Bataq Erotic

The Bataq are the smallest of Palawan's indigenous peoples and one of the smallest groups in the Philippines: a few hundred people spread across a handful of river valleys on the island's northeast side, in the uplands above Puerto Princesa and into Roxas. They are Negrito, part of the oldest layer of settlement in the archipelago, and their local groups take their names from the water they live beside: Babuyan, Tanabag, Langogan, Tinitian. Ask where someone is from and the answer is usually a river. The name causes constant confusion with the Batak of Sumatra, to whom they are unrelated in language or history, and the spelling Bataq is sometimes used to keep the two apart.

Their language, also called Binatak, is Austronesian and sits close to Palawano and Tagbanwa, its immediate neighbors on the island. Fewer people speak it every year. That decline is part of a longer pattern documented in unusual detail since the 1970s, most closely by the anthropologist James Eder, whose long study tracked population loss, intermarriage, and the slow narrowing of the forest economy that had supported them. Almost every Bataq today has Tagbanwa or lowland settler ancestry, which makes the question of who counts as Bataq a live and sometimes bitter one in a community this small.

They farm upland rice and cassava in swiddens, they hunt, and they make most of their cash from the forest: rattan, wild honey, and above all almaciga, the resin tapped from Agathis trees and carried down the trail to traders at consistently poor rates. Older religious practice centers on the spirits of particular places, the panya'en, and on the babalyan, the shaman who deals with them, sometimes in trance, sometimes through the tarek dance. The best known ceremony is the runsay, held once a year through the night on the beach at the mouth of the Tanabag River and ending at dawn. Protestant and Catholic missions have worked among them for decades, and most Bataq will describe themselves as Christian, which has not much displaced the older reckoning of what lives in the forest.

Logging, in-migration, and the conversion of their uplands into protected land have all pressed on the same few valleys. The 2017 declaration of the Cleopatra's Needle Critical Habitat, which Bataq communities backed, was an attempt to turn that pressure into something closer to tenure.