(Note: Names have been changed for privacy)

The Bagobos settled on Mt. Apo, the tallest mountain nationwide, centuries before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Davao Gulf Coast, during the so-called Austronesian Dispersal. “Bago” means new, ubo means people, hence the “new people.”

The Austronesian Dispersal, a massive migration of Malays and Polynesians, which took about 5,000 years, began at the end of the fourth and last glacial period, about 10,000 BC. Geologists still debate today whether the dispersal originated in Burma or some southern shore of mainland China.

The Austronesians are the ancestors of present-day Filipinos, Indonesians, Malaysians and Polynesians, or more popularly known as the Malayo-Polynesians or “brown race.” They were prehistoric mariners, the first boat people in human history, free spirits with wanderlust.

The rising of the sea due to the melting of the polar ice cap triggered the dispersal. As the land shrank, they built their makeshift mini-boats. Centuries before the Phoenicians roamed the calm Mediterranean in the first known wooden ships, the Austronesians had already reached the remote islands of the vast violent Pacific — Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii, using tiny makeshift boats (balanghay in Pilipino).

The Bagobos were pushed back to the mountains by succeeding more superior Malay migrants who took over the lush plains. There, in their mountain sanctuary, the Bagobos learned the wisdom of herbal medicine from the lush rainforest.

During my journalistic trips to Mt. Apo, I met Datu Ugo, a babaylan (medicine man), whom I interviewed in his humble one-room home in Kidapawan at the foot of Mt. Apo. He was a warrior and an herbalist. He showed me a volcanic stone, which was wrapped in cloth hidden in the ceiling. It was black, shiny, and smooth as glass, very heavy, perfectly egg-shaped but bigger in size, as if refined by machine.

Datu Ugo said, “Apo Sandawa told me in a dream to look for this ‘healing stone.’ I searched for years, roaming the rainforest, until I stumbled on a giant centuries-old balete tree. I had a strange feeling. I put my hand deep into its tangled roots. There it was, waiting for me, just as I had seen it in my dream, this stone.”

He recalled that, one day, his stone was gone. He feared Apo Sandawa, the mountain god-spirit, was angry and took away his healing powers. After a week, a fellow babaylan came and admitted he had stolen the stone. He knelt, begging for forgiveness. He said that after he stole the stone, he got a high fever that would not go away. As soon as he returned the stone, his fever vanished.

I met another babaylan, Datu Godo. For two days, he walked me through quickly across centuries of Bagobo oral history, the peopling and the legends of Mt. Apo. He said Apo Sandawa talked to him in dreams, giving him advice on how to handle the crisis with lowlanders, essentially of rapid assimilation and their loss of heritage. He said he would wake up suddenly from a dream and know what to do.

The sophisticated Bagobo herbal culture is thousands of years old. They have rare herbs unique to Mt. Apo to cure all kinds of diseases, even cancer, they claim. Datu Godo complained that the herbs were vanishing fast due to the wars between soldiers and rebels. The soldiers would set forest fires to deny the rebels cover. Some rare herbs unique to Mt. Apo are now extinct.

(To be continued)