Lang Dulay

Born: August 3, 1928
Died: April 30, 2015
was a Filipino traditional weaver who was a recipient of the National Living Treasures Award.
She is credited with preserving her people's tradition of weaving T'nalak, a dyed fabric made
from refined abaca fibre. She knows a hundred designs, including the bulinglangit (clouds), the
bankiring (hair bangs), and the kabangi (butterfly), each one special for the stories it tells. Using
red and black dyes, she spins her stories with grace. Her textiles reflect the wisdom and the
visions of her people.

Before the 1960s, the Tboli bartered tnalak for horses, which played an important role in their
work. Upon the establishment of the St. Cruz Mission, which encouraged the community to
weave and provided them with a means to market their produce, the tnalak designs gained
widespread popularity and enable weavers like Lang to earn a steady income from their art.
However, the demand also resulted in the commercialization of the tnalak industry, with
outsiders coming in to impose their own designs on the Tboli weavers.

Ironically modern designs get a better price than the traditional ones. Despite this, and the fact
that those modern designs are easier to weave, Lang persists in doing things the old, if harder,
way, to give voice, in effect, to the songs that were her elders before her. Her textiles are judged
excellent because of the “fine even quality of the yarn, the close interweaving of the warp and
weft, the precision in the forms and patterns, the chromatic integrity of the dye, and the
consistency of the finish.”

She was only 12 when she first learned how to weave. Through the years, she has dreamed that,
someday she could pass on her talent and skills to the young in her community. Four of her
grandchildren have themselves picked up the shuttle and are learning to weave.

With the art comes certain taboos that Tboli weavers are careful to observe, such as passing a
single abaca thread all over the body before weaving so as not to get sick. Lang Dulay never
washes the tnalak with soap and avoids using soap when she is dyeing the threads in order to
maintain the pureness of the abaca.

Upon learning that she was being considered to be one of the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan
awardees, tears of joy fell from her eyes. She thought of the school that she wanted to build, a
school where the women of her community could go to perfect their art.
SALINTA MONON
Born: December 12, 1920
Died: June 4, 2009
Practically, since she was born, Salinta Monon had watched her mother’s nimble hands glide
over the loom, weaving traditional Bagobo textiles. At 12 she presented herself to her mother, to
be taught how to weave herself. Her ardent desire to excel in the art of her ancestors enabled her
to learn quickly. She developed a keen eye for the traditional designs, and now, at the age of 65,
she can identify the design as well as the author of a woven piece just by a glance. All her life
she has woven continuously, through her marriage and six pregnancies, and even after her
husband’s death 20 years ago. She and her sister are the only remaining Bagobo weavers in her
community. Her husband paid her parents a higher bride price because of her weaving skills.
However, he left all the abaca gathering and stripping to her. Instead, he concentrated on making
their small farm holding productive. Life was such that she was obliged to help out in the farm,
often putting her own work aside to make sure the planting got done and the harvest were
brought in. When her husband died, she was left alone with a farm and six children, but she
continued with her weaving, as a source of income as well as pride.Salinta has built a solid
reputation for the quality of her work and the intricacies of her designs. There is a continuing
demand for her fabrics. She has reached the stage where she is able to set her own price, but she
admits to a nagging sense of being underpaid nevertheless, considering the time she puts into her
work. It takes her three to four months to finish a fabric 3.5 m x 42 cm in length, or one abaca
tube skirt per month.

She used to wear the traditional hand-woven tube skirt of the Bagobo, of which the sinukla and
the bandira were two of the most common types until the market began to be flooded with cheap
machine-made fabrics. Now, she wears her traditional clothes only on special occasions. Of the
many designs she weaves, her favorite is the binuwaya (crocodile), which is one of the hardest to
make.

Today, she has her son to strip the abaca fibers for her. Abaca was once plentiful in their area,
but an unexpected scourge has devastated the wild abaca crops. Now, they are starting to
domesticate their own plants to keep up with the steady demand for the fabric.

When she has work to finish, Salinta isolates herself from her family to ensure privacy and
concentration in her art. At the moment, she does her weaving in her own home, but she wants
nothing better than to build a structure just for weaving, a place exclusively for the use of
weavers. She looks forward to teaching young wives in her community the art of weaving, for,
despite the increasing pressures of modern society, Bagobo women are still interested in learning
the art.

Few women in the 1990s have the inclination, patience or perseverance to undergo the strict
training and discipline to become a weaver. Salinta maintains a pragmatic attitude towards the
fact that she and her younger sister may be the only Bagobo weavers left, the last links to a
colorful tradition among their ancestors that had endured throughout the Spanish and American
colonization periods, and survived with a certain vigor up to the late 1950s.