The Native Tasaday

The Tasaday Language: A Proof of their Existence

In the mid-1990s, Professor Lawrence A. Reid (U. of Hawaiʻi, Dept. of Linguistics, Emeritus) wrote that he spent 10 months with the Tasaday and surrounding linguistic groups (1993–1996) and has concluded that they “probably were as isolated as they claim, that they were indeed unfamiliar with agriculture, that their language was a different dialect from that spoken by the closest neighbouring group, and that there was no hoax perpetrated by the original group that reported their existence.”^[10]^[11] In his paper ‘Linguistic Archaeology: Tracking down the Tasaday Language’,^[12] Reid states that, although he originally thought that an individual Tasaday named Belayem was fabricating words, after a detailed analysis of the linguistic evidence he found that around 300 of Belayem’s forms were actually used in Manobo languages of Kulaman Valley, a place Belayem had never visited. He also mentions that a similar group was later found and confirmed to be living as hunter-gatherers without contact to other tribes

Download the file below to learn more about the language of Tasaday.

Linguistic Archaeology: Tracking Down the Tasaday Language Download

Tasaday: Victims of Cultural Assimilation; not the Murderers of Truth

As decades pass through, the Tasaday were affected by cultural assimilation, which, as defined by Spielberger, is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a dominant group or assume the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group. The Tasaday believed that to make things easier for them, they needed to change their practices and line it up with the modern world – this included learning agriculture, having their kids study, earn money, and even adapting other cultures – for their tribe to survive. They have assimilated with the lowlanders, Manobo-blit tribe and have acquired their ways.

Cultural assimilation explains how Oswald Iten, after years of discovery of the Tasaday, finds them in modern clothing, knew how to farm, etc. At that time, the Tasaday were already adapted, acquired, accustomed and adjusted to the culture of the neighboring tribes.

Who are the Tasaday?

The TASADAY is an indigenous group of people from the Philippines that lived deep in the tropical rain forest of southern Mindanao. They knew nothing of the outside world, lived in caves, subsisted off what the forest could provide, wore tiny leaf g-strings and used stone axes. They are considered to be the most primitive people on earth.

The Tasaday Controversy

Dafal discovered the Tasaday and shared his discovery to Manuel Elizalde Jr., a wealthy politician and the head of PANAMIN. Elizalde and his team publicly announced their discovery of the tribe in 1971 and claimed that the Tasaday were from the stone age so this drew attention worldwide.

They again attracted attention in 1986 when a journalist, Oswald Iten, visited the said tribe and reported the caves deserted and further claimed the Tasaday were simply members of known local tribes who put on the appearance of living a Stone Age lifestyle under pressure from Elizalde and the Marcos government. Instead, he saw them living in regular houses, wearing western clothing and tending gardens just like those of other rural Manobo people in the southern Philippines.

This sparked some accusations on the Tasaday saying that living in the jungle and speaking their dialect as being part of an elaborate hoax. Doubt was raised about their isolation and even about being a separate ethnic group.

37 years later, Kara David and her team of journalists climbed the rainforest of Mindanao in search of the lost tribe. They found them in extreme poverty. Because of the controversy, access to government services was difficult for the Tasaday. They now wear regular clothes and have assimilated with the lowlanders. But most of them are illiterate, dying without access to health services… poor and forgotten.

The Tasaday still assert their identity and feel pain when people call them a hoax. Kara David is not an anthropolgist and don’t know the truth behind their identity. But she is a journalist. And this what she knows: the Tasaday are Filipinos too. And they deserve to have a decent future. They deserve our help.