post at UPB and was fortunately accepted. Throughout my eight-year stint as a faculty member, I had the chance to work on Cordillera Studies, the declared niche of the University. 

 All these meant returning to my roots which I later realized involved both a physical and intellectual  re-rooting and a re-routing. Music largely guided me throughout this journey. I went back to my mother’s master’s thesis containing my people’s traditional songs many of which she notated (Saboy 1990), and to her sole publication on Cordilleran music (1993). 

Fortuitously, another type of music wafted into my consciousness when I heard on the radio the familiar voice of a Kalinga singer, Edison Balansi, a childhood friend whom I had not seen in 20 years. As it turned out, when I got in touch with him, I learned that he had set up a musical band called “The Living Anitos” and was producing what I would eventually classify as ethnopop music. This reconnection with a childhood friend led me deeper into my own culture and his works, along with those of other Kalinga ethnopop artists, became the subject of my master’s thesis (Saboy 2014a; cf. Saboy 2012). In turn, this thesis gave birth to several papers some of which were autoethnographic, reflecting on my identity as a devangelized IP who once left his first love – his own culture (e.g. Saboy 2010; 2014b; 2016). 

The Linguistics component of my master’s program and my teaching responsibility also enabled me to do language and culture documentation among the Vanaw. Initially done through our research team led by Prof. Ruth Molitas Tindaan starting in 2013, it sought to work with the community to produce a world list and eventually a dictionary. 

Although the project somewhat satisfied the output required by the research grants from the Cordillera Studies Center (CSC), it was never fully realized even after I left UPB. It has now become a personal project which I hope to put to final published forms within the next few years.  There have been several offshoots and/or outputs of/from the project.  One is the working Vanaw orthography now used by basic education teachers in the Vanaw area in their Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education program.

Another was the offering of Vanaw as an elective language course in UP Baguio where some teenage Vanaw native speakers from the community had the chance to interact with the language learners in the campus. I was also able to record several forms of oral tradition from chants to stories, some of which I have written about and uploaded on my website.[8] 

Although we have had several missteps especially in the early stages of the project, we followed through our commitment that we would not conduct a guerilla-type research in which we simply go to the community, extract data from our informants as fast as we could, and fulfill the documentary evidences of actual fieldwork required by the CSC. 

We wanted to (and we did) spend extended periods in the community, hear stories, participate in rituals, bring back our outputs (including photos and audio-visual recordings) for validation and/or distribution, and be accountable for the narratives we constructed about them.  In this sense did I have a contextualized appreciation of Shawn Wilson’s memorable contention that

Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information. (2008, 3)[9]

Nevertheless, that did not mean that I had a full understanding my people’s language.  In fact I later realized that I did not know much about my language at all even though I spoke it and could write in it.

In 2018, Professor Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes, then teaching at the University of Tokyo, encouraged me to work on the transcription and translation of Vanaw um-umag (fictive and non-fictive stories) told by one of our lamented elders, Barcelon Panabang.  My confidence in my understanding of my own language was deflated after a two-week stay in Osaka just working on the recordings.

Fortunately, Prof. Lawrence “Laurie” Andrew Reid generously and gently offered his help and over the next two years of correspondence – he in Japan and I in Bahrain – we were able to complete the project which was eventually published by the University of Tokyo (Yoneno-Reyes, Reid, & Saboy 2022).[10]  It was also through the encouragement of Professor Reid and the help of another iVanaw journalist, Romulo Tangbawan of ArabNews that we were able to get the Ethnologue editors to make changes to their language list and recognize Vanaw as one of the eight Kalinga languages.

Even then, this whole language documentation experienc reinforced the fact that I am and will continue to be a student of my own language and culture.   

 A Conflicted Indigene

 During the first night of our clan reunion in 2014, my relatives requested the new local Anglican priest to deliver a homily to kick off the affair.  He refused to come down from the rectory which was located a little over a hundred meters up the mountainside, arguing that  we should be going to him instead. 

Not wanting to delay the event further, some of my older relatives asked me to read the Scriptures and expound on it.  I wanted to tell them I had not preached in six years, never attended church nor prayed since then, but I didn’t want to cause unnecessary friction among us. For them, I was still a preacher and the son of Annivyan, the pangat (tribal leader or chief) who used to guide them in a four-part singing of some “Great Songs of the Church” during his sporadic visits to the village.

During my father’s funeral in 2003, the same elders were there when I told the audience in my response to eulogies that although my father said I will continue his work among our people, I had decided to devote my life to the Ministry.  If only I knew back then that my self-assured declarations would haunt me a decade later.

So I took the Bible and read and expounded on the assigned text, the first chapter of James.  I briefly spoke of how it was that, just like the intended recipients of the epistle (i.e.,  “the twelve tribes scattered among the nations”), we the naisiwalak 'those in the diaspora' have also come together from far and wide.  Ironically, at that moment, I felt a sense of alienation as a Fundamentalist-turned-Freethinker right in the midst of a congregation of the faithful. 

I still feel that way.  For although my secular worldview actually made me more open to learning from our traditional ceremonies and more appreciative of the psycho-social function of religion and spirituality, I am still anxious about me being othered because of my lack of faith even if I could successfully convince them that I am not necessarily anti-religion and certainly not necessarily averse to the experience of what they might consider “spiritual”.

 On the other hand, I am also conscious of the fact that a huge factor in my devangelization was me imbibing counter-apologetic discourses mostly articulated by thinkers in the Global North. Such discourses often dismiss the Indigenous Worldview just as much as they reject the absolutist claims of Theology. So one of my struggles is navigating the strait between Scientism and (unhealthy) Skepticism on one side, and Fundamentalism and Gullibility on the other. 

 Another source of my unease is the fact that when the academic rubber meets the Indigenous road, the research ride tends to be bouncy and unsettling as I grapple with what is ideal and what is practical, or why I do what I do.  At times I had to stop myself to ask whether I was doing fieldwork just to make a name for myself and further my career.  Or the fact that I am both an umili (insider) and a kakka-ili (outsider) being an academic and having been away from home most of the time. 

I am not sure if this unease is ever going to go away but I suppose this serves as a constant reminder for me to continue reflecting on whether, after doing fieldwork, I am actually doing something for the benefit of my own community. As Groh (2018, 128) puts it:

 Therefore, when we have returned from field research and carry on, working with the findings and data that we have collected, then, in addition to this analysis, we should also carry out some meta-analysis. What are we doing there at all? Why are we doing it, and for whom are we doing it? What is the purpose, and what kind of benefit are we seeking? After all, it is not about impressing others with the exotic places we have been to, but about gaining knowledge that will help us to understand what is going on in this world. What shall be the use, and will it really be of use? By all means, we must keep away any consequential damages from the indigenous peoples. This is our ethical obligation. We have to consider the mechanisms that we set in motion, when we present or publish our results. Who are the recipients and what will they do with the information? What do we want to convey? Which details are necessary for that?

Further, it also makes me, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith proposes (Smith, Tuck and Yang 2019, 13), to wonder – in relation to the outsider-insider issue – “whether there are really sides anyway” and to think more about “positioning and positionality” in relation to my local context.

A Suspicious Indigene

Just as I have learned to try to be critical of Western, colonial discourses, I have also developed a degree of skepticism against the idea of fellow natives individually posing wittingly or unwittingly as the “Representative Indigene” whose views and works supposedly accurately reflect those of her/his community as if they speak for the community. 

But I wholeheartedly agree with Robert Allen Warrior who rightly said that native academics “are not simply the bearers of truth who will make everything right…” and “can give voice to the voiceless, but . . . cannot speak for them” (quoted in Garroute 2003, 109).  I also believe that native academics and non-academics alike can be and actually are complicit in the mangling of our own image.

When it comes to Indigenous writers from New Zealand, North America and other Western countries or regions whose works I have had the privilege of reading, I have to say that I owe these scholars a lot for enriching and broadening my understanding of this field of contestation called Indigenous Studies. 

However, I suspect that what they say or what their respective Indigenous communities’ practice and believe in are not necessarily descriptive of, true to, or valid in other native groups especially in the Global South.  For instance, the heavy emphasis of North American writers on spirituality may not necessarily define what it means to be Indigenous elsewhere. 

To illustrate, Daniel Everett’s work among the Piraha of Brazil revealed the fact that an Indigenous group, by virtue of an experiential apprehension of their world, actually have no concept of a god, or of  fictive narratives (2008, 115-134). Thus, if we were to look at the core of Indigenous identity, we might not find it in a theistic-based or such other familiar forms of spirituality but on a people’s relationship to Nature and their unique customs and lived experience.

I am also wary of non-government organizations (NGOs) that project themselves as champions of Indigenous peoples’ rights and anti-neocolonialism but are themselves driven by foreign ideologies which may not be compatible with the worldviews and values of our Indigenous communities whom some of them misrepresent just to sustain and promote a narrative that seeks to gain their respective organizations some cred among their supporters abroad.

There are, of course, NGOs that our communities have welcomed and enjoyed working with. BanToxics!, for, example, had partnered with the Vanaws who finally abandoned the use of mercury in their small-scale mining operations and replaced it with the borax method for gold extraction.

 A Penitent Indigene

 In the past 10 years, I have found out that documenting my own language and culture is a race against time as the elderly culture bearers are joining our ancestors one after the other much faster than I expected.  Those who have gone ahead, as Bontoks would put it, ed adi kaila (‘to the unseen[world]’) had taken to their graves a whole library of oral traditions which, if not properly documented, will likely be lost forever.  When I add to the equation the fact that these elders are my own blood relatives, I easily get emotional. But being sentimental about this whole work is also a great motivation.

 This is especially true in relation to my parents, themselves acknowledged culture bearers among their own people but whose knowledge and wisdom I neglected to learn from to the greatest possible extent that I could.  Shortly before my father died, he had been telling friends and relatives that I would continue his work. At the time, I was still trapped in an Evangelical cage and so even if I had heard him directly say so to me, I would not have paid attention to it seriously.[11]  It was the same thing with my mother whose culture I have neglected as an academic.

 I have been thinking a lot about those 10 years spent in Fundamentalist Christianity, and wonder how much more IKSP documentation I could have helped produce for the benefit of both my community and the academe.  So I guess a great part of what drives my current academic work is this sense of guilt, and my decision to pick up where my parents left off is a form of penance to atone for my “sins of omission.”

 Conclusion

I am a product of colonialism and I have benefited from it. At the same time, I have also in some ways  been displaced by it, losing my love for my own culture in the process.  So I am a prodigal son returning home, finding my way to the village hearth.  I now know that if someone can make me forget our village hearth, s/he can take my heart anywhere. I have thus chosen to return so I will not forget. And now, this I know as well: I am a dweller of a land I cannot outlive, and I will always be the child of a village I cannot outlove.

 REFERENCES

Everett, Daniel. 2008. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. London: Profile Books.

Garroutte, Eva Marie. 2003. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, Ltd.

Griffiths, Stephen. 2012. “Guerilla Priest: Al Griffiths and the Resistance Movement in Kalinga in World War II.” The Cordillera Review, IV (2): 3-36.

Groh, Arnold. 2018. Research Methods in Indigenous Contexts. Cham, CH: Springer        International Publishing.

Hart, Michael Anthony. 2010. “Indigenous Worldviews, Knowledge, and Research: The Development of an Indigenous Research Paradigm.” Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work, 9 (1): 1-16.

Saboy, Anatalia Magkachi. 1993. Ethnic Songs of the Major Ethnolinguistic Groups of People in the Cordillera. Manila: National Center for Culture and the Arts.

____________________. 1990. “The Songs of the Banaos of Western Kalinga.” Masters thesis, Baguio Colleges Foundation.

Saboy, Scott Magkachi. 2019. “Research and Indigenous Worldview: Reflections from a Kalinga Village Hearth.” Presented at The 24th Young Scholars’ Conference on Philippine Studies in Japan, Nagoya University.

___________________. 2016. “Matatagu’n Anitu (Living Anito) as a Trope for Recontextualizing Tradition and Re/Presenting Indigeneity.” In CSSTRP 2: Consolidating Lessons and Charting Directions, edited by Lorelei Mendoza, 275-285. Baguio City: CSC-UP Baguio.

___________________. 2014a. “Living Anito: Remixing Traditions in Contemporary Kalinga Music.” Master’s thesis, University of the Philippines Baguio.

___________________. 2014b. “A Brown Man’s Burden: Critiquing an American Restorationist Discourse.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 229: 67-74.

___________________. 2012. “Voicing Ethnicity: Traditional Referentiality and Kalinga Ethnopop.” The Cordillera Review: Journal of Philippine Culture and Society, IV (2/Sept): 37-64.

___________________. 2010. “Writing Ethnicity: Searching for an Igorot ‘Native Clearing.’” Presented at the Taboan: 2nd Philippine International Writers’ Festival, Cebu City, Philippines,

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (Nga¯ti Awa, Nga¯ti Porou), Eve Tuck (Unangax ˆ), & K. Wayne Yang. 2019. Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View. New York: Routledge.

Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing.

Yoneno-Reyes, Michiyo, Lawrence Andrew Reid, & Scott Magkachi Saboy, eds. 2022. Documenting Indigenous Tribal Memory: Folktales of the Vanaws, Northern Philippines. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Institute of Advanced Studies on Asia.

NOTES

 [1] Interview by the author on 23 August 2017 in Paswal, Balbalasang, Balbalan, Kalinga, northern Philippines.  Royce Lingbawan is an elder and a culture-bearer from the Vanaw ‘tribe’ in western Kalinga. He is a former president of the Banao Bodong Association (BBAA), now the Banao Bodong Tribal Association, Inc. (BBTAI).

[2] Bontoc is the capital town of the Mountain Province, one of the six provinces of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR). Tabuk is the capital city of the Province of Kalinga, also in CAR.  Unbeknownst to most outsiders, Kalinga’s cultural territory actually extends beyond its current political configuration (For an extended discussion on the matter, see my article “Are the Kalinga and Tingguian Ethnically One” HERE.

[3] Some Cordillerans, notably among the Kalinga and the Ifugao, actually object to being ethnically categorized under the exonym “Igorot.”  Some also wrangle over whether “Cordilleran” is to be preferred over “Igorot.” I prefer to assign the first term to those who reside in the Cordillera but do not trace their roots to any of the ethnolinguistic groups in the region, and the second term to those who actually belong to or have been adopted by any of these indigenous communities.

[4] The prefix -i denotes origin. Thus, iVanaw means “from the Vanaw tribe).

[5] His “Balbalasang, It’s You” was officially adopted by his eponymous village as their “barangay anthem” and his “Aguinaldo March” became the official anthem for the commemoration of the Kalinga municipality of Lubuagan as a one-time seat of the First Philippine Republic during the Philippine-American War.

[6] In Churches of Christ soteriology, all baptisms – whether in the form of pouring, sprinkling or immersion – done by other churches or denominations are not salvific; only theirs is, provided further that immersion is done specifically “for the remission of sins” (Acts 2.38).

[7] A part of my creative nonfiction reflections on my devangelization can be found HERE.

[8] See, for example, a documentation on Vanaw funeral practices @ THIS PAGE and a recording of a Vanaw chant HERE.

[9] In addition to Wilson’s enlightening discussion on the nature of an Indigenous Research Paradigm (2008, 62-79), I also profited from Michael Hart’s discussion on the matter (2010).

[10] The folkloric corpus (both transcription and translation) have been made available to the Vanaw people and to the general public @ http://www.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yoneno/database.html.  With the express permission of Professor Yoneno-Reyes, I shall be working on a simplified, more reader-friendly bilingual text primarily for use in schools. We took part in a panel discussion on our work in a conference in Japan in which I attempted to present an native academic’s view of of research from, as it were, the jalipong or the (village) hearth (Saboy 2019).

[11] I have posted my reflections on this HERE.