>> Joshua Kueh: We have a
wonderful group of panelists
 today.
I'd like to extend a warm
welcome to Uyan Daay, 
Emily Lorenzo Catapang
and Louward Allen Zubiri
from the Mangyan Heritage
Center. I would also like to
welcome Patricia Okubo Afable,
a curatorial affiliate
of the Yale Peabody Museum of
Natural History, and Will
Hansen and AnalúMaría López
from the Newberry Library in
Chicago.
I will provide fuller
introductions to our speakers at
the start of your
presentations, but I just wanted
to welcome them at the
beginning of our program and
also say that I'm excited to
have the opportunity to be on a
panel with them.
All right, so since time is of
the essence, let's get started
with presentations.
To begin, we have three
speakers from the 
Mangyan Heritage
Center based on the island of
Mindoro in the Philippines.
Uyan Daay is in charge of
community based cultural
projects and activities at the
Mangyan Heritage Center.
Uyan is a Mangyan script 
master and culture bearer.
She was the assistant
researcher in a recently
completed Mangyan script
documentation project funded by
the Ambassador's Fund for
Cultural Preservation through
the United States Embassy in
the Philippines.
Emily Lorenzo Catapang has been
the Executive Director of the
Mangyan Heritage Center since
its founding in 2000.
She also acts as a librarian,
archivist of the Mangyan
Heritage Center Library, which
houses a comprehensive
collection of documents on
Mangyans. In 2005,
she received a fellowship for
visiting archivists at the
Rockefeller Archive Center in
New York.
While there, she gave lectures
on Mangyans at several
organizations and universities
and searched for Mangyan
documents and 
artifacts in libraries and
museums in the United States,
including the Library of
Congress.
She also gives lectures about
the Mangyans and educational
institutions and organizations
in the Philippines and abroad.
Our third panelist from the
Mangyan Heritage Center
is Louward Allen Zubiri, 
and he served as
the head researcher at the MHC
leading the script project
there.
He is currently pursuing a PhD
in linguistics at the University
of Hawaii at Manoa.
He recently earned his graduate
certificate in multilingual,
multicultural professional
practice from the same
institution. His research
focuses on the description,
documentation, revitalization
and acquisition of non-dominant
Philippine Austronesian
languages and scripts.
He is interested in how
language works and linguistic
endeavors are interconnected
with policymaking, education,
community development and
heritage awareness.
So I'll now pass the time to
Louward and Louward.
>> Louward Allen Zubiri:
Good morning to all viewers here
in the Philippines and hello to
all the other viewers from
other parts of the world.
It is an honor to be presenting
to you today an overview of the
Mangyan Heritage Center and its
archival collections.
This is the ethnolinguistic map
of Mindoro showing the eight
indigenous communities living
on the island collectively
called Mangyan. From north to
south, they are the 
Iraya, Alangan,
the Tadyawan, Tau-buid, 
Bangon, Buhid,
Hanunuo and Ratagnon.
These different indigenous
groups have their own distinct
languages and cultural
traditions.
Two of them, the Buhid and
Hanunuo Mangyans in Southern
Mindoro, have kept alive their
pre-colonial indic derived
alphasyllabaries which have
been declared as national
cultural treasures in 1997, and
inscribed in the memory of the
World Register of Unesco in
1998, together with the Palaw'an
and Tagbanua scripts of
neighboring Palaw'an Island.
The Buhid and Hanunuo minions 
were able
to keep alive their scripts
because they inscribed on
bamboos their poems 
called Ambahans.
This is why the Mangyan
Heritage Center was established
to primarily preserve and make
more accessible to researchers
the documents, written and
collected for more than 30 years
spent on [inaudible]. 
Representatives from
the different communities in
Oriental Mindoro were present
at Image's launch in 2000,
performing the traditional
dance and rituals
to drive away evil spirits.
These are the three men who
collaborated in setting up the
MHC to promote and keep alive
the rich cultural heritage of
the different indigenous groups
in Mindoro.
Father Ewal Dinter is a German
missionary priest to Mangyans.
The late Antoon Postma, a Dutch
anthropologist and missionary
who eventually married
Arnamagnaean and documented the
rich culture for more than 50
years until his death in 2016.
And Quint Delgado Fansler is a
Filipino American who 
was a Jesuit volunteer.
The MHC Research Library
builds upon the collections of
Antoon Postma for more than 30
years.
The collection includes 2000
plus documents, pieces,
journals, manuscripts, news
clippings dating back from 1577
to present, 20,000 plus
digitized Mangyan poetry and
songs Ambahan, Suyot and 
Urukay 10,000 plus digitized
photographs depicting 
Mangyan life and culture.
More than a dozen bamboo
collections from Mr. Antoon 
Postma and Dr. Masaru Miyamoto
and a copy of
over a dozen video documentaries
and footages on the Mangyans
produced and donated to MHC.
Postma's collections 
and other MHC
research and publications on the
Mangyans have all been digitized
by Postma's daughter, together
with other volunteers.
In 2014, through a memorandum
of agreement between the Hanunuo
and Peoples Organization in the
U.S. Library of Congress.
A copy of the 20,000 plus
digitized Hanunuo Mangyan, Bahan
[inaudible] was handed to
the representatives of the
Library of Congress in the
MHC Office for preservation
purposes. Reproduction and
publication will require prior
consent from the leaders of the
Hanunuo Peoples Organization.
Now, let me share with you some
photos of our priceless bamboo
collections with Mangyan
inscriptions
from Postma and Miyamoto.
This lime container
only six inches long with a
diameter of half an inch,
contains 16 different ambahans
with 159 lines and 1,113
characters.
You don't have to be a senior
to need a magnifying glass to
read the tiny inscriptions
etched on this bamboo 
tube with a sharp knife.
And this is another priceless
bamboo tube with inscription
etched by a left handed script
writer.
This would entail reading from
right to left. When a right
handed person inscribed the
same message on bamboo tube,
it would have been etched from
left to right.
So if you hold this tube in
front of a mirror, the mirror
image will allow you to read it
from left to right.
Because Mangyans inscribed
ambience or poetry on bamboos
growing along a path in the
woods, previous generations of
Mangyans will read from left to
right, right to left, up or
down and the reverse.
And these are traditional
bamboo containers called luka
for betel-chew ingredients.
The Mangyan elders used to
inscribe their poems on the
luka. And these are bamboo
tubes with Buhind inscriptions.
The poem you see is about a
farmer losing his field to a
lowlander. In 2017, Japanese
anthropologist Masaru Miyamoto
donated to the MHC eight bamboo
tubes with Mangya inscriptions.
These were gifts to him 
by Mangyan
friends while living in the
Mangyan community for several
months conducting research for
his post-graduate studies in
the 1980s.
This small bamboo container for
betel-chew ingredient only 2.5in
long with a diameter of 1.5in
contains 600 plus
finely inscribed characters.
We have yet to work with
Hanunuo elders to transliterate
[inaudible] inscribed
on Miyamoto's priceless
collections.
Another priceless bamboo from
Miyamoto,
this bamboo tube measures
10.7in long, has a diameter of
1.5in and contains 538
characters.
It was a gift to Miyamoto by
Alpog, a left-handed Hanunuo
Mangyan script master.
Another bamboo container for
betel-chew ingredients with left
handed inscriptions by Alpog. To
keep alive the Hanunuo
Mangyan scripts and ambahan 
to the younger generations,
the script and ambahan has been
taught in selected Hanunuo
Mangyan schools for several
years before the Covid-19
pandemic. This was implemented
in partnership with the
Department of Education, and we
are also looking for grants to
continue this program.
[inaudible] has a mobile exhibit
that is traveled since 2003 to
over 70 educational
institutions and museums
nationwide. With writing one's
name in Mangyan 
script on a popsicle
stick as a popular feature.
This fosters interest and
appreciation of 
Mangyan script as
an important written heritage of
the Filipinos kept alive by the
Mangyans of Mindoro.
[Inaudible] has also 
published books.
"Bamboo Whispers" contains 100
and ambahans in four languages,
the original Hanunuo Mangyan
language in Mangyan script with
translations by poets in
Filipino, English and Spanish,
accompanied by archival and
fine arts photographs depicting
Mangyan line. Published in 2017,
the following year it received
the Golden Boot Award for Arts
and Humanities and National
Book Award as Best translated
book. An earlier book on the
ambahan by [inaudible] is his
Filipino translation of the 261
ambahans in [inaudible].
[Inaudible] book and 
[inaudible] volume Mangyan
culture book are used as
resource materials in the
teaching of Mangyan script and
ambahan in Panamanian schools.
MHC also published updated
[inaudible] on the
Mangyan script for
use in teaching.
[Speaking Hanunuo]
>> Louward Allen Zubiri:
[Inaudible] everyone.
My name is Louward Zubiri and
I'll just add to what Emily and
Uyan has already shared. Talk
about the center's script
project. The project centered on
Surat Buhid Mangyan and
Surat Hanunuo Mangyan,
two of the four remaining
indigenous groups in the
Philippines. The scripts remain
in active use within Hanunuo
[inaudible] communities in
Mindoro, albeit with varying
levels of vitality among
different villages.
The scripts are
alphasyllabaries, which is a
type of writing system where
you have a default consonant
vowel shape and an inherent
vowel, and you add another
symbol to change the vowel.
The project was a response to
the request of within Hanunuo
communities to address the
endangerment of their scripts.
Children not knowing their
scripts.
It is a continuation of the
center's community based and
activity based initiatives
aimed at promoting the use of
the scripts in ambahan the
indigenous poetry of the
Mangyans. Through the years,
the center has implemented
initiatives aimed at promoting
and reinvigorating the practice
of ambahan, which is one of the
remaining domains of script
use.
The project involves a team
composed of members from the
Hanunuo and Buhind 
communities who
were recommended and vetted by
the communities and staff of
the center.
This multi-year project
consists of three main phases;
documentation, photography and
materials development and script
teaching. Designed as a
community based project, the
center collaborated with three
peoples organizations
representing Hanunuo and Buhid
in Mindoro.
People's Organizations are 
the indigenous political
structure in the island of
Mindoro. For the Hanunuo
communities in Oriental Mindoro,
Pinagkaisahan sa Hanununo
Daga Ginurang or PHADAG
is the key partner. For the
Hanunuo communities in Oriental
Mindoro, Samahan Hanunuo,
Gubatnon Ratagnon or HAGURA is
the key partner. For the Buhid
communities in Oriental
Mindoro,
Sadik Habanan Buhid or
SHB is a key partner.
In terms of the project's
scope,
the project spans the
southernmost region of Mindoro
Island, covering seven towns
across two provinces; Oriental
Mindoro and Occidental Mindoro,
and encompassing a total of 152
Sitios. 364 elders and
community leaders participated
in the documentation of their
script and in the development of
pedagogical materials.
34 of them were selected to
teach the script in their
communities, 904 students
benefited from the script
teaching program.
A total of 8000 copies of the
primers were distributed to 
the different communities.
Again, the project involved
three main phases documentation,
orthography and materials
development and script teaching.
In the interest of time, I will
just briefly mention some
highlights. For the
documentation phase,
we focus on identifying script
forms,
script use, transmission
pathways and centers of
learning. Script samples in the
form of inscribed luka or the
main outputs of the
documentation phase.
For the orthography and
materials development phase,
we focus on the development of
primers through a community led
participatory process.
You can read more about this
process in the book chapter
cited at the bottom 
part of the slide.
Primers for four script
variants are the main outputs of
this phase. For the script
teaching phase,
we conducted workshops for the
script masters and their
teaching assistants.
We also pilot tested the
materials and gathered feedback
from an initial 
group of students,
after which sitio-based
script instruction by elders
and teaching assistants
commenced. As a summary, this
community based multiyear
project involves script
documentation, photography and
materials development and
script teaching.
This stands as the most
extensive script project
undertaken in the Philippines
to date.
Together with Hanunuo and
Buhid Communities, the Center
planned to continue initiatives
and advocacies such as this.
As we commemorate the
International Decade of
Indigenous Languages, it is
crucial to reflect on the
execution and outcomes of
projects, initiatives and
endeavours in supporting
Indigenous communities.
The team would like to thank
and acknowledge the cultural
barriers and residents of the
139 Sitios in Oriental Mindoro
and the 13 Sitios in Occidental
Mindoro who shared their
culture, wisdom, life and
experiences and gave their time
and effort throughout the whole
endeavor.
We would also like to celebrate
the partnership between the
Mangyan Heritage Center and the
People's Organizations 
of Hanunuo
and Buhid. The project is
supported under documenting,
preserving Mangyan syllabic
scripts in the 21st century of
the Ambassadors Fund for
Cultural Preservation Program by
the Bureau of Educational and
Cultural affairs of the U.S.
Embassy in the Philippines.
[Speaking Hanunuo]
[Speaking Buhid]
[Speaking Tagalog]
And thank you.
>> Joshua Kueh: Well, thank
you very much, Louward
and also Uyan and Emily for
your presentations. To the
audience members, I'm sorry if
we've had a slight problem with
the audio there.
We tried to improvise as best
as we could and I hope you were
able to hear the wonderful
presentations.
So now I'd like to move on to
our next speaker, who is
Patricia Okubo Afable.
Doctor Afable is an
anthropologist whose primary
ethnographic and archival
research is on Philippine
Cordillera Peoples cultures and
histories.
Born in Baguio City, she
attended the University of the
Philippines and Yale
University.
Currently, she is a curatorial
affiliate at the Yale Peabody
Museum of Natural History,
where she is working on a Harold
Conklin archives.
So Patricia is going to speak
to us some about the Eric
Conklin archives. So, Patricia,
the floor is yours.
And I'll just start up your
slideshow in just a second.
>> Patricia Okubo Afable:
Good evening from Maryland.
I'm having problems,
unfortunately, with my printer,
so I'm going to have to read
from my screen.
And so I would like to
turn off my video and just have
you hear my voice for the
meantime.
Harold Conklin was a pivotal
figure in the anthropological
study of the environment and
language and culture.
His remarkable career as a
Philippine and Southeast Asian
specialist, a teacher and
professor at
Yale University and
Columbia University,
museum curator, field worker
and writer spanned most of seven
decades. So thank you for this
opportunity to focus on some
details about his life, his
work in Mindoro, and the
research collection that he
left behind as a way of
introducing his legacy to
Philippine studies.
Can I have the next slide?
Yes, you've got the next slide.
Sorry. No, I meant the slide
with Harold Conklin.
Harold Conklin first arrived in
the Philippines as a soldier in
the U.S. Army 
during World War II.
He was 19 years old and had
just completed his freshman year
at the University of California
in Berkeley.
He died in 2016, just a few
weeks short of his 90th
birthday. He deeded the bulk of
his research collection, mostly
a paper collection, and now
named after himself and his
wife, Jean Michael Conklin, to
the Yale Peabody Museum of
Natural History in New Haven,
Connecticut.
Most of the archive documents
his research first on Mindoro,
which was concentrated in the
late 1940s and the decade
following that in the 1950s and
secondly in Ifugao. The Ifugao
work started in 1960 and was an
organizationally much larger and
a totally different project
involving a totally different
agricultural system and a
different language.
The main contrast, which was an
ecological one, was between
swidden cultivation or shifting
cultivation in Mindoro and the
cultivation of rice in flooded
pond fields in Ifugao.
So the Ifugao archive at
the Peabody Museum is much
larger and it is the one that
was more recently documented.
It involved, of course, a lot
more photography, correspondence
and also audio visual
recordings that were not easily
available in the 1950s.
I will also briefly mention
here that there's a small part
of the archive at Yale that
covers the period mostly in
Conklin's teenage years and his
first year at Berkeley when he
was intensely interested in
Native American culture and
languages, particularly
Iroquoian languages of upstate
New York and Canada.
There's a...
There was a lively
correspondence from this period
before World War
II and then later, when he
stopped traveling to Ifugao so
often he renewed his ties with
his old friends and
correspondents
mainly in upstate New York.
Also in his freshman year at
Berkeley, Conklin learned Malay
from a Javanese man who was
employed at the dormitory
cafeteria where Conklin worked.
During this period, his name was
Mohamed Osman.
He taught him Gundul or Jawi,
the Arabic script that was
modified from Malay.
And so this meant that
Conklin's introduction to
Austronesian languages in the
Philippines and their scripts
was a fairly seamless one.
The other part of what's called
the Conklin Collection for
Mindoro at the Peabody Museum
is one of Hanunuo material
culture. This consists of 900
objects primarily collected in
the 1940s and 1950s.
In this collection, there are 70
bamboo sections either laths or
bamboo internodes, which are
inscribed with Hanunuo writing.
In his earlier writings, these
were called bamboo manuscripts.
They were obtained primarily
from people in Yagüe in
Terubong, where he lived near
the families of [inaudible]
between 1947 and 1954.
There is also a collection of
inscriptions, including some
obtained in Buhid areas and
in Tagbanua areas of Palawan,
which have not been accessioned
and cataloged and are presently
part of the archive rather than
the material culture
collections.
In his work on Mindoro, Conklin
used the ethnic name Hanunuo
rather than Mangyan.
He said that in the 1940s, the
people he met in Oriental
Mindoro rejected the term
Mangyan because it was a
demeaning term, a deprecatory
term used by outsiders.
The term Mangyan therefore
joins similar ethnic labels in
the Philippines, such as
Igorot, Tingguian, Kalinga,
Lumad, Moro and others that
have had long histories of
controversial use, primarily in
the contexts of upland-lowland
relations and or the history of
conversion to Christianity.
The next slide, please.
This is one of the few
photographs of Conklin in the
field in the 1950s.
The caption was one that he had
written himself.
It shows his primary assistant,
Badu'
also called Badu' Ihuy who when
Conklin returned to Mindoro to
do dissertation research in the
1950s.
Conklin is holding a larger
piece of bamboo with an
inscription and Badu' is making 
a copy of it onto a shorter
version. I mean a shorter
section of bamboo.
The objects involved, including
the knife used to make the
inscription, are now part of
the Yale collections.
And the next slide, please.
For this slide, I will speak
primarily from notes for an oral
history that I tried to compile
about ten years ago from about
the beginnings of Conklin's
research in the Philippines.
Most of the materials I
mentioned here, including field
notes, journals and
correspondence, are now on
storage, in storage on pallets
at the Yale Peabody Museum,
which has been closed for the
past few years.
It's slated to open in 2024,
and my hope is that materials in
storage will be available
for research soon after that.
So very soon after his arrival
in the Philippines in 1945,
Conklin met the scholars who
introduced him to the research
resources in the ruins of
Manila right after the Second
World War.
Professor Otley Beyer, who had
founded the University of the
Philippines Department of
Anthropology and ran the
Anthropology Museum, offered
him workspace in the museum and
the use of what was left of the
library.
Robert Fox, the 
archaeologist and his
student of Tagbanua Society,
accompanied Conklin on many
field trips during those early
years, as they were both members
of the U.S. Army and had the use
of army vehicles.
This included the very first
trip to Mindoro where they met
Luyun, Bardo's brother
for the first time. On this
trip, Conklin recorded his first
encounter with someone writing
with a left hand in a mirror
script that Emily describes
earlier.
Luyun's work with Conkling
during that period,
mainly in 1947, was intensive
and all absorbing for both of
them. There's one quote that I
recorded that encapsulates this.
In the entry in Conference
Journal for May 1947,
Conklin writes, "In the evening,
Luyun and I finished six
pages of my synoptic sentence
lists which were mimeographed."
Mimeographed sheets, if you
remember that term, from the
1950s. He's an extraordinary
informant, taking great interest
in accuracy, etcetera.
He has, in fact, completely
abandoned the thought of working
in his canons in his swiddens
despite this being the planting
season. Instead, he will hire
others to work his fields after
others have planted.
In 1947, Conklin made a trip to
Manila with Luyun to record his
speech and music at the U.S.
Embassy where there were
adequate recording facilities.
I have wondered if these
records, in fact are part of the
Library of Congress Folklife
Archive.
There are apparently
photographs of this journey in
Manila, primarily in the H.
Otley Beyer Archive.
It was Professor Beyer,
actually, they say.
Beyer In the Philippines, it
was Professor Beyer who told
Conklin about Fletcher
Gardner's sojourn as a surgeon
in Bulalacao earlier in
the 20th century.
It was he who encouraged
Conklin to contact
Fletcher Gardner as well
as the Malewana family.
Another helpful link for that
period was that the Mindoro
Governor Ignacio in the early
1950s had been a student of
Otley Beyer at the U.P. and it
was the Governor Ignacio, who
introduced Conklin to the
Maliwanag brothers.
The other important official in
Mindoro at the time whom Conklin
had to deal with was the local
official of the Bureau of
non-Christian Tribes.
That was the government agency.
That was what the government
agency was called for
the non-Christian tribes, the
non-Christians of the
Philippines, firstly.
His name was Manuel Craig, a
World War II guerrilla leader
and founder of Mangyan schools.
He lived in San Teodoro and in
fact brought Conklin to Saclag
to the Mangyan School there.
Conklin began learning Tagalog,
of course, upon his arrival in
the Philippines and the most
important Tagalog scholar he was
to meet was Guillermo
Tolentino, the sculptor and
writer and later Philippine
national artist who introduced
him to the old Tagalog script.
The Tolentino family basically
adopted this young soldier and
taught him the Bulacan Tagalog.
It was called Old High Tagalog
by Conkling's friends that
he frequently spoke ungtil the
end of his life.
Basically, he spoke Tagalog to
every Tagalog speaker whom he
met. Guillermo Tolentino,
incidentally, is responsible for
the collection of samples of
old Tagalog script that are in
the Musée de l'Homme now, the
Chirac Museum in Paris from the
1930s. Conklin traveled to Paris
after World War II to study
this collection.
While Conklin was certainly
attracted to the script that he
found being written and used in
Terubong, his main interest was
not literary analysis of the
productions as much as in their
cultural significance and their
functions in carrying messages
and sharing information.
He [inaudible] part
of his dissertation to the
analysis of Ambahan and
[inaudible]
that make references to
the plant world and to 
cultivation, plant cultivation
In the collections, there is one
striking photograph in which a
man is reading a notice on a
bamboo section planted in a
field to inform people that the
field is being prepared to be
burned. It was a detour notice
as it turned out. Swiddens are
not easy to photograph, as many
of you know, but the photo
collections from a later visit
when colour film was available
contain spectacular photographs
of Swiddens being fired to
clear them.
As Conklin began to acquire more
of the language, he realized
that knowledge about plants and
their roles in subsistence, in
medicine and ritual were
primarily what his Hanunuo
teachers wanted to talk about.
So he began to focus more on
agricultural, technological and
environmental knowledge among
the Hanunuo. So when he
returned to Mindoro to work with
Badu' in the early 1950s,
Conklin's notes and
correspondence emphasized his
interactions with plant
scientists at the Philippine
National Museum, like 
E.D. Merrill, H.H. Bartlett,
who also had written
about Sumatran scripts, and
Eduardo Quisumbing, the
botanists who were building the
National Museum's
collections and the Herbarium
after World War II.
So at this time in the late
1940s, Conklin began his
collecting for the Philippine
National Museum and his largest
collections of plants and also
of Hanunuo material culture
were the first big accessions
to the National Museum after the
destruction of the war.
And I'd like to turn to...
the next slide, please.
This is just a summary of the
kinds of...
archival and museum
collections that were
made from Mindoro.
The recordings, which began in
the late 1940s, including speech
performances, rituals, music,
went to the Library of Congress.
The material and botanical
collections went to the National
Museum, to the American Museum
of Natural History, where there
is also a collection of
scripts
incidentally. The University of
California in Berkeley,
whose site I just checked
recently, assessed that there
are several hundred examples of
Mindoro script.
Also, the International Rice
Research Institute, mostly of
rice samples, and more
recently, I have found out that
there is also a collection of
Buhid scripts at Princeton
University Library, which
nobody still seems to know
about. Then, of course,
there are the collections
at Yale University and Yale
Peabody Museum has the bulk of
the research notes,
some correspondents,
and, of course,
the documents, the professional
documents such as course
outlines, drafts and manuscripts
as well as publications.
Conklin was also a great letter
writer and his correspondence
from the late 1930,
he had started writing
letters to anthropologists by
1939 until the early
2000s.
Most of this is in the Yale
library.
And so his correspondence,
for example, with Antoon Postma
is primarily in the Yale
Library.
He has correspondence with
Peace Corps volunteers who had
worked in Mindoro.
But most of those are part of
the archive and not part of the
Yale Library Collections.
The large number of
photographs, which includes
slides, negatives, prints and
also some digital files, are
part of the Peabody Museum, the
Yale Peabody Museum.
The conference Philippine
Studies Library primarily went
to Berkeley, his alma mater,
and some of it also some of
the duplicates went to Silliman
University.
Finally, in the last slide,
I give a summary of the main...
archival and museum
repositories which are
listed here. They overlap with
the information on 
the previous slide.
But I just want to say
something about the Mindoro
collection particularly. As I
said earlier,
there are some 900 objects in
the material culture collection,
which includes the bamboo
sections, the bamboo
inscriptions, and
my estimate at this time is
that there are between 50 to 20
banker's boxes, which would be
equivalent to 15 to 20 linear
feet, field notes,
correspondence and illustrations
by Yagüe residents, course
notes and drafts of publication
pertaining to Mindoro alone. Now
in the Yale Peabody Museum and
the illustrations, there are
about two linear feet of
illustrations on letter sized
paper, most of them by Badu'
and most of them are of plants.
And these illustrations
were annotated by Badu' in
the Hanunuo script.
So these are... all of this
is still to be unpacked and
something that I'm hoping will
happen in the next year and
a half, I think.
Yes, so thank you.
That's the end of my
presentation.
>> Joshua Kueh: Well, 
thank you so much, Patricia, for
that insightful and informative
presentation. And so now we'll
move on to our next two
presenters who are from the
Newberry Library.
We have Will Hansen, who is the
Roger and Julie Bass, Vice
President for Collections and
Library services and curator of
Americana at the Newberry
Library.
Mr. Hansen holds a master's
degree in library and
information science from the
University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign. He began his career
in libraries at the Newberry in
2003 as a circulation
assistant then, in 2004 as a
library's reference system.
After serving as assistant
curator of collections at Duke
University's David M. Rubenstein
Rare book and Manuscript Library
from 2007 to May 2014, he
returned to the Newberry in
2014. Mr. Hansen has 
published articles
on Herman Melville Active
Learning with Primary Source
Materials, Archives of Born
Digital Materials and other
topics.
He has lent hundreds of hands
on instructional sessions with
rare books and other primary
sources, as well as teaching
adult education seminars at the
Newberry on a variety of
American literature and history
topics.
His curated exhibitions at the
Newberry include "Hamilton: The
History Behind a Musical" in
2017, "Melville: Finding America
at Sea" in 2019 and "¡Viva la 
Libertad! Latin America and the
Age of Revolutions" in 2021.
Other speaker from the Newberry
Library is AnalúMaría López who
is the Ayer Librarian 
and Assistant
Curator of American Indian and
Indigenous Studies at the
Newberry Library.
She helped steward the
Indigenous Studies collection
while guiding library users
through connecting them with and
interpreting materials linked
to it.
Her interests include
historically underrepresented
Indigenous narratives, the
preservation, revitalization and
teaching of Indigenous
languages, decolonial theory in
libraries and museums, and
building relational community
collaborations for access to
resources within colonial
institutions. She holds a
master of library and
information sciences with a
certificate in archives and
cultural heritage resources and
services from Dominican
University. Ms. Lopez began 
her career with
the Newbery in 2004.
After working for other
libraries and museums in Chicago
for 13 years, Ms. Lopez returned
to the Newbery
in her current role in September
2017. I'll now turn the mic
over to Will and Analú.
>> AnalúMaría López:
So thank you, Joshua,
for that
lovely introduction.
So first, I wanted to start off
with a huge thank you to the
organizers, Library of Congress.
You know, Joshua, for the
invitation for us to speak with
you all today. And also just,
you know, thank you to all the
panelists and everyone else
that's joining from around the
world on the panel today.
So next slide.
So Will and I are talking... are
speaking to you from
[inaudible] or so-called
Chicago.
Indigenous peoples have been
stewards and continue to be
stewards and protectors of the
lands we now call the Americas
and Chicago since time
immemorial.
In the history of these lands,
settlers and settler
colonial states have only
occupied the space for 
less than 500 years.
So I encourage you all to
support native and indigenous
communities, groups,
organizations, initiatives, be
it back home where you're from,
or here in Chicago.
Next slide. And here you're
just seeing the Newberry's land
acknowledgment that we did here.
Since Joshua gave such a great
introduction for us already,
I'm not going to spend too much
time on this slide.
But as Joshua said, you know,
we're talking to you from the
Newberry Library here in
Chicago.
I'm Huachichil my family is part
of the indigenous diaspora here
in Chicago. We are from the 
[inaudoble] state of San Luis
Potosi in [inaudible] Mexico, 
Latin America.
I have been at the Newberry
since 2017 and my current role,
I work as a librarian and
curator, assistant curator.
I am going to pass it over
to my colleague Will now
 for his introduction.
>> Will Hansen:
Yes. Hello, everyone.
I am also speaking to you from
Chicago and hopefully it will
let me continue to...
There we go, continue to
advance the slides.
You don't need all of my bio,
but here's more of most of what
Joshua said. The other
important thing to say is that I
am not an expert in Mangyan
materials or in Mindoro.
We're going to share what we
can about what the Newberry has
related to these collections.
But unlike many of our
distinguished colleagues on the
panel today, I do not have
expertise in this script, the
language or the peoples of
Mindoro.
In general, for context, the
Newberry Library is an
independent research library in
Chicago.
It was founded in 1887 by a
bequest from this man that
you're seeing here, Walter
Newberry, who was an early white
settler in Chicago who died in
1868.
It was founded as and continues
to be an independent research
library. So we are free of use,
free to use and open to the
public. But we are not a public
library.
We're a 501C3 non-profit
organization.
However, anyone over 14 years
old or in the 
ninth grade in U.S.
schools is welcome to register
and conduct research
in our reading rooms, we
welcome visitors from anywhere
in the world. We also welcome
visitors of any age and any
research background to contact
us and ask any sort of reference
questions that you might have
and we are happy to tackle all
of those questions that we can.
So you are welcome to use us as
a resource.
The library has focused on
facilitating research in the
humanities disciplines, so
things like history, language,
literature, music, art,
religion since the 1890s and has
always had a non-circulating
collection with a focus on rare,
unique and hard to find primary
sources such as rare books and
manuscript collections.
The Indigenous Studies
collection is one of 11
collection areas at the
library, one core core, one of
11 core collection interests at
the library, and one of the
research areas for which the
Newberry collections are best
known. So like I said, we work
with people from all over the
world, we work with students,
we work with people doing
genealogy research and local
history research,
we work with community groups.
We welcome visitors often from
the Philippines and from the
Filipino-American community
here in the States.
In short, we work with anyone
with a research interest related
to our collections.
This gives you a little context
for the collection overall.
We are certainly nothing the
size of the Library of Congress,
but we have something like 1.5
million books.
We have many manuscript
collections.
We have an amazing map
collection.
We have incredible collections
in the areas that you're seeing
here. And we have a great
collection, one of the best
collections in the country
related to the history and
culture of the Philippines,
especially the colonial era in
the Philippines.
You can see American Indian and
Indigenous Studies is one of the
core collection areas that
we're best known for.
And I will turn it over to
Analú to say a little 
more about that.
>> AnalúMaría López:
So thank you. So the Indigenous
studies collection at the
Newberry was founded by a gift
from Edward E. Ayer
from Edward E. Ayer's 
library in 1911.
Ayer was an American
businessman and one of the most
prominent book and manuscript
collectors of his time.
Now, although Ayer's remembered
and honored as a generous
benefactor to places like the
Newberry, the Field Museum and
other Chicago institutions like
the Art Institute of Chicago, it
would be wrong to disregard the
complicated history of white
individuals and organizations
collecting materials related to
indigenous peoples. So, as 
[inaudible] best wrote it,
once Ayer's wealth and power
were built upon his business
interests, which were part of
the devastating process that
separated Native American and
indigenous people from their
land, culture and history.
So now when Ayer donated the
collection,
he also left an endowment and
we're still adding actively to
the collection. But for the
last decade, we've been
prioritizing the perspectives
of native peoples.
The collection is extensive,
encompassing material relevant
to indigenous peoples, history
and culture of the Americas,
really from pole to pole, coast
to coast.
It begins in the 15th century
to present.
Next slide. So to complement
his extensive collection of
Spanish and American Indian
language manuscripts documenting
the early contacts of Europeans
with Native peoples of the
Americas, Edward E. Ayer began
buying materials related to the
Philippines and Hawaiian
Islands in 1898.
So Ayer's decision in
collecting Philippine and
Hawaiian materials is closely
tied to American imperialism.
During this time in
1890 days when the
Spanish-American War ended,
so that really marked Ayer's
continued interest in acquiring
and expanding the Philippine
materials within his collection.
So likewise for the Hawaiian
Islands,
you know, America's illegal
annexation of Hawaii in 1898
extended U.S. territory into the
Pacific and sparked Ayer's
continued interest in seeing
what he could collect from
Hawaii. The collection has an
abundance of materials regarding
the history of native peoples
under the jurisdiction of the
United States in the Philippine
Islands and Hawaii.
Initially, the core of the
collection of Philippine
materials consisted of items
previously owned by the Compania
General de Tabacos in their
Barcelona library, which Ayer
obtained through the efforts of
a Madrid bookseller called Pedro
Vindel. Although purchases and
gifts over the years have
substantially expanded the
holdings since that initial
purchase. The Newberry's
Philippine Collection provides
materials related to Philippine
and American history, the late
Spanish period in the
Philippines, Filipino
nationalism and revolution,
Philippine-American War and U.S.
government relations,
Philippine linguistics and
finally travel, literature and
maps of the islands.
Also included are five volumes
of documents from 1578 to 1792
on Philippine history and
politics, transcribed by Ventura
Del Arco in the Real
Academia de la Historia in
Madrid between 1859 and 1865.
So what you're seeing on
these slides left to right are
the Damian Domingo collection,
the trajes in Manila.
You know, as most of you
might know already, Domingo was
the first eminent Filipino
painter.
Next to this one is one of the
first maps printed in the
Philippines from 1734
titled "Carta hydrographica y
chorographica de las yslas
 Filipinas" printed by Jesuit
priest, Pedro Murillo Velarde,
which were engraved and printed
by Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay,
who was Tagalog.
And finally we have a letter
written by Jose Rizal to Abe
Meyer on December 6th, 1888.
And again, this is just really
like just one... a few of many
other materials that Newberry
has related to the Philippines,
but also Rizal in general.
So I'll just pass it over back
to my colleague, Will.
>> Will Hansen:
Okay. So to give you just a
brief overview of the 
Mangyan materials
at the Newberry, there
are more than what is here, but
we sort of focused on the
early material and the rare
material in the collection.
So there is a
collection of bamboo rolls and
fragments. There are also sort
of rare compilations of texts
put together by Fletcher
Gardner.
More about him in just a
second.
And then there is also a
collection of photographs which
includes part of a much larger
collection of ethnographic
photographs, mostly
ethnographic photographs of the
peoples of the Philippines
collected by the U.S official
Dean Worcester. These
photographs include, as you can
see here, about 250 images of
Mangyan peoples from the 1890s
into the first decade of the
20th century.
So where do these things come
from?
The Mangyan materials were
acquired from Fletcher Gardner.
We have a pretty thorough chain
of provenance here.
Gardner as you already heard a
little bit about, was an
American physician, a major in
the U.S. Army and...
a person who published several
books on the indigenous people
of the Philippines. He was
stationed in Mindoro at that time.
Edward Ayer acquired them
through the mediation of
Dean Worcester from Gardner.
And I'll show a little bit of
that correspondence in a second.
Ayer and the Newbery were
particularly interested in the
indigenous languages of the
Philippines and of the world, so
most of the items that Ayer
sought to acquire were focused
on alphabet, script, 
genres of text.
And you can see a little bit
about where the photographs were
collected from here as well.
Just a little bit more context.
So this is one of the letters
initiating this exchange.
So what this is saying is this
is a letter to Fletcher Gardner
from Dean Worcester, 
where he is saying
Mr. Edward E. Ayer of Chicago, 
who has the finest library on
Philippine subjects in the
United States, is visiting
General Corbin and is about to
leave on a short trip to the
Southern Islands.
This morning I showed him a
Mangyan manuscript on half a joint
of bamboo. He was anxious to
secure a series of such
manuscripts for his collection.
He has given me $50 to be
extended to this end.
And that he is sending Gardner
half of this in cash and half of
it to be expended in cloth
beads et cetera
to pay the sources of the
material itself.
And asking about what kinds of
material he should
look for saying that these
could take the form of letters,
songs, folklore or any other
form which you may deem
desirable. One other letter
from Gardner back to Worcester
saying in January of 1905, I
have some of the material I need
to make other trips into the
mountains to collect more.
And then reporting in February
of 1905, I have everything here.
I am sending all of the
material to you along with
transliterations and Tagalog
and English translations to send
to Mr. Ayer. So this is where
the material here came from.
As far as the bamboo material
that is here, you're seeing a
couple of images of it here.
There are 26 bamboo rolls and
pieces in the collection overall
here. About half of these
contain Mangyan material and the
other half contain Tagbanua
material.
The 13 bamboo pieces
focused on the Hanunoo language,
Mangyan language include a
variety of material, mostly
songs, but also interestingly,
on the right side of the screen
here you are seeing what is
identified as a letter.
Most of the transliterations
have, or excuse me, most of the
pieces have transliterations
and English and Tagalog
translations pasted on the
back, and some of these also
give attribution to specific
individuals.
We actually don't have an image
of one of those here.
This just says,
collected by Fletcher Gardner,
but some of them identify
[inaudible],
among other people who were the
sources of the material.
The piece on the right is a
letter in Mangyann written to
Cabezon Subong in Saint Louis,
Missouri, by Cabezon Sikadan in
Bulalacao. So this seems likely
to be one of the letters sent
during the World's Fair in
Saint Louis in 1904, the
notorious World's Fair in Saint
Louis in 1904, and possibly
given by Worcester to Ayer from
that event.
But that is one of the more
interesting items in the
collection here. I will pass it 
back to Analú.
>> AnalúMaría López:
And just to show you
in the next few slides, a couple
other items that we have that
are part of the collections here
at the Newberry.
What you're seeing here is a
compilation from 1905 done by
Fletcher Gardner of texts of
Mangyan songs translated into
Tagalog and English.
And what you're seeing in the
middle image is where Gardner
begins the introduction to the
Hanunuo Mangyan people and then
brief notes. You know, he talks
about goes into depth about the
writing, the alphabet, its
pronunciation and Mangyan
songs. He also includes lyrics
for 14 Mangyan engagement songs
and in the form known 
in Tagalog as the [inaudible]
and please correct me if I'm
mispronouncing that at all.
The first in Tagalog is
translated by three native
Mangyans and then followed
what you see
throughout the text are
Gardner's translations from
Tagalog into English.
Next slide, please. And then
here you're seeing another set
of Hanunoo Mangyan 
songs with translations
in Tagalog and English included,
also done by Fletcher Gardner
in 1905 as well.
So these are typewritten.
It's a typewritten copy of the
Hanunoo Mangyan songs created of
Fletcher and then you have the
translations again, Tagalog and
English, most are also of the
same theme.
However, there are also seem to
be ones that are on the rolls
that the bamboo rolls that
we'll just talk about in the
previous slides as well.
Next slide, please.
And then finally, we also have
this rare printed item from 1805
in German, edited by [inaudible]
who you'll remember we mentioned
briefly in the beginning the
letter that Jose Rizal wrote to
Meyer. Gardner later...
It's interesting, Gardner
comments on this item later in a
1939 article saying, "The
writing studied by [inaudible]
in this printed text 
in Berlin in 1895,
contain a number of examples of
inscriptions which are
transliterated.
But there are only three
attempts at translation, all of
them by an indirect approach
through Tagalog."
That method is
extremely unsatisfactory, as
personal experience has shown,
is what Gardner comments on in
this 1939 article.
Next slide, please.
And then finally, we're just
ending with related materials,
as Will mentioned in the
beginning, Ayer also acquired a
collection of ethnographic,
mostly ethnographic
photographs of the peoples of
the Philippines done from the
Worcester. We have associated
letters between Worcester and
Ayer when the photographs were
coming into the collection.
As Will mentioned, the
photographs include many images
among young peoples as well,
mostly again in ethnographic
style, for example, mostly
frontal side and some
environmental views.
We did create an online 
finding aid in 2019.
Previously it was kind of a
challenge to not necessarily
access but to navigate the
access to these
photographs. So you had to
check out an index and then copy
the number of the index to the
photograph to manually
input it into our online
system.
So now it makes it a little bit
easier for researchers who are
interested in requesting these
materials and seeing them in our
reading rooms. And then as of
this year, we just embarked on a
digitization project in
collaboration with the
University of Michigan, with
Dr. Ricky Punzalan
of the University of Michigan.
So that is just in the works.
Currently, we're hoping to 
digitize the entire [inaudible]
collection of photographs. And
then other resources at the
bottom that we can share at a
later time are the Philippine
research guide. These are all...
this is available online.
It'll just give you an overview
of a lot of the stuff that we
talked about today.
That's it. Thank you.
>> Joshua Kueh:
Well, thank you very much,
Analú and thank you very
much, Will, for that overview
of material at the Newberry
Library. So I'm going to now
speak very quickly about Mangyan
holdings at the Library of
Congress.
And I'll abbreviate it so
that we have some time for
questions. So just give me a
second and I'll share my
presentation and hope you can
all see it.
So the Library of Congress
holds several collections with
Mangyan and items, and these
items range from bamboo
cylinders and slats inscribed
with prose and verse in the
Hanunuo Mangyan script to
sound recordings of Mangyan
poetry. Today, I'll focus on one
of these collections, the Mangyan
and bamboo collection from
Mindoro Philippines, and then
I'll list a few significant
collections of Mangyan items
at the library to highlight
other opportunities for
research. So the library's
Mangyan Bamboo collection from
Mindoro is held at the Asian
Division.
And for the public, you could
access that through the Asian
Reading Room. And this
collection is made up of three
groupings of items.
We have...
bamboo items, first of all.
So the bamboo slats and
cylinders that I mentioned.
Then we have transliterations
and translations of those items
sent to the library by Fletcher
Gardner.
And thirdly, we have a
published volume of the title
Indic Writings of the 
Mindoro-Palawan Axis.
Next, I'll just give you an 
overview of the bamboo items.
There are 77 of them in total,
71 bamboo slats and six tubes
inscribed with Hanunuo 
Mangyan script.
And these are divided into
three sets.
Set one consists of 22 items
that are inverse written by the
author, Kabal. And then we have
one item item A1, which is the
oldest item in the collection,
and it's written by Sikadan who,
according to donor, was a Chief
of Pokanin and Pangalkagan
and it's a complaint of
slander.
Set 2 is made up of 48
items
and these are in prose and
written by Luyon, whom Patricia
has already mentioned.
And the writings in this set
cover topics ranging from life
under Spanish occupation of the
Philippines to agriculture,
education and different stages
of life.
Set 3 consists of six items
written by the author Balik, and
these are in Mangyan script
with Latin transliterations
between the lines.
Some topics covered a marriage,
death and burial.
Transliterations and
translations of bamboo items.
The other things that we have
in the collection, we have
transliterations of set 2,
and
these are handwritten
transliterations of Leon's works
as well as typed
transliterations of Luyon's
writings. We also have
handwritten English translations
of Luyon's writings, and we have
typed English translations of
what are possibly the six
bamboo cylinders and an English
translation for item A1.
And there are three volumes of
Indic writings of the 
Mindoro-Palawan Axis.
The first two volumes written
by Gardner and his co-author
Ildefonso Malewana, and it
contain transliterations and
translations of all the items
in the library's Mangyan and
bamboo collection, except for
one item, item A 1 and
mentioned by Sikadan.
And these volumes also cover
collections at the
 Ayer collection of
the Newberry Library.
And the third volume is Mangyan
vocabulary and grammar by
Fletcher Gardner.
I'll move on now to the
provenance. There you see a
photograph which Patricia
kindly pointed me to, and you
can see Fletcher Gardner on the
right there in the photo.
So most of what we know about
the provenance of the library's
Mangyan bamboo collection
comes from the bamboo items
themselves, the accompanying
documents that I showed you just
now and an article Gardner
published in 1939 in the Journal
of the American Oriental
Society, and most importantly,
the three volume publication
Indic writings.
From these sources, we learn
that the collection stemmed from
Gardner's long standing
interest in Mangyan culture and
language, as well as Indic
derived scripts on the
Philippines. Gardner's
engagement with Mangyan writing
had begun at least by 1904.
Will has already mentioned that
he was a contract surgeon at a
U.S. military detachment in
Mindoro, and we know he had
started collecting Mangyan
inscriptions at this time and he
put together a short vocabulary
of Mangyan.
According to the Dutch
anthropologist Antoon Postma,
Gardner was also instrumental
in attracting and recommending
five Mangyan men for the
infamous Saint Louis World's
Fair of 1904.
Several decades later, in 1938,
Gardner started a project to
study the Indic derived scripts
of the Philippines, particularly
those of the islands of Mindoro
and Palawan.
And he also began to study the
Ayer collection at the Newberry
through an interlibrary loan at
the Witte Museum in San Antonio,
Texas, where Gardner was based.
And six months later, Gardner
managed to contact
in Ildefonso Maliwanag, whom he
had met a belief in Mindoro
during his time in Noro.
Ildefonso Maliwanag lived in
Mansalay and within reach of
several Mangyan communities, and
he and his brother Eusebio
Maliwanag, were responsible for
assembling all the items in the
collection except for item A1,
which Gardner himself had
collected.
Eusebio made several long
trips to seek out material in
the years 1938 and 1939, and
both the Maliwanag brothers
worked on transliterations and
translations of material
acquired. They recruited
Mangyan interpreters
and they also recruited
the help of relatives like
Guillermo Bakal, who helped
with English translations and
collecting items.
So in short, the Maliwanag
brothers, their family members
and Mangyan interpreters, were
instrumental in putting together
the library's Mangyan Bamboo
collection and helping us
understand its contents.
The result of
the collaboration 
between Gardner
and the Maliwanag brothers
yielded, among other things, of
course, putting together of
the Bamboo Collection and the
Asian Division of the Library
of Congress, along with
vocabularies and grammars,
transliterations and
translations. Related to the
origins of the collection are
the authors of the items. 
In the collection,
there are four authors whom I
have already mentioned, so these
are Sikadan, Kabal,
Luyon and Balik.
Beyond their names, I was only
able to find some biographical
details in Sikadan and Luyon but
perhaps some of our panelists
have more information.
Sikadan, author of what is
probably the oldest item in the
collection, is identified by
Gardner, as I mentioned
previously as a chief, and he
was one of the party of Mangyans
who occupied a village at the
Saint Louis World's Fair. And
according to Antoon Postma,
Gardner stayed overnight at the
House of Sikidan in the
Buchanan area in the summer of
1904. Other than that, 
I was not able
to find much else about Sikadan.
As for Luyon, Patricia has
already touched on Luyon.
Gardner does mentioned 
that Luyon
was at least 50 years old in
1939, and he mentions that Luyon
was a woman married to a man
called Yagüe. But according to
Patricia, Harold Conklin had
told her that Luyon was not a
woman but a man.
And he knew this because he had
worked with Luyon and his brother
[inaudible] in Yagüe in Mindoro
between 1947 and the early
1950s. And furthermore, both
Luyon and [inaudible]
were known to the
Malewana brothers.
So it's really puzzling as to
why Gardner got this detail
wrong. Gardner's likely
mistake in this instance does
raise questions about the
accuracy of information
presented in the publication in
the writings. So I had a bit
more about transcriptions,
transliterations and
translations, but we don't have
a lot of time to go through
that. So I think the main point
I want to communicate here is
that these transliterations and
translations, they were indeed
pioneering works, but they were
I think the operative word is
tentative. So these are works
in progress.
So as you consult these, if you
look at our digital collection,
it's important to keep that in
mind.
So I'll just very quickly now
mention that we have other
Mangyan holdings in the
library.
We have recordings of 
Hanunuo-Mangyan
poems that were donated by 
Antoon Postma and these are only
available on site at the Library
of Congress because they are
under copyright.
And at the American Folklife
Center, we have Harold
Conklin's philippine Collection,
as well as recordings. Here,
there's likely to be overlaps
of material listed in the
catalog records on the slide,
meaning the same content is
delivered in two different
formats.
And also note that the
recordings in the Conklin
Collection are not made up of
only Hanunuo and Buhid field
recordings, but also include
sampling.
So if we go [inaudible] 
recordings.
So to learn more about these
holdings, please reach out to
reference staff at American
Folklife Center via
"Ask a Librarian" service, 
and I've
included a link to our 
"Ask a Librarian" service
at the bottom
of the slide.
And please also note it's
necessary to give the Folklife
Center prior notice if you
intend to use the content
collection because it takes
time to retrieve the recordings
and other material in the
collection.
So I hope this presentation and
those of our panelists gives you
an idea about the possibilities
for exploring Mangyan scripts and
literary culture at the Library
of Congress,
Mangyan Heritage Center,
Newberry Library, and the Yale
Peabody Museum of Natural
History.
So I'd like to now turn the
time over to my colleague, Ryan 
Wolfson-Ford who will be
reading your questions 
for the panel.
>> Ryan Wolfson-Ford:
Hello. I had one question to
all of the panelists from Bruce
Young that came in first, and
his question was for anyone on
the panel, had they seen or
documented ways of writing
throughout Mangyan 
in a circular fashion?
>> I'm [inaudible] from Mindoro.
It's my first time to say that
writing style of like that.
>> Louward Allen Zubiri:
Okay. We said it's her first
time to see that our writing
style. It's also my first time
to see that actually.
I mentioned in my
presentation a while ago that,
some of our bamboo
collections were written by
right handed as well as a left
handed script master.
So it's our first time to
see a circular style of writing
and hi, Bruce. I know he 
was the one who asked this.
I also have not heard Bosma
mentioned about this
our writing style before.
>> Ryan Wolfson-Ford:
Okay. Did anyone else on the
panel have anything else to add?
Okay, I will move on to the
next question.
One of the first questions that
came in was a question about why
don't parents directly teach
their children the 
Mangyan script?
>> Louward Allen Zubiri: 
I can answer that question.
Actually, it's been
observed that parents really do
not teach directly their
children their cultural
practices, it's not part of
their culture.
So if a child is interested,
he or she will just watch
his or her parents.
like in one of their
practice, their handweaving,
cloth weaving. So if the child 
is interested, he or she
will learn by just observation,
watching his or her parents.
>> Ryan Wolfson-Ford:
Thank you. And please feel free
to put in questions 
through the "Q&A" box.
The next question is, would it
be possible to ask...
actually, sorry, that's...
Let me try the next question.
Hi, thank you very much for
your talk.
Does Mangyan Heritage Center
showcase ethnographic materials
from other Mangyan groups,
aside from those of the Hanunuo
and Buhid groups?
Thank you.
>> Louward Allen Zubiri: Yes.
Actually, I mentioned in my
presentation that we have this
traveling or mobile exhibit
that has been to
over 70 institutions, museums
all over the country for several
years and we have
included in that exhibit are
some artifacts from the
Alangan, Iraya, Bangon and other
indigenous groups here in
Mindoro.
Since this panel discussion
 is about... is focused
on the Mangyan inscription.
So we just featured our
collection on related to
the Mangyan inscriptions.
>> Ryan Wolfson-Ford:
Thank you. The next question
we have is, may I know about the
community support and
cooperation and the process
of maintaining Mangyan script?
>> Louward Allen Zubiri:
We have partnership with
Mangyan people's organization.
So our activities projects
on revitalizing the Mangyan 
script is
in partnership with the
[inaudible].
So this is in response to the
request to keep alive or to pass
on to the younger generations
their script and the [Inaudible]
the Mangyan poetry.
And we have done this in
partnership with the Department
of Education's Indigenous
Peoples Education Office.
in between 2012 to 2016. So we
were able to teach the script
at schools about more than a
dozen schools for about 4 to 5
years.
>> Ryan Wolfson-Ford:
Thank you.
The next question is
from Jim Moss.
The University of Michigan
Museum of Anthropological
Archaeology houses a collection
of over 100 Mangyan manuscripts
collected by the Maliwang
brothers for Fletcher Gardner.
Most are transcribed and
translated in Gardner's Indic
writings book, but have about a
dozen or so that are not.
Is there anyone interested in
working with these manuscripts
to translate or transcribe
them?
>> Louward Allen Zubiri: We may
be able to ask the elders,
because as of now, 
only very few elders are...
We were able to conduct an
extensive documentation on the
Mangyan script 
based on Louward's
presentation a while ago, and
there were about 300 plus
script masters that the elders
and we have to discuss with
them if someone is willing to
transliterate, this can be a
project.
It's still a big project but
that the transliteration in fact
I also mentioned that
Miyamoto's bamboo collections,
the one he donated to the MHC 
it's not transliterated.
We still have to look for
someone who can do that.
>> I'll just add a bit.
And then from our end, most of
the new project requires
consultations and prior consent
from the different 
Mangyan communities.
So if we're starting one or
anyone is starting one, the
first thing is to reach out to
the communities 
for their consent.
>> Ryan Wolfson-Ford:
Thank you. The next question
we have is from Tim Brooks.
He writes, I see from 
the Mangyan
Heritage Center's Facebook
page that Bamboo Whispers is
available for purchase, but that
post was dated 2019.
Can I order a copy of the book
and if so, how?
>> Louward Allen Zubiri:
Yes, you may order.
One of our board of
trustees is now in the U.S. and
she has copies with her.
I can connect you, Mr. Tim
to her. So you can 
order and she can
mail it from where she is now
from the U.S.
>> Ryan Wolfson-Ford:
Thank you. The next question we
have is thank you for your
presentations. Does the Mangyan
Heritage Centre sell new
materials with Mangyan
inscriptions?
>> Louward Allen Zubiri: We
only sell this bamboo
letter openers with Mangyan
poems, so we do not sell other
bamboo inscriptions as. So
because we usually, as the word
mentioned there were some
materials has to be...
We have to get consent from the
Mangyans before.
So like this the Mangyan
script is part of their
intellectual property.
So the bamboo inscription,
which has been, I mean,
the letter openers with the
Mangyan poem with the
inscribed on the bamboo
with the tag in English
translation of the poem.
So that's the only available
for now.
>> Joshua Kueh:
Thank you to all the panelists
for making time to speak with us
and share your knowledge with
everyone.
If you do have questions,
please feel free to reach out to
us at the Library of Congress
and we can direct those
questions to our panelists.
I'm sorry we did not have more
time for questions, but you can
reach out to us by using the
"Ask a Librarian" service, and
that's ask.loc.gov.
So ask.loc.gov.
So that's a very quick way to
reach us and we'll be able to
then put you in contact with
the panelists.
So thank you everyone once
again, and have a good evening
and a good morning, depending
on where you are.