Native children.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: Michael L. Tan

LAST Tuesday, I wrote about our prejudices against the "natives," the local popular term used to refer to cultural minorities or indigenous groups. At best, our attitudes are patronizing, seeing them as resistant to change. At worst, we view them as lazy and uncivilized.

Such attitudes are deeply-rooted, the Spanish and American colonizers and eventually, our own government, setting up barriers between "us" and "them." We, the ones who surrendered to the foreign masters, were rewarded and called "civilized" as opposed to these mountain peoples who resisted. "They" were different: pagan, primitive.

We "non-natives" all grow up with rare glimpses into the lives of indigenous Filipinos, except for occasional documentary travelogues, the natives becoming just another part of the scenery and the flora and fauna. Or the occasional newspaper article, referring to the latest epidemic, or famine.

In our childhood, too, our elders would scare us with stories about the fierce native, exemplified by headhunters, these images invoked to threaten us if we misbehaved as I remember from summers in Baguio: "Sige, we'll give you to the Igorot."

I'm realizing, too, we rarely heard of, much less saw, native children. During those summers in Baguio, I do not remember seeing the children and I am realizing, now, that they were kept apart from us. I suspect that in part, their parents too were apprehensive and fearful of us, lowlanders, maybe the differences all the more emphasized by our being English-speaking Intsik, many more steps removed from their own culture. Perhaps they, too, threatened their children: "Sige, we'll sell you to the Intsik!"