Gaddang people
The Gaddang are an officially-recognized indigenous people and a linguistically-identified ethnic group. For centuries, they have inhabited the Northern Luzon watershed of the Cagayan River and its tributaries, and maintained a distinct identity from their neighbors.
Gaddang speakers were recently reported to number as many as 30,000; that number does not include another 6,000 related Ga'dang speakers or any of several other small linguistic-groups whose vocabularies were determined to be more than 75% identical.
These proximate groups, mutually-intelligible but speaking with phonetically-varying accents, include the Gaddang, Ga'dang of Alfonso Lista and Tabuk, Baliwon of Paracelis, Cauayeno, Majukayang of Tabuk, Katalangan in San Mariano, Yogad around Echague. It is closely related to the speech of Malaweg in Rizal and Itawit of Tuao near the mouth of the Chico river.
These groups are depicted in current official literature and history as a single people. During the American period, cultural distinctions were asserted between Christian residents of the Isabela plains and Nueva Vizcaya valleys, and formerly non-Christian residents in the nearby Cordillera mountains. Some reporters have exaggerated one or more of those differences, while others may completely ignore or gloss them over.
The Gaddang are indigenous to a compact geographic area; the stage for their story is an area smaller than Metro Manila — about three-quarters of a million hectares. Distances between major population centers: Bayombong to Ilagan=120 km, Echague to Natonin=70 km. The living population collectively comprises less than one-twentieth of one percent of Philippines inhabitants, and shares their 0.25% of the nation's land with Ifugao, Ilokano and others.
As a people, Gaddang have no record of expansionism. They created no unique religion or overweening set of beliefs, nor have produced any notable government. Gaddang cultural-identity is determined by their language and to a lesser degree was shaped by the their location. However, they have historically implemented social mechanisms to incorporate as full members of their communities individuals born to linguistically-different peoples.
Physical geography
The Cagayan Valley is cut-off from the rest of Luzon by mile-high forested mountain ranges joined at Balete Pass near Baguio. The terraced Cordilleras close in from the west, the darker reaches of northern Sierra Madre arise in the east, meeting at the river sources in the Caraballo Mountains.Once covered in continuous rainforest, today the valley-floor is a patchwork of intensive agriculture and mid-size civic centers surrounded by hamlets and small villages. Even remote locations in the surrounding mountains now have permanent farm-establishments, all-weather roads, cell-phone towers, mines, and regular markets. Often, native forest-flora has vanished, and any uncultivated areas sprout invasive cogon or other weeds.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development in its 2012 study on Indigenous People's Issues in the Philippines identifies populations of Gaddang in Isabela, Nueva Ecija, Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, and Mountain Provinces.
A linguistic geography
The Cagayan Valley is physically divided from the rest of Luzon; Cagayan Valley cultures and languages are separated from other Luzon cultures and languages by social geography. The homelands of the Kapampangan and Pangasinan lie south of the mountains between the Cagayan and the enormous Tagalog-speaking population of Central Luzon. While a limited-number of Tagalog and Kapampangan speakers are reported to have used a written script prior to European contact, its use appears to have been restricted to poetry and brief notes rather than for record-keeping.In the Cordilleras and Caraballo mountains, there are diverse populations in Igorot/Ilongot-speaking communities. East of the main valley, Kasiguranin farmers and various "negrito" Aeta hunter-gatherers inhabit a few tiny settlements in the Sierra and along the seashore; many Ilongot peoples also live east of the valley, particularly Aurora.
From the 17th through the 19th centuries, many Ilokano left the crowded northwest coast to labor on Cagayan Valley plantations. Today, Ilokano-speakers in the Cagayan valley outnumber descendents of the original inhabitants by many times, and these Ilokano make up the majority of the residents of the northern area of Central Luzon.
Evidence is that the early Gaddang occupied this vast protected valley jointly with culturally-similar neighbors for many hundred years. The Gaddang language has similarities to those of the Itawes and Malaueg settled at the more distant mouths of the Matalag and Chico rivers, as well some correspondence to the tongues of the more numerous Ibanag and Isneg of the valley. Gaddang have, however, recently settled in north Aurora around Baler, and also have relocated to Central Luzon. Still, even among these half-million Cagayan Valley of indigenous-descent, Gaddang count as less than 10%.
Prior to use of a Filipino "national-language" or the official use of English dating from the early 1900s, 17th century Dominicans promulgated Ibanag as the sole and preferred medium for communication and education throughout the Valley. The Provincial Chapter of the Dominicans decreed in 1607: "Praecipientes ut omni studio et diligentia dent operam, ut linguam de Ibanag loquantur Yndi omnes, et in illa dictis indis ministrare studeant." In the area inhabited by Irraya-speakers this policy helped Ibanag to supersede the local languages.
But most Gaddang language-variants continued to remain vital and distinct from Ibanag, a situation which persists in the southern Cagayan and Magat valleys and foothills of the Cordillera. Decades of linguistic studies document considerable identity among the Gaddangic tongues, while revealing less intelligibility with Ibanag and Isneg.
Evolving an idea of a people
What is a people?
Early depictions of the northern Luzon Filipinos were written by conquerors to serve administrative, evangelical, or military purposes. Writers ignored scientific rules of evidence, and may be unreliable about conditions. There are no native reporters whose work survives. Consequently, descriptions from this period are an overlay imposed by foreign invaders on indigenous cultures. As such, they promote the interests of church, crown, and the business of the local governing apparatus, while failing to comprehend or accurately portray native concepts.In 1902, the US Commissioner for Non-Christian Tribes wrote:
We can therefore safely claim there was no "Gaddang people" prior to the Spanish incursion; merely inhabitants of evanescent forest hamlets having tenuous relationships to people in similar settlements. Customs and language might be shared with neighbors, or they might not — the Spanish visitors created whole peoples from such tiny gatherings. Nonetheless, there are people named long ago as Gaddang still residing in the same locales and using the same family names as were written down more than four hundred years ago.
The sources
In 1758, Dominicans in the Philippines were instructed by Royal Order to proselytize peacefully peacefully, rather than with the military-aided conquest of the first one hundred fifty years of the mission. In 1776, the order returned Fr. Francisco Antolin, O.P. to their Ituy mission in the valley where the Santa Fe and Marang rivers join to become the Magat. Antolin had spent his first two years in the Philippines at Ituy, then was called to the theology faculty at Manila's University of Santo Tomas. There, he pursued everything written about the Cordillerans and people of the Cagayan watershed from the university's collections of over a century and a half, but also those of the recently-closed Jesuit Universidad de San Ignacio;. After returning to the north with extensive notes, he began his own observations and, in 1789 published Noticias de los infieles igorrotes en lo interior de la Isla de Manila. This was translated into English by historian William Henry Scott in 1970, and provides information about Cordilleran Igorot peoples and their neighbors in present day Isabela and Nueva Vizcaya.At the end of the Spanish period, Fr. Julian Malumbres was writing his Historia de Nueva-Vizcaya y Provincia Montanõsa, carefully detailing the doings of the individual priests, administrators, and military persons throughout the several hundred years of the Spanish occupation. He is fairly vague about actions and customs of the native population.
American businessman Frederic H. Sawyer lived in Central Luzon beginning in 1886. He compiled The Inhabitants of the Philippines from his official, religious, and mercantile contacts during the final years of the Spanish administration. Published in 1900, The Inhabitants of the Philippines was intended to be a resource for incoming Americans. His descriptions, however, are secondhand, and meager. In his section titled Gaddanes we recognize the pagan residents of the highlands. The residents of Bayombong, Bambang, Dupax, and Aritao, however, are called Italones, while their like in Isabela are the Irayas and the Catalanganes. These terms appear on the military maps used by General Otis and his staff during the Philippine–American War.
In 1917, respected University of the Philippines ethnologist/anthropologist H. Otley Beyer reported 21,240 Christian Gaddang and 12,480 Pagan Gaddang. In this text, Beyer specifically notes that the Gaddang language "is divided into many dialects", and that all groups have a "marked intonation while speaking". He enumerated the Christian group as 16,240 Gaddang-speakers and 5,000 Yogad-speakers. Some Pagan Gaddang spoke Maddukayang/Majukayang – a group totalling 8,480 souls. There were also 2,000 whose language was Katalangan.
Fr. Godfrey Lambrecht, CICM, was the initial director of the Bayombong high school and college which have become St. Mary's University, and published several articles about the customs and traditions of the Gaddang. A 1959 article by Fr. Lambrecht is prefaced:
The 1960 Philippine Census reported 6,086 Gaddang in the province of Isabela, 1,907 in what was then Mountain Province, and 5,299 in Nueva Vizcaya. In the 1980s - using this data - Mary Christine Abriza wrote:
In April 2004, the National Statistics Office published a "Special Release" outlining results of the 2000 Census of Population and Housing in the Philippines. In those administrative regions with the largest concentrations of indigenous residents, Region II, Cagayan Valley IPs were 23.5% of all Region II residents, and the Cordillera Autonomous Region indigenous peoples comprised 11.9% of the total CAR population. Gaddang and Yogad were among the 83 groups identified as IPs.