Mandaya Erotic

The name says where to find them: man for people, daya for upstream. The Mandaya are the upriver people of southeastern Mindanao, among the larger of the non-Muslim indigenous groups that Filipinos collectively call Lumad. Their country is the Pacific side of the island: the mountains and river valleys of Davao Oriental, running into Davao de Oro, Davao del Norte and the southern reaches of Surigao del Sur and Agusan del Sur. Their language, also called Mandaya, belongs to the Mansakan cluster of Central Philippine languages. That makes it a near relative of Mansaka, Kalagan and the Davawenyo of the lowland towns, and a more distant cousin of Cebuano, which most Mandaya now speak as well. The Mansaka are often counted as a Mandaya branch. The Kalagan share much of the language but took up Islam, which the Mandaya did not.

What outsiders know best is the cloth. Dagmay is woven from abaca fiber on a backstrap loom, its patterns tied off and dyed into the threads before weaving, in earth reds, browns and black. The figures are specific: crocodiles, human forms, and tight geometric fields between them. Tradition credits the designs to a spirit, the tagamaling, and the craft still passes from mother to daughter. Dagmay skirts go with embroidered blouses, heavy beadwork, and the patina, a worked silver disc worn on the chest.

Older Mandaya society turned on two figures. The bagani was a war leader whose rank rested on proven kills and showed in how much red he was entitled to wear; he ruled with the advice of a council of elders. The balyan, usually a woman, handled the other side of things: healing, harvest rites, and dealings with the diwata and the lesser spirits of forest and river, sometimes through carved wooden figures called manaog. Houses stood high off the ground, in some accounts up in the trees, because raiding was a fact of life. Ethnographers in the early 1900s also recorded teeth filed and blackened at puberty.

Spanish missionaries reached this coast in the seventeenth century, but the uplands stayed largely outside colonial control until Jesuit resettlement campaigns late in the nineteenth, followed by American era abaca plantations and, after World War II, logging and waves of Visayan settlers. Most Mandaya today are Catholic or Protestant, farm rice, corn, coconut and abaca, and live in ordinary barangays. The balyan have not vanished, though, and neither has the politics of land. Ancestral domain claims under the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act are the current form of a very old argument about who the uplands belong to.