Oblations

Istarted and finished the book while waiting for class. Yet, in the space of that hour or so, “Macli-ing Dulag” (UP Press, 2015) brought me to so many places: our family’s reading of Sunday newspapers in bed, martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos, and my high school discovery of journalism in the pages of a Sunday newspaper supplement.

Deceptively slim, “Macli-ing Dulag” combines two books: Ma. Ceres P. Doyo’s expanded article, and “A Peek into Cordilleran History, Culture and Society” by Nestor P. Castro.

I was in high school when Doyo’s article on Macli-ing Dulag was featured in “Panorama,” a magazine that came with “Bulletin Today.” My father did not think highly of the newspaper. Of the three national dailies, though, he thought the Bulletin had the thickest main section devoted to news.

While my sister and I flipped through the supplements, my father read the news section from front page to back. He often pronounced the news was the “usual propaganda.” As we had several mutts that resisted housebreaking, propaganda served a purpose.

On June 29, 1980, my father asked me if I read this “Panorama” article. Edited then by the legendary Leticia Jimenez Magsanoc, the magazine offered little to interest a teenager.

In Doyo’s account, I read Macli-ing Dulag’s response to a government official belittling his people’s lack of land titles that could have “legitimized” their opposition to the Chico River Dam Project: “How can you own that which will outlive you? Only the race owns the land because the race lives forever.”

Only in college would the sacrifice that saved the Kalinga way of life sink in. Only during the recent reading of Doyo’s book did I realize that we have no lack of heroes: the tribal leader who gave up his life to defend his people’s culture, which Marcos would have traded for 1,010 megawatts of electricity; the untried journalists (Doyo and Rene O. Villanueva) who went through arduous travel and a military interrogation to write the reports that led to the first face-off between the media and the state since martial law was imposed eight years before.

The Filipinos’ heroism does not belong to the past; it manifests in the struggles to assert self-determination being waged by the indigenous peoples, non-government workers, students, and other citizens.

Asked during the military hearing why she only carried “one side” of the story, Doyo explained that the government had unlimited access to the media. “My article is a challenge to the government to print the truth.”

My father pointed me to my earliest memory of journalism’s oblation. As custodians of our shared memory, have we discharged our duty?