Macli-ing Dulag: Kalinga Chief, Defender of the Cordillera by MA. Ceres P. Doyo (review)

In 1980 Maria Ceres P. Doyo figured in a highly mediatized military hearing because of an article she wrote on Macli-ing Dulag. Macli-ing, a pangat (peace pact holder) from the Butbut ethnolinguistic group residing in the village of Bugnay in Tinglayan, Kalinga, rose to prominence during the martial law period because of his opposition to the Chico River Dam project and his leadership in forming strategic alliances among the Cordillera’s ethnolinguistic groups—actions that eventually cost him his life. Doyo expands her controversial 1980 article in the book Macli-ing Dulag: Kalinga Chief, Defender of the Cordillera. The book is a collection of eighteen thematically arranged short journalistic essays by Doyo about Macli-ing and the struggle against the dam project. The essays are based on Doyo’s field notes gathered after Macli-ing’s death, including excerpts of her conversations with the Kalinga and other respondents sympathetic to the struggle.

Providing the anthropological context for Doyo’s essays are eight short academic essays by Nestor Castro that appear after Doyo’s essays. Castro, a cultural anthropologist based in the Department of Anthropology of the University of the Philippines Diliman, where he also obtained his graduate degrees, has published works on Cordillera self-determination, customary law, and ancestral domains. His dissertation was on the Dananao Kalinga’s politics of ethnic identity, while his master’s thesis assessed the communist movement in the Cordillera.

In the book Doyo documents brief oral accounts of the Butbut in the aftermath of Macli-ing’s death. Doyo acknowledges the gaps in translation in interviewing anonymous resource persons in Kalinga. Nevertheless, her essays render visible the multiple dimensions that define the persona of Macli-ing, who was murdered by a military unit in his home on 24 April 1980.

Salient in Macli-ing’s speeches before multisectoral gatherings against the Chico Dam, as well as in his conversations with the Butbut and government officials, was his refusal to subscribe to the Marcosian control of the commons. He articulated the belief shared by the ethnolinguistic groups opposing the Chico Dam project that it would result in the inundation of the payao (rice fields), leading to the loss not only of food security but also of the rituals, quotidian interactions, and cultural memories foregrounded by the land that is home to them.

Doyo starts the book with a description of the Cordillera’s physical terrain from the vantage point of an investigative journalist unfamiliar with the region’s perceived treacherous topography. Meanwhile, Castro’s description of the setting is more expansive than Doyo’s and touches on social relations. Unfortunately, the book does not provide a background on the social dynamics and customary law specific to the Butbut (or those shared in Kalinga) in relation to the contested physical boundaries and access to natural resources on the Cordillera.

Although Castro enumerates existing development projects like the Ambuklao and Binga dams, the Bakun ASEAN Industrial Cooperation (AIC) Small Hydropower Project, and the San Roque Multipurpose Project, the book does not explicitly articulate how the Chico Dam issue must not be seen in isolation but as integral to a more comprehensive critique of state-centric and modernist notions of development and progress, which remain pervasive to this day. Castro also briefly assays the impact of government agencies on indigenous groups, such as the Presidential Assistance for National Minorities (PANAMIN), which replaced the Commission on National Integration (CNI), agencies which were molded from the legacy of Manifest Destiny and which assumed the right to partition the Cordillera. While Castro sees a “strong sense of communalism” (63) among diverse groups in the region, it would have been more helpful if he explained how the Cordillera’s indigenous elite mediates state and corporate interests and brokers the privatization of land.

Both Doyo and Castro regard 1974 as the start of the opposition against the Chico River Dam Project, the year when Bontoc...