Dumagat-remontado history

Dumagat tribe kaliwa dam
Dumagat-remontado location
Dumagat tribe in quezon province

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Proud to be Agta Dumagat (The Philippines)

The Agta Dumagat of the southern Sierra Madre mountain range, in the Philippines, are one of the ancient Negrito ethnic groups with a hunter gatherer background.
Until very recently, the only “educational content” available to Agta Dumagat children was entirely designed for an urban middle class reality. As it was extremely hard for Agta Dumagat students to relate to it, the programme was literally placing them at an early huge disadvantage. Beyond that, schools also would alienate kids from their communities’ forest orientation, related values, culture, knowledge and skills, while acting as powerful agents of acculturation… to the low end of the mainstream.

The pilot project supported by the PKF Foundation aims at boosting the Agta Dumagat children’s self-esteem and ensuring that they have a head start in their voyage through the educational system, while securing uninterrupted intergenerational transfer of traditional knowledge, practices and belief systems.
The initiative will be implemented in two Agta Dumagat schools, run

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Dumagat, Remontado

Once spoken in large parts of two CALABARZON provinces, Dumagat, Remontado [agv] is now confined to two sitios in Tanay, Rizal, and three areas in General Nakar, Quezon. As of 2018, only half of the said communities’ populations use the language, and the number of speakers is far less than the recorded 2,530 in 2000. Dumagat, Remontado is classified as moribund (EGIDS 8a) and was once thought to be no longer in use back in 2006 (Eberhard et al., 2022). A more recent study approximated that there are about 325 speakers left, all aged 50 years and above (Lobel & Surbano, 2019).

Aside from intermarriage with Tagalogs, Dumagets, Ilokanos, and Aklanons, non-transmission to the younger generation, and isolation of communities (Lobel & Surbano, 2019), a case of long-standing development aggression (Subingsubing & Ramos, 2021a; 2021b) contributes to the endangerment of the language and its speakers.

People in recent years

“A tribe under threat: Dumagats vs dams,” reads an article published by Inquirer in September 2021. This is the second of a two-

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A Philippine tribe that defeated a dam prepares to fight its reincarnation

‘The dam is cunning’

The community members who gathered in the town of Lumutan to vote on whether to consent to the project this past September had already encountered it under its various guises over the years. This time, though, they knew “so little about this new one,” said Jaime from the Katribu coalition. “The community is confused.”

“We don’t even know what the project’s about,” said Tatang, one of those present. “They come here and ask for our votes but they didn’t even show us the plan,” he added, referring to the water agency and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).

Questions were also raised about how the government was speeding up the process: It had grouped the community into six clusters, essentially stripping down their communal approach to bloc voting and downplaying the great geographical distance between one community and another — an obstacle that only the most eager were likely to try to overcome. “That’s the challenge: every member has to be thoroughly informed of wh