IGOROT

Introduction

Three or four days’ journey to the south and east of the Tinguian live the Igorot; but so difficult are the trails over the mountains and through the swift rivers that there is little intercourse between the two tribes, consequently each believes the other a people to be feared.  Salt, weapons, and jars are sometimes exchanged, but the customs and beliefs are not similar.  Each group leads its own life and is governed by its own spirits.

From a distance an Igorot village looks like a group of haystacks nestling among the hills; but viewed more closely, it is found to consist of houses whose board sides are almost hidden by the overhanging grass roofs.  The upper part of the house is used as a storehouse, while below, on a ground floor, the family cooks and eats.  In one end there is a tiny boxlike bedroom where the father, mother, and small children sleep.  After they are two or three years old the girls spend the night in a dormitory, while the boys sleep in the men’s council house.

These people have splendid terraced fields on the mountain sides where water is brought from the streams through troughs and ditches.  Here both men and women are busy early and late cultivating the rice, sweet potatoes, and small vegetables on which they live.  The men are head-hunters and ardent warriors, each village demanding a head in payment for any taken by a hostile village.

Watching over the Igorot, controlling the winds and the rains, and providing good crops and health for the people, is the Great Spirit, Lumawig, who lives in the sky.  He is believed to have created the Igorot and even to have lived among them on the earth.  He no longer visits them in person, they say, but each month they perform a ceremony at which they pray to him to protect them and entreat him to favor them with health and good crops.

The following tales are told by the fathers and mothers to the children to teach them how things came to be as they are.

The Creation

Igorot

In the beginning there were no people on the earth.  Lumawig, [93] the Great Spirit, came down from the sky and cut many reeds. [94] He divided these into pairs which he placed in different parts of the world, and then he said to them, “You must speak.”  Immediately the reeds became people, and in each place was a man and a woman who could talk, but the language of each couple differed from that of the others.

Then Lumawig commanded each man and woman to marry, which they did.  By and by there were many children, all speaking the same language as their parents.  These, in turn, married and had many children.  In this way there came to be many people on the earth.

Now Lumawig saw that there were several things which the people on the earth needed to use, so he set to work to supply them.  He created salt, and told the inhabitants of one place to boil it down and sell it to their neighbors.  But these people could not understand the directions of the Great Spirit, and the next time he visited them, they had not touched the salt.