Professor’s Project Creates Second Ever Book in Endangered Philippine Indigenous Language

Oona Paredes, photographed in the Philippines, hopes the book kicks off a longer-term effort to jumpstart a literary tradition for the Higaunon.

In an article by UCLA Humanities, Sean Brenner writes about Oona Paredes’s recent research project resulting in the second book ever published in the Higaunon language.

The Higaunon people, an Indigenous minority ethnic group in the Philippines, number roughly 250,000 and live in the mountains of north central Mindanao. For more than 200 years, they have maintained an oral tradition, with ancestral stories, laws and religious practices passed down across generations through spoken word. Until the late 20th century, their language had never been committed to paper.

The Higaunon people live in the mountains of north central Mindanao, roughly the area bounded by the yellow ellipse in the inset.

Then, in 1981, a Christian missionary group arrived in Higaunon territory and began working on the first-ever Higaunon orthography — a system for codifying a written language. That was a precursor to what became a 25-year-long effort to translate the New Testament into the Higaunon language.

Years later, Paredes, who was raised in Mindanao, started a collaboration with members of a small Higaunon community called Baligiyan on what would become only the second book written in Higaunon — and the first centered on the Higaunon themselves. The project was as an offshoot of Paredes’s study of Indigenous political authority in the Philippines. As she was conducting preliminary research for that project, local leaders kept bringing up the Panud, a collection of the community’s foundational stories about its origins, history, religion and laws that have been passed down through the generations in chanted form.