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Mangudadatu assures of more `colorfully intricate' 2019 Inaul Festival

TOURISM • 15:47 PM Thu Feb 15, 2018
619
By: 
John Unson
Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu helps ethnic arts enthusiast Stephanie Gancayco from California wear a vest fashioned from inaul fabric. (JOHN UNSON)

MAGUINDANAO --- The Maguindanao Inaul Festival ended with a surprise, something organizers and even the chief executive of the province, Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu, did not expect.A group of 19 researchers, show directors and academicians from the Kulintang Arts, also known as Kularts, in San Francisco, California, arrived during the culmination program on Wednesday of the festival in Buluan town to observe an open-field ethno-historic cultural dance contest as part of a cross-country study tour.Founded in 1985 by Filipinos in the United States of America, the Kularts is helping educate Americans on Philippine ethnic arts through mentorship, international collaboration and educational outreach programs.The visiting Kularts ethnic arts experts told reporters they came all the way from California to study the intricacies of the second provincial Inaul Festival and its relevance to preservation of local cultures and traditions. We are not worried of our safety here. We know Maguindanao is a peaceful place contrary to how outsiders perceive the province to be. We’re not scared at all. We are here to study, said Allelulia Panis, the most senior of them said.Mangudadatu told them in public they can come back next year for a more intricate Inaul Festival, pioneered by his office in 2017.The governor gifted each of them an inaul-inspired vest in appreciation of their unannounced visit to Buluan town to witness the closing program of the Inaul Festival. Expect a more colorful, more intricate and more educating Inaul Festival in 2019. The province should have an inaul research center and a museum by then, Mangudadatu said.Entrepreneurs in central Mindanao are anticipating improvements in domestic commerce and trade with the participation of foreign and local dignitaries, among them Sebastian Baste Duterte, in the February 5-14 provincial Inaul Festival. Their visit to Buluan municipality will create the impression that it is indeed safe now to put up viable businesses in Maguindanao province, merchant Pete Marquez, a senior official of different central Mindanao business clubs, said Tuesday.President Rodrigo Duterte’s son, Baste, even toured last Monday the four corners of the renowned Lake Buluan on a fishing boat accompanied only by Sangguniang Panlalawigan member Jhazzer Mangudadatu and Gen. Bismark Soliba of the Army’s 1stMechanized Brigade, with only an unarmed military photographer in tow.There are more than a dozen government-recognized lairs of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front along the lake, scene of bloody clashes between state forces and the Moro National Liberation Front from the 1970s until the group forged a truce with Malacañang on September 2, 1996.Capped off with cultural shows, the Inaul Festival is meant to promote the traditional inaul hand woven fabric as indigenous product of ethnic Maguindanaons.The centuries-old inaul weaving craft is now being revived by the Maguindanao provincial government as an alternate source of income for local Muslim, Christian and Lumad families relying mainly on farming to survive.Baste told reporters and local officials Monday he was impressed with the ingenuity of Maguindanaons engaged in traditional crafts.He said he was fascinated too with what was for him marketability of their indigenous products to buyers in Metro Manila and abroad. Kulba kaayo kaning inyong activity diri karon (You’ve got an amazing activity going on here.), he said, referring to the Inaul Festival.Baste said he was also amazed with the entry of foreign investors in recent years to venture into agricultural projects such as large-scale Cavendish banana propagation, generating employment for local residents and revenues for municipal governments.He also promised to help promote the inaul fabric, a strong cultural icon of the Maguindanaons,also known in history books as people of the flooded plains owing to the proximity of the province to the vast Liguasan Delta that overflow and inundate many towns nearby during the rainy season.Sandra Siang, an official of the Kutawato Muslim Business Chamber, said their continuing, extensive promotion of the inaul fabric got a boost with Monday’s endorsement by President Duterte’s son no less. We are grateful to Baste for giving the inaul fabric `two thumbs up’ while he was around on Monday to witness the Inaul Festival activities, Siang said.Among the popular endorsers of the inaul fabric is a scion of a noble clan, House Deputy Speaker Sandra Sema, congressional representative of the first district of Maguindanao.She wears inaul-inspired garments in her official and public engagements as an advocacy to preserve a weaving industry started by the sultans that once ruled Mindanao, then Mandanawi Darusallam, long before the advent of Christianity in what is now the Visayas and Luzon in the 14thcentury.Anwar Malang, regional trade secretary of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, said the visit of foreign and local dignitaries to Buluan, capital town of Maguindanao, during the duration of the Inaul Festival will improve the local business climate. We have so much to offer to investors. Maguindanao has vast tracts of fertile lands. It has rivers and marshes from where we can get water to irrigate farms and, most importantly, we have a provincial government so active in domestic peace-building activities, Malang said.He said foreign investors, as a procedure, always gauge first the efficiency of local government units in areas where they are to put up businesses to determine the capability of elected leaders to keep their investments safe. Several towns in Maguindanao have received the vaunted Seal of Good Local Governance award from the central office of the Department of Interior and Local Government. That can help allay too whatever apprehensions these capitalists have, Malang said.

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