Whang OD: The Last Kalinga Tattoo Artist

PERPETUALLY SHROUDED IN MIST, the Kalinga village of Buscalan sits high up in the Cordillera Mountains of northern Luzon, Philippines. Although all of the tattooed warriors are now gone, the village is teeming with tattooed elderly women that wear the artistry of the last Kalinga tattoo artist: 89-year-old Whang Od who learned the art of batok (tattoo) from her father.

Whang Od is a graceful woman who despite her age continues to work in her family’s rice fields nearly everyday. That may seem like nothing special, but then again Buscalan sits high atop the ridge of a mountain that dives 1,500 feet down towards a raging river that feeds numerous terraced rice fields below. Every morning at sunrise, Whang Od scales down some one-thousand stairs that shimmer in morning dew passing waterfalls and lush foliage in her worn-out flip-flops that have lost their treads. After reaching the river, she heads one mile upstream on a series of treacherous and muddy footpaths that eventually lead to her family’s rice terraces. She works all day until the heat of the afternoon sun drains all of her strength. Just after 4pm, the trek back up the mountain begins and Whang Od now has a fifty pound basket of rice attached to her forehead with a tumpline. Singing a few melodies along the way, she takes care to not miss a step and slowly, and very methodically, she plods her way up the staircase that seems to have no end. Once she reaches her hut, the rice basket comes to rest on the creaky wooden floor and then she immediately begins to prepare her dinner consisting of rice, greens, and a little pork that was gifted to her. As the sun starts to fade, crisp mountain air begins to permeate the cracks of the wooden walls of the house and Whang Od moves closer to the fire in her kitchen where she always sleeps. Tomorrow, she will repeat her routine as she has for over seventy years. (see related story here http://www.gmanews.tv/story/196315/ang-huling-mambabatok-documentary-by-kara-david)



KALINGA BATOK, THE HEADHUNTER’S SHRINE, AND A MODERN-DAY WARRIOR



When Whang Od was twenty-five, the man she was in love with died in a logging accident. Instead of looking for a new husband, she dedicated her life to tattooing and now sixty-four years later she is the last practitioner of an art form that many scholars believe is nearly one- thousand years old.




Although decades of missionization, colonial administration, and modernization have gradually led to the abandonment of Kalinga batok, enduring fragments of this rich tradition of body art continue to be worn by Kalinga elders: including the last generation of headhunting warriors whose numbers have perhaps dwindled to some thirty men. These World War II veterans who bravely fought Japanese machine gunners with spears, shields, and axes incited great fear in their Nipponese enemies; because once captured their heads would be taken and their bodies left to decompose in the moist air of the mountainous jungle terrain.

One of the last Kalinga warriors (mingor) to wear the traditional tattoos of his ancestors is 88-year-old Lakay Miguel (Lakay means “respected elder”). Miguel earned his marks for inter-village combat before WWII and for the heads he took during the great conflict. Because he killed or wounded more than two enemies he was permitted to receive the bikking tattoos on his chest which are the headhunter’s primary emblem. But Miguel’s bravery on the battlefield was unsurpassed and he was also allowed to receive the tattooed khaman or head-ax on his rib cage, markings on his back, and tattoos on his arms. The human anthropomorph tattooed beneath his khaman symbolizes his Japanese victims and also denote that he is a warrior of the highest rank. He also wears a faded cruciform between his eyes, three marks on his Adam’s apple as a preventive therapy against goiter, and small tally marks behind the ear that represent his number of enemy engagements.

Miguel's fondest memories was when he took the mandible of a Japanese enemy and began using it as the handle of his gangsa gong; a traditional custom of the Kalinga people. Today, gangsa gongs with human jawbone handles are considered priceless heirlooms and are only used during very special occasions.

In the Buaya region of northern Kalinga Province, most enemy skulls – minus their jawbones – usually came to rest in the sangasang or village shrine. Village shrines were the location where trophy heads and the severed body parts of enemies were stored after a headhunting celebration. Although individual family shrines were located in people’s houses that sometimes contained a bit of enemy skull, the village shrine was the most revered in the community because of the extreme supernatural power that emanated from it. In the Kalinga village of Buaya this enclosure, which stood at the outskirts of the village in a bamboo thicket, was believed to be protected by spiritual guardians of the sky, underworld, and water: each resembling a kind of aggressive or bloodthirsty beast (kakayap) or demon (alan). But the shrine also housed more beneficent entities like protective “friends” (bulun) and companions (bilbulun) that sometimes aided Kalinga headhunters on their human quests. If a village did not construct a sangasang, an evil spirit called a bingil was believed to plague the settlement until a shrine was erected or a blood sacrifice was made. These foul creatures resembled humans but their bodies were covered with pus and festering, decomposing wounds that smelled of rotten flesh.

Nowadays these shrines have for the most part been all but neglected because headhunting has lost favor. Rumors of recent headhunting raids are still heard throughout Kalinga territory, but these accounts are more fictitious than real. Even though there is a long history of blood feuding in the region and scores of victims have not yet been avenged by their family members, automatic weapons and rifles have replaced spears, shields, and head-axes, making headhunting less practical today than in the old days. A more typical feat is to simply shoot a foe at long range rather than attempting a close encounter of the enemy kind. Moreover, the agricultural areas around villages, which for centuries have been the primary hunting grounds, have been clear-cut to promote spotting enemies from a distance. So unless you’d like to make yourself an easy target in the scope of a M-16 assault rifle, most contemporary warriors don’t even think about taking heads because today’s warfare is long range and chances are that you would fail before you even started.