Museo ng Nayong Pilipino Bulletin December 2020
For the year 2020, the Nayong Pilipino Foundation has been reconstructing its institutional history as well as that of its ethnographic collection. Research from intertextual sources, multi-sectoral consultations, in-depth interviews with scholars, and transmedia public engagement count among the efforts of the Heritage Space Program - Museo ng Nayon Project. Last December 4, 2020, the Museo ng Nayon team consulted Dr. Norma Respicio, Professor Emeritus of the University of the Philippines. Apart from being a scholar who has been working on textiles of the Philippines and cultural worker, she also worked on the ethnographic collection of NPF. Dr. Respicio began recounting several encounters with the collection under different leaderships and management. After the Marcos administration, then Executive Director Mercedita Dela Cruz developed programs for the museum to enrich the collection through tapping researchers with ethnographic study backgrounds. Dr. Respicio was one of the researchers invited to give a talk on Philippine ritual objects but this did not require working on the actual collection yet. It was not until the leadership of past Executive Director Ines V. Silvestre in the early 90s that she had the opportunity to work on it through a curatorial approach. Under Director Silvestre, plans to calibrate the presentation of the collection with recent ethnological practices were set in motion. Dr. Respicio was invited together with Dr. Abraham Sakili by Dr. Cherubim Quizon who was tasked to do curatorial work for the collection. The exhibit was called Gan-ay/Gyan- ay which was the common term for warp in the Philippines therefore highlighting the textile pieces. The assignment of work was divided into areas: Dr. Quizon for objects associated with the Lumad, Dr. Respicio for Cordillera, and Dr. Sakili on Islamic Mindanao.
Dr. Respicio encountered excellent pieces that she described to the Museo ng Nayon team: textiles from the Itneg; body ornaments from the Cordillera; a huge collection of beads from Kalinga; and objects from Ifugao such as a hagabi. She also recounted seeing numerous lengthy and intricate textile pieces from across abaca weaving cultures in the Philippines. There were Pis and Saputangan pieces that impressed Dr. Sakili and body ornamentations that Dr. Quizon featured in the exhibit.
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Dr. Respcio described how remarkable the collection was back then. A huge portion of it was from the Office of the Presidential Assistant on National Minorities (PANAMIN), an institution created in 1968 and led by Manuel Elizalde Jr. It became a national government arm in 1974 and was eventually dissolved after Elizalde fled the country.
Sometime in the early 2000, Dr. Respicio revisited the collection with a graduate student working on her master of arts degree. They met with the person in-charge of the collection that time and was shown an inventory-like document containing information and photos of the ethnographic pieces. During this time the museum was no longer maintained although the objects were in storage with adequate preventive conservation measures. The pieces she saw were mostly new and were very different from what she worked on in the 90s.
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After the collection was moved to the Nayong Pilipino Clark in 2007, she was asked to evaluate the pieces. At that juncture, Dr. Respicio no longer saw the pieces she encountered during her work with Dr. Quizon and Dr. Sakili. This consultation with Dr. Respicio helped the museum team confirm that the collection has suffered so many losses in the past. An estimated 50% of the collection are missing and current records cannot account for the extraordinary pieces mentioned by Dr. Respicio. Moreover, some information gathered from oral accounts state that most of the collection can be traced to PANAMIN but the current inventory reflects only about 10% explicitly mentioning PANAMIN.
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Rebuilding the history of NPF and the collection will require further investigation for what transpired within the institution-- tracing where the artifacts went, consulting the people involved, and a call for photos and records from data and archives. It is also crucial to validate oral accounts on past transactions involving the collection. Accounting for the losses of the Nayong Pilipino Foundation and confronting unethical practices that transpired in the past is only one among several research endeavors of the Museo ng Nayon team towards actionable policy recommendations and strategies.
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