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Paradise Lost: The Aeta People After Pinatubo
| Article
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20041 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
3,915 Words |
| Author
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David Sturgis
Writer and photographer David Sturgis has traveled widely
throughout the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and Nepal
documenting the changing lives of indigenous people. |
Victor Melicia has seen many things in his sixty-plus years. His early memories are of his people's peaceful life in their ancestral mountain home in the Philippines. He remembers the Japanese intruders he fought from that home in the time of war, and the great American general, Douglas MacArthur.
The small, dark, and slender man laughs as he thinks of the succession of social workers who showed up over the years, vainly attempting to coax Melicia's proud, independent people from the mountains with promises of a prosperous agricultural life in the lowlands.
But these days, as Melicia sits under the blue plastic roof of his temporary shelter at the Cabalan evacuation center, he can think only of the terrible thing that has happened; of the cataclysm that succeeded where missionaries and warriors failed, evicting his people permanently from their home.
Private Lives
Melicia is an Aeta, a member of the small nation of indigenous people who have lived since the seventeenth century on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo. They lived in harmony with the spirits of their mountain, safe from land-hungry conquerors below, hunting wild pigs and deer and cultivating root crops on the slumbering volcano's thickly forested slopes.
Then in June 1991, after six hundred years of benign quiet, Pinatubo erupted in an explosion so huge it is expected to affect the world's atmosphere and weather for years. Over the course of a week it ejected three cubic kilometers of volcanic grit, burying the rich breadbasket farmlands of Zambales Province, crushing the homes of thousands of Filipinos, and bringing about the closure of two of America's most important military bases in the Pacific--Clark Air Base and the Subic Bay naval facility. Hard hit as they were, most of those affected had somewhere to turn for aid or refuge. Lush ricelands are found throughout the Philippines, and Filipinos could hope for help from families outside the region. The U.S. soldiers could--and did--pack up and head home.
But all the world's twelve thousand Aeta lived around Pinatubo and nowhere else. Their entire cultural, social, and historical identity has been entombed beneath a hundred-foot-thick volcanic slab. The mountain, shortened three thousand feet by the blast, rises above their old homeland like an abbreviated tombstone. For residents of the United States, it is as if all of North
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