A Victory for the Binukot

There are book awards that feel like a polite tap on the shoulder, and then there are wins that land like a bell, telling you something almost slipped away.

Ginlawan, the latest published piece of the Suguidanon epics, just took the 43rd National Book Award for poetry in Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a, and it deserves the cheers, but it also deserves our unease.

Because this is not simply a book being honored. It is a voice being rescued from the edge of silence.

Federico “Tuohan” Caballero, the chanter whose performance carried these narratives, died in 2024, and that fact should change how we read the award, since it puts a hard deadline on how long we can keep calling this “heritage work” instead of “heritage emergency.”

The National Book Development Board and Manila Critics Circle said the book “enriches the cultural, social, and intellectual life” of the region and the nation, and yes, it does, but enrichment is not the same as continuity.

Continuity needs living learners, and that is why the quiet, unglamorous work matters more than any trophy: the School of Living Traditions model exists precisely to keep traditions alive through masters teaching young people in their own communities, not by freezing them in glass.

If we are serious, the next question is boring but necessary: who pays for years of teaching time, travel, documentation, and student support in places that do not get sustained cultural budgets.

The second question is even more uncomfortable: who owns the story when it moves from mountain chanting to university archives to glossy publishing to digitized files that can travel anywhere.

This is where Iloilo should stand a little taller, because the project’s efforts directing royalties back to the Panay Bukidnon community is not just a detail but a standard we should insist on across every “we preserved your culture” project in the country.

What makes the Ginlawan story worth more than a round of applause is the scaffolding underneath it. In 1993, Dr. Alicia Magos and Anna Razel Limoso-Ramirez started recording Caballero in Calinog. That work eventually produced a 14-book series, accepted by UP Press in 2015 and released last year under Director Galileo Zafra. And critically — this part gets skipped in most coverage — a tripartite memorandum of agreement was signed early on, ensuring that royalties from the published series go back to the Panay Bukidnon community. Not to UP. Not to the researchers. To the people whose ancestors created the work.

The Philippines’ own Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act recognizes “community intellectual rights” and ties protection to free and prior informed consent, which is exactly the point: preservation that ignores consent is not preservation, it is appropriation with better manners.

Globally, United Nations Declaration on the. Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) says Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop cultural heritage and intellectual property, and digitization should be built around that principle, not treated as a technical add-on.

So when moves to digitize more Panay Bukidnon narratives came to fore, the public conversation should not stop at “finally,” because the real test is whether the community retains real control over access, context, and use, including what should not be shared beyond the community.

And yes, while we are celebrating, we should also be honest about the story inside Ginlawan, because Malitong Yawa’s life is shaped by men’s decisions, men’s conflict, and men’s powers, which makes the epic a mirror that can still sting if we pretend it is only a quaint cultural victory lap.

Maybe that is part of why the Suguidanon stays alive, because it does not flatter us, it asks us to sit with power, desire, protection, and harm, and then it asks us what kind of community we want to be when we retell it.

If Iloilo wants a practical next step, it is this: fund the living tradition as seriously as we fund infrastructure, back the schools that teach the chanting and language, require ethical agreements that return benefits to communities, and treat digitization as a partnership with rules, not a race to upload.