Wednesday, August 15, 2007 The festival of festivals returns By Grace L. Plata
From being a festival of thanksgiving for Davao's harvest and culture to becoming a gigantic, "commercial" celebration and now back to its indigenous roots, one can say that the Kadayawan Festival has truly come full circle.
Standing the test of time and tumultuous circumstances, the celebration that in the recent years has been called the "Festival of Festivals", managed to survive and emerge renewed.
The harvest season was the time when the lumads not just harvested but thanked their gods.
Although it was already a ritual of thanksgiving of the lumads (indigenous people of Davao) for a bountiful harvest, the celebration was institutionalized in 1986 to unite the Dabawenyos after the turbulent Martial Law years.
It was then called "Apo Duwaling", a contraction of the famous icons of the city, namely Mt. Apo, Durian, and Waling-waling.
Two years later, it was renamed "Kadayawan sa Dabaw," coined from the Dabawenyo word "dayaw" that means good, valuable, superior or beautiful, to better reflect the merry spirit and indigenous theme of the celebration.
However, many have felt that the true purpose of the celebration was lost over time.
"In recent years, our Kadayawan celebrations have somewhat lost track of our indigenous beginnings and have turned commercial and too tourist-oriented in the hopes of becoming "global". In our eagerness to be pleasing to foreign and local tourists, we have created events that have marginalized and even offended our indigenous communities. By giving the festival a modern twist, we have contributed to the bastardization of our cherished cultural rituals and tradition," said Vice-Mayor Sara Z. Duterte, in a speech delivered for Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte during the opening of this year's Kadayawan sa Dabaw last August 8.
One of the biggest issues that rocked the Kadaywan celebration was last year's fiasco over the "Hiyas ng Kadayawan" pageant where male contestants were allowed to enter.
Thus, the City Government has reformatted the events for this year's celebration including that of restricting "Hiyas" candidates to the representatives of the eight majority tribal groups in the city - Ata, Ovu-Manobo, Maguindanao, Maranao, Tausug, Sama, Kalagan and Tagabawa.
"So, this year, we are going inward and celebrating our inner strength as a people. We are going back to our authentic self, which is rooted to our tirbal ancestry. The migrant settlers may have come from all over the Philippines and other parts of the world, but we all reap the harvest sown by our indigenous peoples who first cultivated and took care of this land we now all call our home," Vice-Mayor Sara Z. Duterte said.
According to her, that is the true essence of the Kadayawan Festival - the generous spirit of our indigenous people who embraced us and allowed us to partake of the bounty that is Davao.
So for the Kadayawan sa Dabaw 2007, Dabawenyos and visitors alike will be seeing a different celebration of Kadayawan as the city aims to restore the celebration to its basic and essential form -- the thanksgiving of the Davao tri-people for a bountiful harvest.
