The Igorot struggle for independence: William Henry Scott.

he would go to heaven if he died, his mother turned to me angrily
and told me she didn't want her son to go to heaven; why not
give him some miedicine and cure him and leave him in this world?"
And when a priest tried to persuade an old Igorot of Sumadel it
was unsanitary to bury the- dead under the-house, he replied, "But
don't you understand that if we bury our dead out there in the
cemetery on the mountain, they will come back at night, take up
their bodies and eat up all our camotes?" The whole Igorot
attitude toward their religion may be nicely summarized in an
18th century statement they made to some lowlanders:
"The fiestas of the Christians aren't worth anything because
it's all just a lot of noise-making with bells and drums and muskets,
and then everybody just goes home to his own house and eats
what little he has. But the fiestas of our leaders are not like that.
They are good-tasting and satisfying, and they don't have all that
racket. They kill animals by the dozens and everybody drinks until
he passes out. Among you anybody is mayor or headman, but
our leaders are never changed. No matter how much they spend,
they always have more."
Some Spaniards themselves understood the Igorot pride in
their own way of life. Father Francisco Antolin, a Dominican
friar stationed in Aritao, spent 18 years trying to learn as much
as he could about the Igorots and their way of life, and he wrote
a long book about them in 1789. The following is a quotation
from his description of the Igorots almost 200 years ago:
"The small population of the Filipinos is usually attributed
to smallpox, venereal disease and leprosy; or to wars, deforestation, tribute, division of land, migrations, and similar:things. But
the Igorots have practically none of these. They take sufficient
care of the mountain passes to prevent the entrance of smallpox
and other epidemics from the Christians. They don't navigate seas
or rivers, nor do they leave their own country. They have nobody
to order them to row, act as cargadors, or cut wood. They work,
eat and drink as they wish and when they like. They have few
long-range wars. The very fact of having maintained themselves
as an independent republic this long, exploiting their mines, without the Christians or other pagans having been able to seize their

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