Getting it right 100 years later

After a century, the Igorots are back with an update on how they fit into the world.

As many as 100 Igorots are expected to participate in this weekend's Pagdiriwang, the annual festival put on by the Filipino Cultural Heritage Society of Washington.

Their presence means local Filipinos are embracing a group many urban Filipinos have tried hard to distance themselves from over the years.

I asked Dorothy Cordova, who is Filipina American and founder of the Filipino National Historical Society, about that.

She remembered people making disparaging remarks about Filipinos, "even saying that we ate dogs."

"I was born and raised in Seattle, but I never understood why some people looked at Filipinos the way they did," she said.

In 1984, her husband, Fred, was putting together something for the UW on the 75th anniversary of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and the origin of those remarks became clear.

The 1909 exposition in Seattle featured a re-created Igorot (pronounced E garote) village in which people from the remote villages spread across the mountains of the northern Philippines put their culture on display.

At fairs around the country people were invited to look at "savages" from America's newly acquired possession.

That was just as Filipinos were beginning to immigrate in significant numbers. They arrived to find themselves defined by impressions of the Igorots.

"With the centennial coming around, we heard they were doing something on the Igorot," Cordova said. So she figured there should be a Filipino take on the Igorots.

Filipinos and Filipino Americans have tended to view the Igorot as a backward culture.

Some stories are the same all around the world.

One of those is the narrative that casts people who resist urbanization as a lesser kind of human. The way Indians are viewed in Mexico or the Maasai in Kenya.

What is really backward is that view.

Igorots will demonstrate their culture and give talks in five huts in a re-created village at Seattle Center, Saturday and Sunday (www.philippineseattlefestal.com), but things will be different this time.

I spoke with some Igorot elders who were flown from the Philippines to join local Igorots in the village. (Gloria Golocan, president of BIBAK of the Pacific Northwest, said there are 50 to 60 active members of the Igorot group around Seattle.)

The three elders are all college-educated, but still tied to their culture, trying to take the best from both ways of living.

Lulu Fang-Asan is a professor at Benguet State University. When she first learned Igorots were put on display at fairs, she wondered, "Why are we being treated like zoo animals?" Most of what she read took the position that the villagers were mistreated, but when she sought out descendants of the people who went on tour, the story was different. The people on exhibit "were having fun and they actually went there voluntarily."

Tony Gomowad is an Episcopal priest and Igorot activist. He said the villagers were just displaying their way of life; the real problem was the interpretation by outsiders that what they were seeing "really proves they are savages the way they eat, the way they live, their types of homes."

We wouldn't do that today, he said. "Now misconceptions and racism are very subtle, so it is not anymore that stark. Nobody is calling (other people) savages and barbarians," he said.

The elders said there is still discrimination against Igorots in the Philippines, but for the first time they have a say in the regional government.

That's good, because the Igorot messages are worth hearing.

The visiting elders said they appreciate airplanes, cellphones and the Internet, technologies that bring people together. And they believe they have technologies worth sharing, too. Igorots have always done organic farming, Fang-Asan said.

"We have a very close relationship to the environment, which is true for most indigenous people."

Caridad Fiar-Od, a retired professor, said there is value in a lifestyle that allows so many Igorots to live past 100 and to find happiness that is not defined by the possession of things.

That sentiment sounds better today than it might have before the economy crashed.

Gomowad said this coming together is about more than the Igorots. Maybe it is about people progressing from judging to sharing.

Welcome back, Igorots.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.