During cocktails at a Prince of Wales Business Leaders’ Forum in Hong Kong in 1992, an American told me, "I know where you’re from, because Imelda made that gown famous." Then she asked the lady standing next to me, "Where do you come from?"

I was wearing my mother’s embroidered, body-fitting piña terno with butterfly sleeves, and the other Filipina was wearing her lola’s baro’t saya with a full skirt and sheer top with pañuelo. "You both come from the same country, yet you’re wearing totally different native dresses! I had to wear a normal long gown because I couldn’t wear an American Indian outfit to this formal occasion." The Canadian and Australian ladies beside her nodded their heads because they too had no appropriate national attire as requested in Prince Charles’ personal invitation.

"Gosh," I beamed, "we have native garb for any occasion from breakfast to midnight, casual to formal; even a tapis for outdoor bathing and a malong for sleeping!"

I may have known this for years, but it took three Caucasians to make me appreciate the wealth and diversity of Philippine culture. And it extends to more than just ethnic wear.

Take the island of Mindoro, one of our 7,107 islands. Just as the name sounds, it’s a gold mine. Besides famous Puerto Galera with its beautiful beaches and colorful corals, it’s the home of 8 of around 110 indigenous peoples (IP) groups existing in the Philippines.

Mangyan is the generic name for the eight tribes in Mindoro—the Alangan, Bangon, Buhid, Hanunoo, Iraya, Ratagnon, Tadyawan, and Taubuid—each having its own distinct culture and geographic boundaries. They also speak eight of the more than a hundred languages and dialects spoken in the country today. The approximately 100,000 Mangyans—about ten percent of the island’s total population—live primarily in the central mountainous regions of Oriental and Occidental Mindoro.

Mainly farmers, the Mangyans revere the environment even before they prepare the land to plant their root crops, vegetables, and fruit trees. Besides asking the good spirits for blessings, they avoid or treat with respect springs, rivers, and burial grounds where bad spirits reside. They sacrifice a chicken or pig, dripping its blood inside the ritual plot so the plants will not be affected by too much, or too little, rain or sun. They make a firebreak before clearing and burning the site, use organic fertilizers, and observe a fallow period. The virgin forests of Mindoro are found mostly in Mangyan areas, disproving accusations that IPs destroy the habitat with their slash and burn methods.

The Mangyans are a peaceful, gentle people who don’t inflict physical punishment on their children. There are no tribal wars among them; in fact, the word "war" doesn’t exist in their vocabulary. This is why they live in the mountains…to avoid trouble. Not materialistic, they share what they have with neighbors, without counting the costs. They don’t even have numerals so they spell out numbers in words. They should be the model of our famed Philippine hospitality.

The Spaniards identified 17 syllabaries existing in their colony in the 1600s. Fr. Pedro Chirino, S.J. wrote in 1602, "there is scarcely a man, and much less a woman, who cannot read and write in letters proper to the Island of Manila." Doesn’t it feel good to know that most Manila inhabitants were literate and using their own script when the Spaniards arrived? No such thing as not educating females in our native culture!

In 1997, the pre-Hispanic scripts of the Hanunuo- and Buhid-Mangyans from Mindoro, and the Tagbanuas and Palaw’ans from Palawan, were declared as National Cultural Treasures, and are inscribed in the Memory of the World registers of UNESCO. They’re the only Philippine IPs who have been able to preserve their ancient writing system; the rest of us retained our languages and dialects, but we switched to the Roman alphabet of our colonizers.

Of the four existing syllabaries, the Hanunuo-Mangyan script has the greatest chance of surviving a few more generations. Why? Because of their beautiful poetry called ambahans; because of Dutch Anthropologist Antoon Postma who’s been living with them for five decades and has collected data, photographs, artifacts, and 20,000 ambahans; because of German Fr. Ewald Dinter, S.V.D., here for forty years, who heads the Mangyan Mission which runs schools and provides legal and medical aid; and because Fil-American Quint Fansler set up the Mangyan Heritage Center (MHC) to preserve and promote this rich indigenous Filipino culture.

Romantics by nature, a Hanunuo-Mangyan once inscribed this poem on a bamboo tree in the forest, hoping that the lady he was courting would read it as she passed by:

Here’s another Mangyan "graffiti" found in the forest:

…May there be Mangyan footprints till the end of time. . .

The clothes in the pictures on the previous page will be on display at the exhibit in the Ayala Museum in January 2006.

Lolita Delgado Fansler sits on the board of the Mangyan Heritage Center (MHC). The MHC supports research, conducts culture-training workshops, and maintains the most extensive library of material on the Mangyans (mainly from Dr. Antoon Postma’s collection)... visit www.mangyan.org. Calapan, Mindoro Oriental