We attended a wedding of a cousin’s child who married “outside the house.” It means the child married a child of another “tribe.” It is not Igorot, thus she has another belief, tradition and culture.
For us it is perfectly right because we also want to know others’ culture.
Few decades ago, marrying outside the tribe was not that easy and usually parents dictate what their child should marry. Almost everything parents and elders say were treated like it’s the law.
However, today is a different story, I believed characters and attitudes of people changed very fast that almost no one had even noticed the big change.
Back to the marriage topic, it is amazing to see and know others’ culture and tradition in celebrating their weddings. Their dances and kinds of programs are completely different from our own Igorot tradition and culture.
Theirs is with bands and singers performing. For good luck and to raise funds for the new couple to start with, the newlywed were asked to dance to a love song while their relatives, sponsors, friends, and visitors pin cash to hang on their dress; in addition, some boxes containing food(lechon manok or grilled chicken) and drinks were sold through bidding. A bidder can get a lady from one of the visitors to dance with and others will try to outbid him until the seller-announcer put a maximum price for the box then end the bidding. There were about ten boxes sold in my opinion and to show our support we bought one. There were also other side shows we didn’t notice because they were done a distance from us, and a slightly hidden from the decorations. The main part of the program everybody likes is for the visitors, especially, youth to spend the night dancing together with the music they like to play using today’s latest technology.
Well, we are normal people so we compared our native practice to theirs and we look at theirs as somewhat “Showy” specially the pinning of money in the dress.
Of course we did not want to be outdone; we also presented our own native music and dance using the gongs as our own music instrument during wedding festivities. Also, we fall in line and gave our own financial contribution to the couple while they are sitting in their chair( We don’t like to be showy so we didn’t pin the bills in their garments). This way we have a chance to know them more and congratulate them and they have the chance to see us face to face, specially, relatives whom they see for the first time.
The celebration went well to their plans, I believed, because all the scheduled programs were done before an hour before midnight, thus, it’s a free for all dancing and drinking for those who wanted to remain through the night.
But there was one thing I observed during the wedding. While our women were wearing their traditional colorful dresses, not even one of us men was using a sign of our own being an Igorot - the G-string. The reason was obvious, our own traditional native outfit is no longer “suitable” in today’s modern kind of culture, because if we use our own G-strings outside our home we might be called as “still barbarians or uncivilized” or any names that will diminish our pride. Really?
And this is what the title is all about. Because of our native attire in the old days the people in the lowlands believed Igorots have tails. I believed someone explained or probably joked to them our G-string attire as “like tails” behind our butts - and either the listeners took it literally or made joke about it until it was believed as true story.
In fact, until now there are still ignorant people who do not know how a genuine Igorot looks like. There are many of them asking people who visited Kaigorotan (specially, Baguio City) if they have seen an Igorot and how do an Igorot looks like. The irony is the person they’re asking the question is a pure blooded Igorot.
Okay, sorry for telling side stories, but what I mean in the title is that, because it is now seldom Igorot men use their traditional custom attires it will not be long and the next Igorot generation will forget one of the important piece of their history is that their forefathers was known to have tails.
For this to not happen, Igorot men should make it a point to always wear their attire on every occasion so that today’s children and the next generation know our forefathers have tails.
