OCAMPO, Camarines Sur -- A common attitude of Bicolano lowlanders towards the Agta people here that populated the upland areas since ancient times is generally negative as impressed in Bikol adjective “uro-agtaon” which may mean someone uncivil, having bad manners and ugly and ignorant.

Caption: Couple Alfredo and Norma Marianito have only vague memories about their ancestors but they don’t understand why the Agta people earned negative impression from lowlanders.

        Prejudged by Bicolano lowlanders, the Agta people and their culture, with very nil available documentation of their lifestyle and way of life, is fast vanishing into the contemporary society without trace of their original culture, partly because of the negative impression attached to them and the consequent discrimination they experience with non-Agta people.

        Salvacion Buenaflor, 43, one of the residents of dominantly Agta-Tabangnon populated village of Villaflorida here, resented she belongs to an Agta bloodline.

Caption: The Agta folks who earn their livelihood as abaca strippers and farm laborers of sugarcane plantation belong to the poorest of the poor in Camarines Sur.

        Buenaflor confessed she has learned to endure discrimination, sneer and taunts from other people since her grade-school days.

        “I cut my finger one time and showed that my blood is red and challenged them (non-Agta classmates) to also cut their fingers too and if they also have red blood in them, then I told them that they too are Agta,” narrating one incident in school when she was in Grade II.

Caption: Alfredo Cledoro (sitting), elected tribal chief of some 80 Agta families in Villaflorida, Ocampo, Camarines Sur, knows nothing about the lifestyle and way of life of his ancestors.

        Buenaflor said she was disheartened and resented his father’s confirmation that indeed they belong to an Agta lineage and blamed her parents for that.

        Alfredo Cledoro, tribal chieftain of some 80 Agta families in this town, downplays his Agta lineage saying they were not pure as he cannot even recall the ways and lifestyle of their ancestors.

        Cledoro, presently employed as caretaker of one of the tourist facilities of Camarines Sur provincial government, was elected tribal chieftain nine years ago when the Indigenous People Rights Act of 1997 or RA 8371 was enforced.

        Marcial Bocalig, 30, another Agta Tabangnon residing here, has accepted the lowly treatment and discrimination saying they might have deserved it.

        But Bocalig was grateful to his grandfather who taught him that flocks of birds that unusually fly about over Mt. Isarog forebodes of an upcoming calamity.

        He added that he was also taught herbal remedies for fever, flu and colds that he said provide relief especially that they cannot afford doctor’s consultation.

        Formally recognized as distinct peoples under RA 8371, the indigenous people (IP) including the Agta tribe is among other ethnic groups all over the archipelago provided with some privileges over wide swath of land considered ancestral domain.

        Cledoro’s tribe is one of the beneficiaries of 599.34 hectares of land in this town covered by Certificate of Ancestral Land Title (CALT) that provided them access to the resources therein.

        However, Asisclo C. Bagaindoc, chief of Technical Management Division of the NCIP here, clarified if the coverage of CALT exempts land already privately titled before.

        Bagaindoc explained that in a situation where CALT coverage is privately titled, the IPs retain their right to participate in deciding development activities within the ancestral domain.

        He said Agta people have their own language but nobody knows what it is and that there is one remaining tribe in the hinder lands of Camarines Norte whose original culture survived for centuries.

        The NCIP listed some 23,270 Agta people in Bicol belonging to different tribes in the two Camarines provinces and the provinces of Albay and Sorsogon.

        Bagaindoc revealed the only tribe of Agta people in Bicol that remains nomadic and pure in their culture is the Kabihug in Camarines Norte.

        Bagaindoc, one of the pioneers of an outreach program of the DENR for the Agta people in the early 1990s, described their spoken language as “garo gamgam” (bird-like).

        “Numbering about 4,073 individuals, the Agta Kabihug moves in sub-groups as they continue to survive on hunting and gathering. They do not practice inter-marriage outside of their tribe, keeps physical distance from lowlanders while keeping aloof towards to strangers,” according to NCIP exec.

        Together with an interpreter, he said he lived for one month with a sub-group of 10 Agta Kabihug families in Sta. Elena, Camarines Norte, trying to introduce simple agricultural technology and hygiene to this nomadic tribe of hunters and gatherers.

        Bagaindoc said the Agta people in other provinces in Bicol were already a mix inter-marriage of people in the lowlands including the Camarines Sur’s Agta Tabangnon and Agta Cimarron.

        He said the Agta Tabangnon descended from parents of a pure Agta and native lowlanders while the Agta Cimarron came from a mix of a pure Agta and a Spaniard.

        Professor Danilo Gerona, Bicol historian, credited the Cimarrones, the people living in the shoulders of Mt. Isarog, for the foundation of the of the 277 years of devotion to Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia, the Bicol Patroness of the local Catholic Church.

        Alfredo Marianito, 67, from height to looks, unmistakably belongs to the Agta people but his knowledge of his grandparents, whom he.

        “I don’t know why?” Marianito answered, when asked about the lowly treatment and common attitude of Bicolano lowlanders towards them.