“AN IGOROT in America” Dr. Henry, Jr. said the late Dr. Pit-og . That’s how he described himself. His sister Grace introduced us in Sagada, Mountain Province about five to six years ago. In the last column we talked about the lingua franca of the Cordillerans. Again by Cordillerans I mean the indigenous peoples of the Cordillera Administrative Region. The column concluded that to a certain extent, the adopted lingua franca of the Cordillerans left insignificant changes in the Cordilleran. English and Ilocano are the adopted lingua franca of the Cordillera. Insignificant here refers to the effects of these lingua franca to most Cordillerans.
Adopting Ilocano and English as second languages had too little effect on how the Cordilleran regards him/herself as a person or as a member of his/her the community. Ilocano and English as second languages have not changed the mentality nor the frame of mind of the Cordilleran. Frame of mind and mentality are part of a WORLD VIEW of a person and/or the community the person belongs to World view, as the word directly denotes is how one looks at regards and interacts with the world.
And the world can mean to the Cordilleran a lot of things. It can be the ancestral domain /territory or the physical world or even the globe. Many Cordillerans like the late Dr. Pit-og are part of the Cordillera communities found all over the globe.
Among traditional communities in the Cordillera the world view expands to mean the terrestrial (physical domain) and the spiritual domain. To a lot of anthropologists, the physical ancestral domain is the same with the spiritual domain. This is a deeper meaning of world view to the Cordilleran as indigenous person. It is a consciousness or awareness of what is and what is not that is unlike to most non-IPs. I believe many over-seas Cordillerans carry such deep meaning of their world view. So that trends of environmentalism and green economics in the foreign countries the Cordilleran reside in, are not new to those Cordillerans who understand the culture at home.
I heard of stories of how some Cordillerans in foreign countries that before their death, they decided with their families that their bodies or ashes be brought home to the ancestral domain. Dying in a foreign land yet deciding to be brought home in death is part a culture-a way of life. Culture is living one’s world view.