The Manóbos of Mindanáo | Page 7

was called agahan and that it
was made out of the bark of a tree whose name I can not recall. He
described the process of beating the bark and promised to bring me, 60
days from the date of our conference, a loin cloth of one of these people.
I inquired as to their manner of life, and was assured that they were
tau-batañg; that is, people who slept under logs or up in trees. He said
that he and his people had killed many of them, but that he was still on
terms of friendship with some of them.
The second report as to the existence of Negritos I heard on the
Baglásan River, a tributary of the Sálug River. The chiefs whom I
questioned had never visited the Negritos but had purchased from the
Tugawanons[15] many Negrito slaves whom they had sold to the
Mandáyas of the Kati'il and Karága Rivers. This statement was
probably true, for I saw one slave, a full-blooded Negrito girl, on the
upper Karága during my last trip and received from her my third and
most convincing report of the existence of Negritos other than the
Mamánuas of the eastern Cordillera. She had been captured, she said,
by the Manóbos of Libagánon and sold to the Debabáons (upper Sálug
people). She could not describe the place where her people live, but she
gave me the following information about them. They are all like herself,
and they have no houses nor crops, because they are afraid of the
Manóbos that surround them. Their food is the core[16] of the green
rattan and of fishtail palm,[17] the flesh of wild boar, deer, and python,

and such fish and grubs, etc., as they find in their wanderings. They
sleep anywhere; sometimes even in trees, if they have seen strange
footprints.
[15] The Tugawanons were described by my Sálug authorities as a
people that lived at the headwaters of the River Libagánon on a
tributary called Tugawan. They were described as a people of medium
stature, as fair as the Mansákas, very warlike, enemies of the reported
Negritos, very numerous, and speaking an Atás dialect. Perhaps the
term Tugawanon is only a local name for a branch of the Atás tribe.
[16] O-bud.
[17] Ba-hi (Caryota sp.).
Their weapons are bows and arrows, lances, daggers, and bolos.
According to her description, the bolos are long and thin, straight on
one side and curved on the other. The men purchase them from the
Atás in exchange for beeswax. The people are numerous, but they live
far apart, roaming through the forests and mountains, and meeting one
another only occasionally.
The statements of this slave girl correspond in every particular with the
report that I received on the upper Sálug, except that the Sálug people
called these Negritos Tugmaya and said that they live beyond a
mountain that is at the headwaters of the Libagánon River.
Putting together these three reports and assuming the truth of them, the
habitat of these Negritos must be the slopes of Mount Panombaian,
which is situated between, and is probably the source of, the Rivers
Tigwa (an important tributary of the Rio Grande de Kotabáto), Sábud
(the main western tributary of the Ihawán River), and Libagánon (the
great western influent of the Tágum River).
Montano states that during his visit to the Philippines (1880-81) there
were on the island of Samal a class of half-blood Ata' with distinctly
Negroid physical characteristics. Treating of Ata' he says that it is a
term applied in the south of Mindanáo by Bisáyas to Negritos "that

exist (or existed not long ago) in the interior toward the northwest of
the gulf of Davao."[18] A careful distinction must be made between the
term Atás[19] and the racial designation Ata', for the former are,
according to Doctor Montano, a tribe of a superior type, of advanced
culture, and of great reputation as warriors. They dwell on the
northwestern slope of Mount Apo, hence their name Atás, hatáas, or
atáas, being a very common word in Mindanáo for "high." They are,
therefore, the people that dwell on the heights. I heard of one branch of
them called Tugawanons, but this is probably only a local name like
Agúsanons, etc.
[18] Une Mission aux Philippines, 346, 1887.
[19] Called also Itás.
I found reports of the former existence of Negritos in the Karága River
Valley at a place called Sukipin, where the river has worn its way
through the Cordillera. An old man there told me that his grandfather
used to hunt the Negritos. The Mandáyas both of that region and of
Tagdauñg-duñg, a district situated on the Karága River, five days'
march from the mouth, on the western side of the Cordillera, show here
and there characteristics, physical and cultural, that