Tagakaolo Erotic

The Tagakaolo carry their address in their name: taga means from, and olo is the head, here the head of a river. They are the people of the headwaters, upland farmers of the mountains that rise behind the western shore of the Davao Gulf in southern Mindanao. Their country runs through what is now Davao Occidental and Davao del Sur, around Malita, Santa Maria and Malalag, and over the ridges into Malungon and the Sarangani hills. The spelling wanders (Tagakaulo, Tagacaolo, Tagakaulu), but the meaning holds, and it marks a real line. Close relatives who settled the coast and took up Islam through contact with the Maguindanao became known as the Kalagan. Those who stayed upstream and kept the older religion stayed Tagakaolo.

Their language belongs to the Mansakan group of the Central Philippine languages, alongside Kalagan, Mandaya and Mansaka. That leaves it, oddly, closer kin to the Cebuano of the settlers than to the speech of the Blaan next door, whose language sits on a different branch of the Philippine family. Most Tagakaolo now speak Cebuano as well, and often Filipino, because the market, the school and the municipal hall all run on them.

Traditional life rested on swidden fields of upland rice, corn and root crops, with abaca grown for cloth and later for cash. Authority lay with datus and with men who had earned standing as warriors, and the spirit world was crowded, with spirits of forest, water and field who had to be consulted before land was cleared or seed went in. American rule brought plantations to the gulf coast and labor demands to go with them. In 1906 a Tagakaolo headman, Mangulayon, killed the district governor, Edward Bolton, near Malita. Davao City still remembers the episode in a street name, from the governor's side. The anthropologist Fay-Cooper Cole described the group a few years later in his 1913 survey of the Davao peoples.

The rest of the 20th century was mostly a story of land. Settlers from the Visayas and Luzon filled the lowlands, logging and plantations moved uphill, and the Tagakaolo were pushed farther toward the headwaters their name already claimed. Catholic and Protestant missions followed, and most families are now Christian in some form, with older ritual persisting around farming and healing. They count themselves among the Lumad, the non-Muslim indigenous peoples of Mindanao, and like other Lumad groups they press ancestral domain claims under the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act. Malita, now the capital of Davao Occidental, is the closest thing they have to a center.