'Kabilin dili gub-on'
By Antonio Montalvan II
Inquirer News Service

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BREEZING THROUGH BACLAYON, BOHOL, ONE couldn't help but notice these words in Binisaya (meaning "heritage is not meant to be destroyed"), on the walls of vintage houses of the town. When the Bohol circumferential highway was being widened, the vintage houses faced demolition, until Baclayon residents and Bohol's heritage-conscious civic inhabitants mounted a campaign to save the historic houses. In the end, government officials relented.

The heritage spirit of many Boholanos is something that is contagious. And this sense of theirs is not limited to the realm of history. Even the Loboc river is regularly cleared of flotsam, its only bane, the onset of the rainy season at which time the emerald waters turn into murky chocolate. Shunning the overcrowdedness and underdevelopment of Boracay, many tourism roads now lead to Bohol because of its unique combination of leisure, heritage and ecotourism.

But the Baclayon struggle only highlighted the irony that in this country, it is government itself that is too often the primary agent of heritage destruction. Many of our local leaders still operate on the proposition that heritage and development are antinomic poles. This is an archaic thinking that certainly has placed our country several leagues behind our progressive neighbors, such as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, where heritage buildings are preserved. Tour guides proudly point out that such buildings boost the tourism industry and economy with substantial capital and investments -- that is aside, of course, from giving their people a soul.

Several years after we have institutionalized culture and the arts in government, our heritage laws still do not have the teeth to protect whatever is left of our patrimony. Even a non-lawyer can easily see the loopholes in many of our heritage laws. Perhaps, that is one reason why our government culture bodies are generally passive when it comes to preserving our heritage. But the limitation can certainly be transcended. I am not aware if there is active lobbying, for instance, being done by these bodies to craft a heritage law that would firmly safeguard historical structures and, most importantly, supersede the inutile heritage laws we have.

At present, government culture bodies are not line agencies, hence, they do not extend their presence to the provinces. Hence, what we have is a Manila-centric heritage advocacy that too often does not have the wherewithal to be effective nationwide.

Take, for instance, the National Museum: until now it has no mandate for repatriation. In the United States, the repatriation of indigenous artifacts, including human skeletal remains, has long been a normative, which many Native American communities have availed themselves of. Although our National Museum initiated, in an unprecedented move a few years back, the repatriation of the Kabayan mummies of Benguet, it places a very low premium on empowering local peoples in organizing community-based museums, which is now the trend in many other places.
Advocacy is another matter. When local civic heritage organizations and private citizens filed a court case against Cagayan de Oro Mayor Vicente Emano to stop the sale of the pre-World War II city hall, nary a word of support was heard from the National Historical Institute. The passiveness and inaction are misconstrued in the provinces as an indication of the indifference of our national culture agencies to local sentiments and assertions. As a result, local heritage advocacies are seldom given support by the national agencies, whose focus remains very limited to what is going on in Manila and Luzon. We are still in the era of cultural elitism.

But there is an oblique kind of heritage destruction, which occurs when our national heritage bodies engage in politics, from which they and their work should be shielded. A recent news item, for instance, caught the attention of many Mindanao heritage advocates when the NHI officially installed a historical marker at the Macaraeg-Macapagal Ancestral House in Timoga, Iligan City. With many historical sites in Mindanao still unrecognized by the NHI, one wonders at the wisdom of selecting the ancestral house of a sitting president as a "heritage site," much more so when the same house was built only in 1950, a relatively recent year.

The NHI rites for the new heritage site was, in fact, presided over by President Macapagal-Arroyo herself. It was also she who unveiled the NHI steel marker declaring her family's ancestral home, as "the house that exemplified the architecture of the 1950s, not only reflecting the ingenuity and artistry of its builders but also a significant phase in the development of Philippine domestic architecture."

NHI Resolution No. 10 also states that the house and land on which the house stands have been donated to the city government of Iligan and that the house itself today serves as a museum for the Macapagal-Macaraeg family.
Selling our soul to politics is not only a form of destruction. It is also cultural violence. Now that our people are still asking where Garci is, it would seem that the NHI officials have turned political apologists as to the whereabouts of Virgilio Garcillano.

Perhaps, we should be asking them, where is Garci?

Comments to monta@cu-cdo.edu.ph

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