Igorots pay tribute to Ibaloi revolutionary heroes

By Vincent Cabreza Northern Luzon Bureau BAGUIO CITY, Philippines--You won’t find the Philippine flag laid out on the tombstones of Ibaloi revolutionary heroes Mateo “Kustacio” Carantes and Mateo Cariño on Tuesday, Independence Day. This omission was not made out of spite. Few in this generation recall the names of their former presidents, much less obscure members of the Katipunan in Igorot country, who helped General Emilio Aguinaldo escape from the Americans when the Philippine-American war broke out in 1899. Ignorance, however, is no longer an excuse, at least for a group of young Igorot professionals who have started filming the legacy of their region’s cultural and historical heroes. Dr. Ryan Guinaran and Betty Lestino have formed ResearchMate Inc. to draw factual accounts of Igorot heroism for this generation of Cordillerans. ResearchMate has completed filming a reenactment of the liberation of Baguio and Benguet, using amateur actors, aged between 12 and 30 years old. The film focuses on war veterans from Ibaloi, Kankaney, and Mt. Province groups who stayed here to fight in spite of the fact that the Imperial Japanese Army had converted Camp John Hay into its Philippine headquarters during World War II. Many of the actors are great, great grandchildren of these veterans, who were teenagers when they fought the Japanese. Sections of the film are posted on YouTube on the web or are promoted enthusiastically by Cordilleran bloggers to overseas Igorots. Guinaran said he hoped to get the films distributed in schools, or even through the pirated DVD network to win a wider audience. He may follow the marketing strategy used by Raymund Red who toured the independently produced movie, “Sakay,” around the country alongside his actors. Heroism is an oft-quoted value that has lost its meaning to present generations, according to Listino, a former researcher of the Philippine Rice Institute. She said this has been working against the case for Igorot heroes, who were too far off the fringe of mainstream society to even win official recognition. The heirs of Carantes said it took Ibaloi families years of painstaking research to even get the National Historical Institute to acknowledge their great grandparents as legitimate Katipuneros. Carantes was a community leader who coordinated the Katipunan activities in the Cordillera during the 1896 Revolution. Notes compiled by the late Ibaloi historian Geoffrey Carantes indicated that Mateo Carantes may have helped hide Aguinaldo as he made his way through the Cordilleras to escape American troops. Members of the Cariño clan have obtained the most-detailed archival records about their great grandfather from the United States. Aside from Cariño’s revolutionary links, he was also credited with winning a landmark US Supreme Court case that recognized his right over lands that became Camp John Hay. The US military converted Cariño’s pastureland into a garrison. The Ibaloi protested America’s actions in a series of cases that culminated in 1909, the same year the summer capital was officially chartered.