 Good morning everybody. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Saras for this special event on representing the Philippine Cordillera. I'm Professor William Clarence Smith. I teach history here. I do research on the history of the Philippines, mainly on migrants from the Middle East and South Asia. My own particular interest in this region is in gold mining and the so-called Syrian involvement in the investing in the gold mines in the historical period and the American period in fact. But I'm also interested in pre-colonial gold mining so if anybody knows about that I'm interested particularly in the technology and in the way in which technology shifts both in the Spanish period and in the American period. I have to tell you a couple of housekeeping things. First of all there are bathrooms on this floor and on every floor in fact and hopefully well signposted and you've got the emergency exits out there. Hopefully we won't have to use those. Okay and just one final thing is that we're planning another event next year on the Philippine south. So we're doing the north now and we're thinking of shifting to the south next year. So if anybody's interested in contacting Christina who's the Uber organiser of all this I just sort of fronted. Christina does all the legwork. Please contact her or me and we'll try and do a similar event next year on the Philippine south. And now it gives me great pleasure to call on Dr. Anuryn Salvador Amores to come and give her keynote lecture. Thank you very much. Hello good morning everyone. Can you hear me at the back? Good. All right I'll start now. So thank you very much so as through Christina San Juan for inviting me here. So it's a pleasure to give this keynote for this particular conference. Today I'm going to talk about reexamining Igrot representation, issues of commodification and cultural appropriation. At the end of my impassioned talk to a group in Manila late last year about our proposed exhibition titled Fist of Merit which was slated to be set up at the University of the Philippines Baguio's Museum Cordillera in February 2018. A well-dressed elderly woman calmly asked do the Igrots still exist? Are they still dog eaters and head hunters? It was an innocent question but I almost fell to the ground in disbelief that questions such as this existed in some of my countrymen's minds to this day. In my head I thought that the old lady was in a time warp. Keeping my composure and demeanor I replied politely yes they do they are now lawyers doctors and educators and wear the same clothes as we do. Recording this incident and speaking to you now on the topic representing the Philippine Cordillera I cannot help but surmise that the colonial stereotypes of the Igrots as head hunters dog eaters and savages continue to hound the members of this indigenous community to this day. The Igrot as savage and irrational is a typical Eurocentric statement and its variations are found in countless documents whose ultimate objective was to project barbarism of native societies and thus to justify their conquest by the agents of civilization. For instance in the 1904 St. Louis Fair the Bontock Igrots Kankanaeus and the Tingyans were exhibited in the Igrot village. A photograph of the dog eating ritual of the Igrots are deeply held and a patently enduring cultural image of the Igrots as the other. Dean Worcester's photograph of a decapitated corpse of an Igrot warrior being brought to his grave the tattooed warriors that records their successful warfare and the bare-breasted women widely echoed and pervade by the colonial project. Colonialism's rhetoric of exoticism also functions to successfully establish boundary between the cultural group of being displayed and the cultural group doing the viewing. As a Kankanaeus and an anthropologist Albert Bagdian and I quote, concurs that the Igrots themselves are one of these hundreds of millions of so-called indigenous scattered all over the world and thus are familiar in personal experience with the demeaning consequences emanating from otherness. My interest on Igrot representation, commodification and appropriation of culture grew out of a range of research in the Cordillera in general and in Kalinga and Ifuga specifically. Igrot representation, issues of commodification and cultural appropriation have been in recent years one of the most widely discussed sources of ethical problems. This is also an ongoing debate on the studies on the Cordillera. The prevalence of these issues indicate the continuing challenge we face in representing Igrot culture. For this presentation I examine the representation of the Igrots, a popular collective term for the different ethnic groups inhabiting the Cordillera mountain ranges of Highland Northern Lausanne. More recently they have likewise been referred as b-backs after the acronym for Bontok, Ifugao, Bont-Benget, Apayao and Kalinga provinces in the Cordillera which are the domain of these indigenous groups or Cordillera which is considered the politically appropriate term to employ in the light of the indigenous People's Rights Act. Today they are more popularly known as Igrot UK or Igrota. While the term Igrot was a derogative term in the past the term is now invoked as a declaration of pride to one's roots and as a means to access resources under the Philippine nation state. In this paper I would like to address the following questions. How were the Igrots represented in the past? How does this impact the representation today? How do we represent the Igrots in the contemporary period and how and in what context are Igrot cultures commodified and appropriated and what consequences are entailed? Instead of asking who owns culture when traditional practices are performed in diaspora we ask how can we promote respectful treatment of native culture and indigenous forms of self-expression within mass societies? What are the challenges we face and how do we negotiate this to be able to represent the Igrots in the best possible way? What role do museums play in representing the Igrots? Drawing from my own research in the Cordillera I will first re-examine how the Igrots were represented in the past. This is based on archival research from different repositories and historical documents. Then I will elaborate on how we represent the Igrots in the contemporary period and identify consequences, challenges and negotiations in representing cultures. I argue the following among many other things. First the past representations of the Igrots allow us to read them back as we take back the images and provide a glimpse of the figurations of Igrot identity prior to contemporary distortions such as those engendered by increased encounters with tourists who want to post in quotation, post with authentic in quotation natives. These representations provide a venue for critical examination, thank you, to allow for a deeper appreciation and awareness that contributes to the self-determination of the Igrots in the contemporary period. That is making it possible the reclamation of the Igrots as symbols in contemporary discourse and debates on ancestral land claim and ethnic identity. Third, the Igrots as the other in colonial representation can be positively valued in contemporary research and colonial records have been vital in re-examining how Igrots are represented in the past and how these materials are used in popular modes of representation and recuperation of Igrot identity in the present. And lastly, the way these representations contest each other provides an entry into the examination of disjunctions of local and global processes as well as further interrogation of authoritative ethnographic representation and anthropological knowledge on the Igrots. Through a case study approach, I examine how these representations of the Igrots are perceived in order to evaluate these representational practices. Given the colonial past of appropriation, commoditization and stereotyping that persists to the present, it will be discerned that representation of Igrot culture are highly contestable and undergoing change. The findings that I present in this paper indicate that there is a need to address the question on how to represent the Cordillera by critically examining the past and current practices. According to Stuart Hall, the representational system, whether they are sounds, written records, photographs, film, electrically produced images, musical notes, even objects are a means to stand for or signify other people's concepts, ideas and feelings that exist in the culture. Representation spans semiotic and discursive approaches. The semiotic is concerned with the how of representation, otherwise known as poetics, whereas the discursive approach is more concerned with the effects and consequences of representation or its polities. It examines not only how representation produces meaning, but how the knowledge exerts power, regulates conduct, makes up or constructs identities and subjectivities, and defines the way certain things are represented, thought about, practiced and studied. In addition, there are various mediums where this representation takes place in written works, photographs, commodities and museum exhibitions, which are all part of the process of representing culture, and what Apadurai and Breckenridge have described as global culture ecumen of the contemporary world. The task is to understand how this have become to represent ignorant culture or have brought eagerness to the world through a variety of practices and discourses as a hybrid process of cultural reproduction. In particular, when knowledge is rooted in local constructions and exposed to the global world as an empowering representation or an oppressive misrepresentation. The former is brought about by thorough collaboration with the cultural bearers, while the latter is generally brought about by commodification and cultural appropriation with the advent of tourism and modernity, among others. The Oxford English Dictionary provides the most basic definition of appropriation as I quote, the making of a thing applied with property, taking as one's own or to one's own use, although what is appropriated will vary in different contexts and situation. What is true in all instances is that something is allegedly taken and some use it and some things are made out of it. In the case of cultural appropriation, the taking from a culture that is not one's own of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge, members of one culture take something from another cultural context and put it to some use within the context of their own culture. Members of the public copy and transform cultural products to suit their own tastes, express their own creative individuality or simply make a profit. Some cultural products can be freely shared with the public, others are devalued when appropriated by the majority culture. In this instances, commodification takes place. While commodification and appropriation are seen as negative practices in the contemporary period, Scafidi argues that cultural products do, however, provide a starting point for the recognition of the source community as well as a means of allowing outsiders a degree of participation in and appreciation of that community. Hence, the perspective on commodification of culture is a multivalent one. Although commodification of cultural products may indeed be an exploitative or colonialist misappropriation, cultural appropriation nonetheless may also be beneficial to both the source community and to the nation as a whole. Furthermore, I also argue that not all appropriation and commodification from other cultures are morally questionable. Sometimes items and ideas are freely transferred from one culture to another. And the internet has facilitated global spread. The case for instance of Batok or the traditional tattoos of the Kalinga, for instance, will serve to illustrate this. Batok involves community-generated and place-based traditional tattoos and practices that have tremendous economic and social value in the village. Yet when these are appropriated, Buscalan, a remote village in Tinglayan, Kalinga in northern Philippines, as a source community, has little control over the use and spread of its designs. Traditional cultural practitioners such as Wang Ud attest that communities of origin are generally unable to prevent the appropriation of their designs through legal action. The potential effects of cultural appropriation on source communities and on the products themselves span the range of destructive effects of misappropriation and the beneficial results of permissive appropriation. I shall discuss this in detail in the latter part of my presentation. Re-examining egorot representation, how do we define the egorots? In this section, I will examine how past representations of the egorots were made and how this had impacts that have been persistent to the present. Photographing the egorots in the lens of Dean Worcester. In 1903 to 1906, Dean C. Worcester, an American colonial official, journeyed through the mountains of the Cordillera in northern Luzon, recording the people's appearance, customs, and material culture. The American colonial administrators at the time were in need of precise, detailed information about the islands, which they had acquired in 1899, and the different ethnic groups of the colony. For this purpose, they created a variety of institutions to collect data. One major institution created for this purpose was the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, renamed the Bureau of Ethnological Survey in 1903. Its remit was to report on the conditions of the Muslim and pagan tribes, recommend legislation for their governance, and accumulate data on Philippine ethnology. Worcester, who became the Bureau of Chief in 1903, took interest in the archipelago's tribal peoples, particularly the egorots of northern Luzon, whom he described as, I quote, savages, primitive, and illiterate, though they are perfectly harmless and peaceful and honest people, unquote. Worcester mistakenly used the term egorot to refer to all the ethnolinguistic groups living in the mountains of the Cordillera, including the Kalinga, Ifugao, Bontoc, Isneg, Kankanael, and Ibaloi. These groups occupy the areas that are now provinces of Abra, Apayau, Benguet, Ifugao, Kalinga, and the mountain province. From his visits to the Cordilleras, Worcester was able to compile an extensive photographic record of ethnic groups, producing about 16,000 black and white photographs taken between 1898 to 1913. In addition to the photographs, Worcester was able to obtain a massive amount of egorot artifacts and produce a 45-minute film entitled Native Life of the Philippines in 1913 that featured some of the egorot's way of life, like gong playing, metal smith, basket weaving, pottery, textiles, among others. The film would reflect on his political agenda for the Philippines. The film had celebrated screenings in the United States, and while some lauded the film because of his scientific cum exploration lecture, there were also negative reactions from Filipinas abroad, primarily because of the misrepresentation of the early Filipinos in the film. As such, the film was not screened in theaters in Manila. The film was virtually forgotten for over a century until it was recently discovered in the archives of the University of Pennsylvania. So as you can see here in the video there is Kalinga dancing which was taken in the Lubwagan, Kalinga. The second row is the Mock fighting among the Bontok, and this here is the thigh slapping game that was recorded in Ifugao. Top is, it's like a wailu ritual, and they were burying ahead of a beheaded warrior. But Worcester has a very limited frame so he could not capture the entirety of that particular ritual. And then below is an Ifugao performance on a wedding ritual in Ifugao. So this is the website where this you can actually find the film, the snippets of the film at the University of Penn Archives. Recently I retraced Worcester's path when he recorded the film and brought this film to relevant communities in the Cordillero region, in Kalinga, Ifugao, Benguet, and Abra. I conducted a film elicitation to gain more depth in the understanding of the film by bringing in Indigenous people's interpretation. The Indigenous voice is different from the exploitative description of the images. According to them it is good to have a record of the past because we refer to them if we are doing it right or wrong. The extensive collection of Worcester's photographs include about 200 of Worcester's photographs of tattooed Igorots taken in Mogshot style with font and profile views against a white background. These photos, many of them published in Worcester's article in the National Geographic entitled Head Hunters of Northern Luzon, published in 1912, had an immense political impact, especially since the issue of Philippine independence from colonial rule was revived in 1912. The publication contains 85 photos of tribal Filipinos with an implicit theme of unpreparedness of Filipinas for independence. The photos of bare-breasted women with tattoos of head hunters and even a headless Ifugao served to showcase not only the colonized subject but also the ethnocentric eye behind the lens that regarded the Igorots as savages, barbaric and primitive. Since Worcester's approach to non-Christian tribes of the Philippines was based on 19th and early 20th century ideas of race and evolution, his photos reflect paradigms of social evolutionism, racism and colonial paternalism. However, they also became ethnographic recordings or, I quote, anthropological documentations of people with no written records which thus became valuable to the American colonial administration. While many aspects of the Igorot photos, many of which were, I quote, stage or deceptively captioned, are disturbing and misleading today. I strongly argue, however, that these photos nonetheless are substantial visual evidence of the Igorot's way of life and as such are effective in current anthropological research and reclaiming ethnic identity. These images have inspired younger generation of Igorots and ignited their interests in the culture of their ancestors, expressed in writings, artworks, tattoos, film, and other forms of media, performing Igorotness at the 1904 St. Louis Fair. The Worcester photographic collection is particularly important because of the ways of seeing that are represented as it directly fed into a major metropolitan project, the 19 St. Louis Exposition in Missouri, popularly known as the World's Fair. In this fair, Sun-dry ethnic groups including the Bontoc, Lipanto, Igorots, and the Tingians were lumped together as the Igorotes and presented as examples of primitive tribes. In Missouri, where the World's Fair was held, there was an increased commerce and new social changes. It also highlighted the encounters with new populations since the exposition introduced the Igorots to the world. For instance, the Igorotte village was extremely popular with fairgoers and earned high profit for the organizers. Perhaps one of the most sensational highlights of the exhibit that created an enduring image of the Igorots was the staging of the Igorot dog feast, wherein the actual slaughter, roasting, and consumption of a dog was played out. Linguist and an Ibaloi Patricia Afabler recounts how the city of St. Louis Fair supplied some 20 dogs a month from the local town so that Igorots could perform the titillating spectacle several times a week. Even the dog eating occurs only rarely in traditional Highland culture. Chickens, pigs, cows, and water buffaloes being preferred ritual animals and food sources. The result was the creation of another still powerful stereotype of the Igorot to be placed alongside those that classify them as headhunters, savages, and freaks. On the other hand, June Pearl Breath, a Bontok and an eminent scholar of the Cordillera, gives a counter-reading about the participation of the Bontok Igorots in the Fair. According to her, and I quote, most of the writings to date have focused on the exploitation of the Igorots in the way they were viewed as culturally representing Filipinos. Elite Filipinos denounced the exhibition and had cost them great humiliation. I quote, end of quote, but how did the Igorots perceive themselves? How does this self-perception, conscious with how others represented them or interpreted this representations? In her interview with the Bontok participants in the Fair, such as Kinarang and Takay, the narrative shows that they are, they decide to go abroad, lured by their own curiosity and thirst for adventure outside of the Ili. Furthermore, they were not entirely passive on resisting subjects as evidenced by how they reacted by using the English language to engage the white man's law and structures of political power when they felt cheated. In other words, there is evidence that opens up to the possibility that their exposure to the world may not have been necessarily resulted in the feeling of being exploited among the Igorot participants. In fact, as Olivier concurs that the Igorots at the Fair were actually modern day laborers, our version of OFWs or OCWs and their performances had dual effect of making them simultaneously desired and disavowed by their audiences. Needless to say, there were thousands of photographs taken of the Igorots on the exhibit and this made their way as souvenirs to American homes that eventually served as postcards sent to different places and have become historical records in the archives of colonial encounter. It is also around this time that a series of articles on the Igorots by Dean Worcester was published in the National Geographic Magazine in 1911, 1912 and 1913 that imbued him the image of a wild man at home. In fact, there is a photograph found at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology which is inaccurately labeled as RF Barton dancing with a native. It actually shows Worcester as an Iphigal native in the act of the Umun Himung performing a war dance called the Hidith for a ritual and for a burial ceremony in Iphigal. The photograph shows Worcester in a complete garb wearing a loincloth, a headdress and brandishing a spear and a shield along with an Iphigal warrior performing what he calls a spremitiveness of the wild tribes of the people that he had earlier documented. A similar case of what might be referred to as reverse appropriation. The Iphigal master cover and ritual especially Stagling of Hapao appropriated the long noses of American colonial officers in their sacred bull war and were sold as souvenir items to visitors. That's Stagling. This is the fourth infantry and they use the bull wall as trophies and you have long noses, long noses, bull wall that were sold as souvenir items such as this ones. A repercussion of this representation is that all of a sudden the Igorots had to contend with the difficulties of change and they faced a dilemma of whether to integrate or to retreat further into the mountains to preserve tradition. These new problems were compounded by the increasingly distorted images of themselves and their way of life. Many of this foisted upon them from without and circulated among lowland cultures who did not know any better either. In addition this photographs have become portable easily downloadable through the internet. They travel quickly across time and space and in the process the intended meanings behind the images also change in the process of movement from one context to another. For example the colonial administrators took photographs of the Igorots for the purpose of asserting hegemony over them. Conversely it can also be argued that the subjugated people may appropriate the same photographs to reassert their identity and power in the colonial context. In this case the photograph is transformed into a metaphor of power having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those and those who exist within it. The photograph perpetuates the past while it is being reproduced or consumed in the present. While one can argue that the photograph is located in the past and it can also be equally said that the photograph is located in the present. Today these photographs are highly valued because of the ethnographic content they contain. When we view the significance of these images as a form of Igorot representation and the attached relation to the larger project of the Philippine indigenous cultures towards the articulation of an Igorot identity within the context of the larger national Filipino identity these images are in fact an honest and faithful documentation of an Igorot culture that contributes to a deeper appreciation of Igorot culture in diaspora most especially for the younger generation. As they would say yes they were the people in the past who were our ancestors. Although these representations are drawn from our own discourse they are contested by other representation representations such what can be discerned in the case of the Kalinga Batok or traditional tattoos in northern Philippines. Wangud incorporated how our cultures commodified and appropriated. No doubt the movement of Wangud tattoo-inspired works in the local and international market has generated the rising interest on Kalinga tattoos. My point in this section is to show that production, circulation and consumption of these objects constitute an important dimension of self-production of Kalinga as well as Igorot culture. For the past months I have been witness to this phenomenon of how Batok tattoos and Wangud have been commodified and appropriated in different forms in t-shirts, sneakers, coffee labels. I have mugs and wine bottles but I forgot to include it here and for the tattooed by Wangud movement the supporters clamor against cultural appropriation of Batok and have raised objections to commodification. What is it that it's being appropriated and commodified? Alternatively is this not simply a case of cultural imitation or cultural borrowing or the less offensive term I quote creative mixing. When there is an incorporation of traditional tattoos in mainstream tattoos and objects this is condemned as theft but it is not more often than not that the native peoples themselves have selectively appropriated symbols from other cultures. It becomes commodification when individuals market restless search for novelty to transform unfamiliar tattoo patterns into exploitable commercial resources. The popularity of tattoos has opened arenas for both traditional and contemporary forms of expression disassociated from the symbolic meanings tattoos also have become graphic designs this devoid of ritual acts. This is due to the influx of tourists to the village in Buscalan since 2014 which burgeoned in 2015 and continues to depressant. Most of the younger ones come from Manila according to Apu Wangud. The other clients are mostly tourists passing through who have heard of her and seek her out for souvenir tattoos. Tattooing of small designs for instance on the back legs arms and wrists are quickly done and the visitors bring the tattoos souvenirs and representations of selves back to be them to the cities. With the study flow of tourists in the village to get tattoos the Tinglayan tourism office records more than 500 tourists visiting Wangud's village and seeking to be tattooed by her in one day. From January to March 2016 there have been 4,071 tourists and a study flow of visitors was recorded in the ensuing months. In my recent visit the arrival of people traveling in groups was constant they would stay into the village for three days for each tourist they pay about 75 pesos or a pound for an environment of fee and those and they were issued numbers. I observed that there was about more than a hundred people who lined up to get tattoos from Wangud. Grace Palicas and Elian Wigan in their tattoo hut. Many waited until the next day to get the tattoos. Once the younger apprentices did the traditional design from the wooden ply board with tattoo patterns now mixed with designs from Ifugao and Tikopien designs from Africa as well as designs derived from Alibata or Baibayan the old Tagalog script with various designs and meanings and other interpretations and then Wangud would put the three dots or the tulduk as a form of signature to authenticate the tattoo. Visitors say it becomes more authentic with the Wangud signature tattoo. With the vibrant economy spurred on the quest for authentic tattoos by Wangud an important phenomenon is that local people have begun to patronize the younger tattoo artists in the village and are now getting inked by the same tattoos that they abhorred 40 years ago. The pain the perforation of the skin the permanence embodied that experiences to construct individual and social identities through appropriation of the Batok resulted in the recontextualization of the tattoos in the present. Today the very same tattoos associated with head hunting are symbols of savagery which were criminalized during the American colonial period at the turn of the century are now ostensibly part of this trend of modern tattoos. This are the apprentices of Wangud. The youngest is a 12-year-old tattoo practitioner. So these tattoos are now appropriated as visible and permanent markers of Filipino identity. So these are the younger tattoo artists of local and foreign tourists would come to get tattoos from the village and noticeably the mass production of these tattoos may have gained meaning in contemporary tattoo practices but have lost the deeper symbolic associations of these tattoos including the absence of rituals performed on this one sacred and place-based practice. The current phenomenon also implies the repackaging of heritage as a reinvention of tradition rooted in the past. This also changed the landscape of the small and remote village in Buskalan to a place where one can showcase the tattooing as a vibrant culture. So here you can see home stay programs. The traditional houses are now transformed into inns, inns, eatery, etc. And of course they have they also sold souvenirs inspired from these tattoos. As Christian Black Gimlet posits that heritage and tourism are collaborative industries that heritage converts locations into destinations and tourism makes them economically viable as exhibits themselves. Anthropologists John Ury and Edward Brunner view the commodification of tattoos from a wider perspective writing that in the tourist gaze tourists determine the locals role in making their demands and expectations. The hosts comply with these demands because of expectations imposed on them. The host gaze on the other hand is the point of view of the locals towards tourism and focuses on the roles and actions of the host community in response to the tourist needs and demands both local hosts and tourists meet at the tourist border zone when their views are in conflict. The tourists come to get traditional tattoos in Buskalan while the locals own from their visit. Yet other scholars believe that locals can be active agents by preserving what they want, inventing traditions, all the while remaining cognizant of what is real and what is staged. For instance last October 21, 2017 a helicopter brought tattoo practitioner Wang Ud from her home village in remote Buskalan in Tinglayan Kalinga. Tinglayan Kalinga province to Manila for a two-day trade event and people cried exploitation. What was a nominee of Gawad Nang Manilikanang Bayan or the national living treasure nominee doing at the Manila fame at the World Trade Center tattooing people on a card on off-platform much like the Igorots displayed during the 1904 St. Louis Fair people asked. In the same vein perhaps the question must also be asked when Indigenous peoples perform their primitiveness in the cities or in diaspora. Does it also undermine their authenticity? Transplanting what used to be a local tradition and a Kalingal ritual to the big city where cash instead of feats of bravery became the mode of exchange for the experience could be part of what has spurred the outcry. Wang Ud and the rage over tourism and traditional tattoos are examples of what occurs in this tourist border zone as the Botok is reinvented and the traditional tattoos meaning and contexts have changed. The tattoos have been appropriated as visible and permanent marks of Filipino identity but their sudden accessibility to about anyone in contemporary times has eroded the deeper symbolic associations especially in the absence of the rituals performed around around this one sacred and place specific practice. In my experience I argue what occurs in the disjunction of the arenas in which meanings are produced and circulated is more complex than commodification and is further complicated by how traditional tattooing as a cultural activity is understood and interpreted. Exhibiting Igrot culture in museums cultural appropriation and protection. How do we represent Igrots in museum exhibitions? What is being represented represented in museums? The image of the Igrots is derived not only from the assertions of their distinct culture but also to depict the culture and life ways of the people. It is about objects or material culture as forms of representation that produce meaning through the display of objects in ethnographic museums. Ethnographic museums feature objects as the material culture of peoples who have been considered to have been the appropriate target for anthropological research. They produce certain kinds of representations and mobilize distinct classificatory systems which are framed by anthropological theory and ethnographic research. In this particular section I seek to emphasize the importance of creating contextualized presentations of the Igrot culture using multiple perspectives and interpretative media based on the collaboration with the native people and their respective communities. It will consider representation in the singular, the activity or process, as well as representations as the resultant entities or products in an ethnographic museum whose representational strategies feature the ethnographic objects or artifacts of Igrot cultures. In other words, ethnographic museums have had to address issues of representation in a concerted fashion. For instance, the Museo Cordillier's inaugural exhibition on tattoos in 2017 is one way of directly addressing heritage, challenging the stereotypes of Igrot culture and empowering local culture, cognizant of the fact that representation of the Igrot culture is a complex process. The issue of how to exhibit Igrot culture and other indigenous groups remains an urgent question, calling for a renewed discussion on representation. So this is our exhibit, inaugural exhibition at the Museo Cordilliera on tattoos. We had five mannequins installed in the main exhibition hall representing the tattoos of the Ibaloi, Kalinga Bontok, yeah only the three and Ifugao. So this one, we had a visitor, a sixth grader from a Christian school who demanded that we should close the exhibition because we have, I quote, obscene, naked, and unshoed peoples from the past unquote in display. Given reactions such as this, we see that scholarly exhibitions, interpretative exhibit materials, and exhibition publications present opportunities to inform audiences and address misconceptions about Igrot culture. Scholars and curators in close collaboration with indigenous groups being represented in the exhibition helped convey the multiple meanings and cultural values as well as relating it to the historical and contemporary context. So here we work with the communities, the cultural barriers our researchers and our curators to present in an accurate way about the Igrot culture. For instance, we have other cases such as the Ibaloi, where we had to fabricate an Ibaloi mannequin full of tattoos and these are based on my research on the Ibaloi mummies in Kabayan. So those are the images based on our research on the Ibaloi mummies in Bengue, and then we invited Ibaloi elders to come see this mannequin. When they saw the mannequin which our artists had worked on for two long weeks, they vehemently asked the tattoos to be removed immediately before the exhibition opening. One of the elders remarked, I quote, the Ibaloi people are not tattooed. We do not have record of tattoos like those, I'm pointing at that mannequin, like those criminals because we are God's people. We are Christians. I, Inayan, the word Inayan is like it's bad, it's taboo, etc. So that's what they said. So we showed these images, the early drawings of Hans Mayer and photos of the mummies with tattoos in Ibaloi and they were relieved in this belief that they have such records because the Ibaloi were the first Igrot group that were earlier Christianized and formed resistance against the Spaniards and educated by the Americans during the colonial period. So this was a challenge that we encountered in representing the Ibaloi in the Mosaic Cordillera. These are the elders who commented after we explained what the research is all about and this are clearly presented in the tattoos on the mannequins. As curators, we explained that these tattoos are the evidence of a highly cultured people in the past. So this illustrates how an effective exhibition can improve the status of traditional culture, dispel stereotypes and facilitate greater understanding of a dynamic nature of culture and the current issues related to Ibaloi culture. Presentations developed in collaboration with local people and communities that utilize interpretative materials can increase the significance and accessibility of understanding Ibaloi culture. Contextualizing the Bontok Lebkan. In February 2018, the Mosaic Cordillera opened an exhibition titled The Feast of Merit that explored the connection between wealth, status, and feasting in Luzon Cordillera. In the exhibition, we selected objects that would best capture the concept of feasting to reflect the affluence of the Ifogau Kadangyan, the Ibaloi, and Bontok Bak Ngang. The curators were careful to ensure that there were decontextualized objects put on display and that this were not sourced using unethical practices of collecting objects in situ. There is one particular ritual object that the Bontok hold as secret to the celebration of the ritual. Feast called the Channo is the object called Lebkan. In the village, in the Bontok Ili, the Lebkan is held sacred and we cannot borrow and bring it out from the village. So this is the Bontok Ili. This is one of the Lebkan found in the village and the Lebkan is a long and huge rice mortar carved out of pine log and used during the Chagas segment of the Channo. The Chagas revolves around the ceremonial freshening of rice using the rod-like puzzles called the Aroh. The threshing which is accompanied by singing is usually performed by women. The Chana feast was celebrated in the 1970s in Bontok Ili and in the 1980s in Samuki. There are several Lebkan mortars used in the past rituals which are kept in the ator of the Ili. The people hold all of this sacred and taking them out of the community as prohibited. The Lebkan of the Misericordillera was constructed with the consent of the Bontok elders and requisite rituals were held during its construction. The elders hope that exhibiting the Lebkan will provide the younger Bontok generation as well as others the opportunity to learn about Bontok traditions. There's supposed to be a video there. So this illustrates how effective exhibition can actually be improved by working with the communities. Furthermore, in this exhibition we also brought never-before-seen or unpublished photographs from Dr. Lawrence Reed, a linguist in the Cordillera who also lent us these images for the exhibition and it contributed highly in understanding the Bontok culture through these images of the Chono that was documented in the 1960s as well as the photographs from Professor Emeritus Dr. June Prylbret, whose fieldwork photographs are very fascinating. The last section reclaiming Ifugao identity. Also during the opening of the Feast of Merit exhibition at Misericordillera we invited descendants of the Ifugao Kadangyan or the Afluen class from Keangan Ifugao to perform the Hongan di Himagabi, a ritual performed for the Haggabi or the prestige bench accorded to the elites. One night before the opening, the 22-member group of the Ipas arrived in the museum. The lights in the museum were still open as the curators were still working on the final touch of the exhibition and the Ipas asked if they can view the exhibition and we also agreed. And in two hours that they viewed the exhibition I observed how they scrutinized the exhibition, touched the objects and read the captions and it seemed that they were pleased with how the Ifugao, their own culture, was represented via the exhibition. One even proudly exclaimed, oden me, pangat me, this is ours, this is our culture. On the day of the opening the Ipas performed the ritual of Himagabi. Soon after the exhibition they volunteered to be living mannequins at the Ifugao exhibition. So this is the Ipas, Ifugao Heritage Performing Art Society from Keangan Ifugao who performed the Himagabi ritual during the opening of the Feast of Merida. Okay, so soon after the performance they volunteered to become living mannequins of our exhibition inside the museum. So these are some of the images so the traditional attire were revived inside the Ifugao hut that we built inside the museum, elder sweeping and now the question who copied who. So in this slide you can see that this historical photographs as I talked earlier about the documentation of the university were actually used to revive these practices and at the same time the images from the archives are made accessible allowing the Ifugaos to return the gaze on their early documenters by honoring their Ifugao ancestors through their performance and a reenactment of the Baigan Kadamian culture. Now to conclude today several thousand of Filipino Americans who are who are Igroth Americans or Igroth Britons live and work abroad. A testament to the enduring result of early American colonial educational policy in the Highlands. Members of this community make themselves heard through the Igroth Global Association, international reunions, publications and dozens of internet blogs and the pride in their identity and in their cultures that connects them today draws from 100 year history. Many have come and re-visited the Museo Cordillera to connect with their Igroth culture. Now echoing my reply to the elderly women who carried on the existence of the Igrots in this modern age. Indeed the Igrots are still around but they are no longer head of hunters or dog eaters but part of their ethnic origin. Their collective desire to practice the ways of their forebears and to uphold the heritage as a people has endured. The Igrots wherever they go whether they are in the mountains of the Cordillera in northern Philippines studying in the cities migrating in London or in Canada or working in Hong Kong or in the US and doing things elsewhere in the diaspora will often find ways of asserting aspects of their cultural identity no matter how vague or faded for as long as they find a link to their cultural memory. Many thanks and thank you for listening.