The People

The indigenous inhabitants of the Cotabato Basin are divided into three principal language groups. While Magindanaon speakers far outnumber speakers of the other two languages and figure most prominently in the present study, knowledge of all three groups is essential for comprehending past and present political relations.

The Magindanaon

The largest indigenous ethnolinguistic group in the Cotabato River Basin are the Magindanaon.^[1] For most of the recorded past they have also been the politically dominant population. The 1980 Philippine census estimated their number at 644,548 persons, or 25.7 percent of the total Philippine Muslim population. This figure places them as the second largest of the thirteen Philippine Muslim ethnolinguistic groups (IBON Databank 1981; Abbahil 1984).^[2] Two major dialects of the Magindanaon language are spoken in the Cotabato Basin.^[3] The terms for these two dialects—tau sa Laya (upriver people) and tau sa Ilud (downriver people)—are place-names indexing the fluvial orientation of a people living along a great river. This dialectal separation reflects demographic, cultural, and political polarization between the two major historical population centers on the Pulangi, one at its mouth in what is now Cotabato City and the other thirty-five miles upstream near the present-day Datu Piang. These two settlements were, respectively, the traditional seats of the Magindanao Sultanate and the Buayan Sultanate—interdependent but dueling realms for most of their histories.^[4]

The distinction between downstream (ilud) people and upstream (laya) people has as much subjective as objective import. Downriver people tend to view themselves as the "true" Magindanaon, citing their "purer" dialect, their (somewhat) earlier exposure to Islam, and their connections to the Magindanao Sultanate, the first and hence noblest Magindanaon royal house. They hold this view in spite of (perhaps because of) the fact that the Magindanaon of the interior have dominated indigenous cultural and political life in the valley for the past 150 years. Many continue to distinguish tau sa laya (upriver people) from "Magindanaons" in the same manner as my downriver neighbor in Cotabato City, who remarked of tau sa laya immigrants to the city: "How can they call themselves 'Magindanaon' when they cannot even speak our language?"

Despite some dialectal and cultural differences, the upriver and downriver Magindanaon in the historical period have shared social and political institutions, a profession of Islam, certain symbols of collective identity in dress and ornamentation, and similar means of subsistence. Traditional Magindanaon communities tended to be dispersed along the banks of the numerous waterways of the Cotabato Basin. Thomas Forrest, writing in 1775, describes the pattern:

In a country thinly inhabited, and where ground is of no value, Mahometans especially choose not to crowd together; each desiring a house on the bank of a river. Peculiarly is this visible here, where upon the winding [river] banks . . . and the sides of the many creeks that intersect the ground between . . . rivers, at the distance of almost every three hundred yards, sometimes we see a single house, sometimes a group of houses, with gardens of coconut, mango, and plantain trees, sugar canes, and rice fields, for many miles up those rivers . . . Wherever is a house, there is a small portion of the river sufficient for bathing, railed in, against alligators. (Forrest 1969)

For the Magindanaon, the Pulangi River system, with its tributaries, channels, and estuaries, has been a source of food and water, a principal thoroughfare, and the means of trade and communication with the outside world. Control of the Pulangi has thus been crucial for the acquisition and maintenance of political power by the rulers of the Cotabato Valley throughout the historical period. The traditional Magindanaon were horticulturists, growing either dry rice in upland fields or wet rice in lowland paddies. In the modern period many Magindanaon have shifted to plow and harrow methods of wet rice cultivation (Stewart 1977).^[5]

The Iranun

Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, the Spanish chronicler Francisco Gainza described a population of skilled and fiercely independent sea raiders living along the eastern shore of Ilana Bay who called themselves "Iranun."

[T]his large population, designated by some geographers with the name of the Illana [Iranun] Confederation, in reality does not form a single political body except to defend its independence when it is found threatened . . . They live loaded with weapons; they reside in dwellings artfully encircled by barricades . . . and they maintain their bellicose spirit by continuously engaging in robbery and theft. Through piracy they strive to gather slaves for aggrandizement and to provide their subsistence . . .

In short, this particular society can only be considered a great lair of robbers, or a nursery for destructive and ferocious men. (Quoted in Bernaldez 1857, 46–47)

The Iranun today are a population whose size has never been accurately estimated by a government agency but who probably number somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 individuals.^[6] Most Iranun continue to reside along the eastern shore of Ilana Bay, although some have also long inhabited the hill country lying between the coast and the southern edge of the Lanao Plateau. The Iranun language is closely related to the languages spoken by the Iranun's more populous Muslim neighbors, the Magindanaon and the Maranao of the Lanao Plateau.^[7] The Iranun share with their neighbors the profession of Islam, as well as a number of other cultural institutions. There has long been intermarriage between the Iranun, Magindanaon, and Maranao, and the percentage of intergroup marriages has increased since midcentury.

As Gainza's account indicates, the Iranun living at the coast once practiced a distinctive maritime adaptation. For at least 150 years prior to the inception of American colonial rule at the turn of the century, they specialized as seagoing marauders. The Iranun raided throughout island Southeast Asia, from the Celebes in the south to Luzon in the north and as far west as the Straits of Malacca, attacking merchant shipping and coastal settlements in search of slaves and plunder.^[8] They continue their seafaring ways today, but now as fishermen and long-distance traders.^[9]

The Tiruray

The Tiruray are non-Muslim^[10] upland horticulturalists who inhabit the northern portion of the Tiruray Highlands. In 1980, the Tiruray were estimated to number about 30,000 persons (Schlegel 1977). The Tiruray have made their living as shifting cultivators in the densely forested mountains and valleys of the highlands, growing rice, corn, tobacco, and other crops in upland fields and foraging in the surrounding forests.

For centuries the Tiruray have maintained significant trade relationships with Magindanaon communities in the lowlands. Similar to the pattern found throughout Southeast Asia, this upland-lowland trade involved exchanges of forest and swidden products for iron tools, cloth, and salt, and took place within unequal and often coercive clientage arrangements. Since the beginning of the American occupation at

the turn of the century, the Tiruray have been experiencing rapid social change. Today they are divided approximately in half between those more accessible communities that have been drawn into plow agriculture and all its attendant sociocultural transformations, and those communities of still-traditional people in the remote forests of the Tiruray Highlands (Schlegel 1979). As a result of the extensive and detailed ethnographic fieldwork of Stuart Schlegel, more is known about traditional Tiruray subsistence and social life than about any of the other indigenous populations of Cotabato (see, e.g., Schlegel 1970, 1972, 1979).