Dayaw Season 2, conceptualized and hosted by Senator Loren Legarda, and produced by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC), is a six-part, 30-minute weekly documentary series that focuses on the preservation of the country’s culture and heritage.

Season two of Dayaw ends in a burst of color, ornamentation and adornment. Our IPs are known for their colorful and meaningful clothing and accessories. We look into how materials such as beads, brass and sequins have become more than just objects of trade but highly valued heirlooms and objects of social and spiritual value,” said Legarda.

The episode explores the significance of accessories and the meaning of each to the cultures of the Ga’dang, T’boli, and Bagobo. Many of the glass and stone beads used by IPs were from India, China, Afghanistan, Venice, and different parts of Europe that were traded all over the Philippines. These beads, which had economic value, were blended with native materials to become heirloom pieces.

A Continuing exploration of cultures and people we share this country with.

Colorful encounters with Filipinos who can, if we let them, enrich our own world views, our knowledge of ourselves.

Nourishing, sheltering, healing, adorning.

Celebrating the manifold ways of being Filipino.

Season 2 of Dayao ends in a burst of color, ornamentation, adornment.

From the story of ancient beads traded into the Philippines, to textiles adorned with sequins, from animist motifs to Christian symbols, all proudly proclaiming our sense of beauty to an admiring world.

Beads used by the indigenous peoples of the Philippines tell a fascinating story of travel, of trade, of how imported objects meant for economic exchange became objects of social and spiritual value.

Heirlooms that connect the weather to ancestors and spirits.

Since the 12th century, glass and stone beads from India, from China, from Afghanistan, from Venice and Europe have found themselves traded all over the Philippine archipelago.

The history of the bead trade is thousands of years old.

In the Philippines, it has not yet been fully documented and only further research will determine the exact travel routes from their places of manufacture to the Philippines.

I was told that the Chinese or even the European beads went through the Silk Route from Europe all the way to China and going to the Philippines.

And they went through the Middle East maybe to India, and then they went as far as Indonesia and all the Melanesian Islands.

So mainly if it's the Chinese beads, because the Chinese make beads out of glass, it is from the silk rope.

And the Spaniards when they came, they traded those beads with gold of the Kalingas.

Beads have always been the most easily traded of objects because of their size and quantity.

But more fascinating is how these imported beads have been traded into the most isolated communities in the archipelago to become highly valued heirlooms.

Imported treasures blended with native material to create a singular look and identity.

Lake Cebu in Mindanao, Hills and jagged mountaintops, lush forests washed alternatingly by mist and sunlight.

Though now ringed with tilapia fish pens owned by settlers, pushed farther away into hills by this encroachment, a people who cling to their identity.

In music and dance, in chant and ritual, in a unique style of dress, the Tiboli.

Tiboli women have long been renowned for their fastidious sense of style.

The basic garments, a short long-sleeved upper blouse and a tube skirt, are made all the more attractive by the use of small glass beads as well as other accessories that incorporate beads, brass, silver, natural materials.

Brass anklets, a heavy brass belt made from chain mail and hawk bells, bracelets and coiled rings, a comb with long bead tassels to frame the face.

When combined all these create both a joyful sonority as well as a colorful visually stunning spectacle, especially when the women dance.

A few things like their amulets, like the brass, the cast brass.

They make a form out of wax and then they cover the form with sand and then they pour molten metal so the wax would melt.

I think they still do that with bells now.

But most treasured among these heirlooms is the kemagi, a necklace that combines imported trade beads with minute gold gear beads and brass chains.

Many of the imported beads have local names as well as specific economic values.

So technically, I don't know if you can call it a bead if you separate them, because it's not round, it's flat with gears, gear teeth.

But then when you put them together, they look like a chain of beads.

Actually, most of the necklace is 3 beads, as I have shown you.

So, kemagi is just the, like, the the attraction, so to speak.

And that's where their wealth is shown, because it's gold.

As a whole assemblage, the kemagi is a synthesis of both the imported beads as well as the locally made gold gear beads.

2 worlds in 1 necklace, integrated, whole, pleasing to the eye, much like the Tiboli women in their colorful, noisy, amazing singularity.

Beads are small, portable, easy to store, carry and exchange.

As beads travel, they become more than just objects of trade.

Bunched together, they are opulent decorations for clothing.

Carefully selected, stranded together, beads become heirlooms of great prestige and value.

But they also say much about the Filipino aesthetic, our love of color, and our disciplined sense of style.

Small glass beads of contemporary make are popular with the highland animists of Mindanao.

These Tiboli women belong to a cooperative that has developed thriving cottage industries around beadwork, stringing thousands of these beads into necklaces and other accessories that have found ready audiences.

Beads are also an indispensable part of the traditional attire of many Mindanao highland groups.

Mandaya, Matigsalug, Agusanon, And other indigenous peoples who attended this year's Kadayawan festival in Davao City demonstrated how beads came together with other elements.

In both men and women, old and young, plain textiles are blank canvases to be decorated with a profusion of beads, sequins, horse hair, cotton pom-poms.

The result is a tapestry of color and texture, of contrasting materials and complementing motifs.

The Bagobos are probably the original ones who started beadwork.

Older examples of Bagobo costumes show a more severe and disciplined approach to design.

This jacket for men from the early 20th century shows how imported trade beads were incorporated with small discs of mother-of-pearl discs.

The earlier ones were chambered nautilus.

And then those, you can tell them by having a very thin shell.

Now so and then they made shells out they made sequins or mother-of-pearl.

Small discs meticulously cut from large shells, ground and shaped by hand, were a premium material for adorning bagobo and balaan clothing.

We can only wonder at the work that went into manufacturing these tiny beads and the difficult process of attaching them to the abaca cloth.

This penchant for adorning textile with beads is shared by the animists of Mindanao and with the people of the Cordillera, most notably the Gadang and the Kalinga.

The Gadang of Paracelis are renowned for their ability to weave, as well as decorate their textiles with bunches of glass beads.

These beads are often as tightly integrated into the textiles as the woven motifs.

The result is textiles that achieve a three-dimensional quality.

The fondness for beaded textiles is shared by both women and men.

No single element of their traditional costume is without beads, From the skirts, the long-sleeved jackets, the headpieces and accessories of the gadang woman, to the loincloths, short jackets and dramatic capes of the gadang men.

The gadangs are the peacocks of the Philippines.

If you know what I mean, you know, They are heavily ornamented.

While the kalingas, they prefer the more somber colors, like browns and blacks.

The value of larger, older beads is most manifest among the Kalinga.

For these peacocks of the north, a bead was seldom just an adornment.

Each specific type of trade bead that made its way up into the mountains had an economic value measured in livestock and other items of exchange.

Each complete necklace had an heirloom value, equivalent in rice fields and livestock.

And there were the healing, magical properties associated with the most precious of beads.

They use it as jewelry and they are heirloom jewelry.

They use beads in rituals, in decorations, ornaments, and even medicine.

You know the Kalingas, they gouge out the glass beads, powdered the chips and then drink to cure maybe stomach ailments.

And also for trade, They can buy carabaos, pigs, using beads.

The pilakid is the most precious of the Kalinga bead ornaments, a long string of beads worn diagonally, crossing the chest from the shoulder.

Asymmetric in design, the more precious old agate beads are worn in front, while the less valuable yellow beads are worn at the back.

Experts will instantly recognize how the Pilakit gathers beads from so many different locations.

The prized agate beads, or adyongan, are from India.

The blue and white chevron is from Venice, as are many of the colored glass beads.

The tinali is like four-armed beads of seed beads that is different colors wound around here.

And they have head beads, forehead beads, and practically all parts of the body.

Ifuga of Asipulo is that if the Parents have a daughter or a son who being a teenager, they will have performed first the balihung.

That they will bless the beads, this necklace, so that people will know that they have a growing daughter or son.

So after which is grown up in, she or he will get married, they will now use these accessories as the Mumbaki will bless them so that they will have a long, long life because this Pa'angaw will never fade out.

So a thousand years ago, brought by the Malays, bartered with pigs and chicken and rice, so they never want to sell or be brought by anyone, but it will be passed from generation to generation.

This can be valued by the 1 truck of land.

If you borrowed it and you lost it with your cousin, you will pay with your land, rice field.

If you will buy another like this and you will pay it, you can get back your property.

In a vanished world where cash did not exist, these beads were more than just simple adornments or vanities.

They embodied the concept of karangyaan, wealth, beauty, prestige.

Some say that why collect beads, trade beads, when they are not indigenous to the Philippines.

So what you can answer is, well, they have become part of our culture.

Not like, for example, comparing it with the textiles.

They make textiles, So you can say it is original.

But the beads, the only thing that you can call original there is the way they string them together, the way they wear them, or the way they make beadwork out of them.

Even though they don't originate from the Philippines.

From pre-Hispanic gold to the jewels of the Ivatan, then on to the batok of the Kalinga, then to the fascination for beads of many Filipino cultures.

In Maykawayan, contemporary Filipino craftsmen continue to indulge our love for adornment, for precious objects.

Their design vocabulary now incorporates Western motifs as well as Spanish, colonial, and neo-tribal.

Right after the war, the Micawayans started making souvenirs.

So, they sold the bell to the soldiers, and they put the Philippines on it.

Then, when Manila was destroyed, many workers died.

The labor was cheap in Maycabayan because it was actually only farmers.

That's when the industry started to develop.

Because the workers are there, the materials are there.

What's giving the industry energy is the new designers, the young designers.

It is not so much about the object or the precious metal, but about how different Filipinos have taken these and made them into their own expressions of beauty and value.

Contemporary artisans and craftsmen can learn so much from the devotional ways of traditional artists in terms of what they consider beautiful or rich or wealthy.

Because wealth in our traditional culture is a question in terms of the cost of materials.

Our traditional Artists emphasizes creativity.

No matter how modest, no matter how cheap materials are, what's important is your imagination.

And this is the reason why in our traditional art, any available material is just for art.

And it is what our craftsmen and our artisans can learn from our traditional art.

In other words, The point of art in our traditional cultures is to enhance life.

Because if you transform everything into an art, whatever you find in the house, furniture, cloth, clothing, mats, windows, as in Panay, the very beautiful window patterns in Panay.

The moment you transform everything into art, you heal people, because 1 of the best ways to heal, to integrate our being is through art.

When you find beauty, we feel so much peace of mind.

And so it's a healing function that is very important in our traditional culture.

A healing function of art that is the reason why we can learn so much from the traditional artists in terms of creating beauty.

In the second season of Daya, we looked at the many ways of being Filipino.

From what we eat, to how we build our homes, how we use music and dance to create rituals that heal and connect us to the natural world.

How we celebrate our bodies with beautiful motifs, all in the quest to achieve that most elusive of qualities.

Kabuuan ng loob, the feeling of wholeness within and without.

It is a gift many of our indigenous peoples struggle daily to preserve.

Next season, we explore the materials used to build symbols and expressions of our race, as well as the artisans whose life's work we must acknowledge and take pride in.

Always and in every story we do, we will show you that there is really much to be


Speaker 0: A Continuing exploration of cultures and people we share this country with. Colorful encounters with Filipinos who can, if we let them, enrich our own world views, our knowledge of ourselves. Nourishing, sheltering, healing, adorning. Celebrating the manifold ways of being Filipino. This is Dayao.

Our knowledge, our pride.

Speaker 1: Season 2 of Dayao ends in a burst of color, ornamentation, adornment. From the story of ancient beads traded into the Philippines, to textiles adorned with sequins, from animist motifs to Christian symbols, all proudly proclaiming our sense of beauty to an admiring world.

Speaker 0: Beads used by the indigenous peoples of the Philippines tell a fascinating story of travel, of trade, of how imported objects meant for economic exchange became objects of social and spiritual value. Heirlooms that connect the weather to ancestors and spirits. Since the 12th century, glass and stone beads from India, from China, from Afghanistan, from Venice and Europe have found themselves traded all over the Philippine archipelago. The history of the bead trade is thousands of years old. In the Philippines, it has not yet been fully documented and only further research will determine the exact travel routes from their places of manufacture to the Philippines.

Speaker 2: I was told that the Chinese or even the European beads went through the Silk Route from Europe all the way to China and going to the Philippines. And they went through the Middle East maybe to India, and then they went as far as Indonesia and all the Melanesian Islands. So mainly if it's the Chinese beads, because the Chinese make beads out of glass, it is from the silk rope. And even the Venetian ones went through. And the Spaniards when they came, they traded those beads with gold of the Kalingas.

Speaker 0: Beads have always been the most easily traded of objects because of their size and quantity. But more fascinating is how these imported beads have been traded into the most isolated communities in the archipelago to become highly valued heirlooms. Imported treasures blended with native material to create a singular look and identity. Lake Cebu in Mindanao, Hills and jagged mountaintops, lush forests washed alternatingly by mist and sunlight. A lake still beautiful.

Though now ringed with tilapia fish pens owned by settlers, pushed farther away into hills by this encroachment, a people who cling to their identity. In music and dance, in chant and ritual, in a unique style of dress, the Tiboli. Tiboli women have long been renowned for their fastidious sense of style. The basic garments, a short long-sleeved upper blouse and a tube skirt, are made all the more attractive by the use of small glass beads as well as other accessories that incorporate beads, brass, silver, natural materials. Brass anklets, a heavy brass belt made from chain mail and hawk bells, bracelets and coiled rings, a comb with long bead tassels to frame the face.

When combined all these create both a joyful sonority as well as a colorful visually stunning spectacle, especially when the women dance.

Speaker 2: A few things like their amulets, like the brass, the cast brass. They call it the lost wax method. They make them themselves. The Tiboli does that. They make a form out of wax and then they cover the form with sand and then they pour molten metal so the wax would melt.

What is left is the metal. So that is interesting. I think they still do that with bells now.

Speaker 0: But most treasured among these heirlooms is the kemagi, a necklace that combines imported trade beads with minute gold gear beads and brass chains. Many of the imported beads have local names as well as specific economic values.

Speaker 2: Dikemagi is interlocking gear beads. So technically, I don't know if you can call it a bead if you separate them, because it's not round, it's flat with gears, gear teeth. But then when you put them together, they look like a chain of beads. So they are made of low carat gold. Kimagi is only part of a necklace.

Actually, most of the necklace is 3 beads, as I have shown you. So, kemagi is just the, like, the the attraction, so to speak. And that's where their wealth is shown, because it's gold.

Speaker 0: As a whole assemblage, the kemagi is a synthesis of both the imported beads as well as the locally made gold gear beads. International trade meets Tiboli skill. 2 worlds in 1 necklace, integrated, whole, pleasing to the eye, much like the Tiboli women in their colorful, noisy, amazing singularity.

Speaker 1: Beads are small, portable, easy to store, carry and exchange. As beads travel, they become more than just objects of trade. They take on meanings and values. Bunched together, they are opulent decorations for clothing. Carefully selected, stranded together, beads become heirlooms of great prestige and value.

Lovely to look at. But they also say much about the Filipino aesthetic, our love of color, and our disciplined sense of style.

Speaker 0: Small glass beads of contemporary make are popular with the highland animists of Mindanao. These Tiboli women belong to a cooperative that has developed thriving cottage industries around beadwork, stringing thousands of these beads into necklaces and other accessories that have found ready audiences. Beads are also an indispensable part of the traditional attire of many Mindanao highland groups. The Bagobo. Balaan.

Manobo. Mandaya. Matigsalug. Agusanon. Mandaya, Matigsalug, Agusanon, And other indigenous peoples who attended this year's Kadayawan festival in Davao City demonstrated how beads came together with other elements.

In both men and women, old and young, plain textiles are blank canvases to be decorated with a profusion of beads, sequins, horse hair, cotton pom-poms. The result is a tapestry of color and texture, of contrasting materials and complementing motifs.

Speaker 2: The Bagobos are probably the original ones who started beadwork.

Speaker 0: Older examples of Bagobo costumes show a more severe and disciplined approach to design. This jacket for men from the early 20th century shows how imported trade beads were incorporated with small discs of mother-of-pearl discs.

Speaker 2: The earlier ones were chambered nautilus. It's like an ammonite. It's like a spiral 1. And then those, you can tell them by having a very thin shell. Now so and then they made shells out they made sequins or mother-of-pearl.

Speaker 0: Small discs meticulously cut from large shells, ground and shaped by hand, were a premium material for adorning bagobo and balaan clothing. We can only wonder at the work that went into manufacturing these tiny beads and the difficult process of attaching them to the abaca cloth. This penchant for adorning textile with beads is shared by the animists of Mindanao and with the people of the Cordillera, most notably the Gadang and the Kalinga. The Gadang of Paracelis are renowned for their ability to weave, as well as decorate their textiles with bunches of glass beads. These beads are often as tightly integrated into the textiles as the woven motifs.

The result is textiles that achieve a three-dimensional quality. The fondness for beaded textiles is shared by both women and men. No single element of their traditional costume is without beads, From the skirts, the long-sleeved jackets, the headpieces and accessories of the gadang woman, to the loincloths, short jackets and dramatic capes of the gadang men.

Speaker 2: The gadangs are the peacocks of the Philippines. If you know what I mean, you know, They are heavily ornamented. While the kalingas, they prefer the more somber colors, like browns and blacks.

Speaker 0: The value of larger, older beads is most manifest among the Kalinga. For these peacocks of the north, a bead was seldom just an adornment. Each specific type of trade bead that made its way up into the mountains had an economic value measured in livestock and other items of exchange. Each complete necklace had an heirloom value, equivalent in rice fields and livestock. And there were the healing, magical properties associated with the most precious of beads.

Speaker 2: They use it as jewelry and they are heirloom jewelry. They pass through the female line. They use beads in rituals, in decorations, ornaments, and even medicine. You know the Kalingas, they gouge out the glass beads, powdered the chips and then drink to cure maybe stomach ailments. And also for trade, They can buy carabaos, pigs, using beads.

Speaker 0: The pilakid is the most precious of the Kalinga bead ornaments, a long string of beads worn diagonally, crossing the chest from the shoulder. Asymmetric in design, the more precious old agate beads are worn in front, while the less valuable yellow beads are worn at the back. Experts will instantly recognize how the Pilakit gathers beads from so many different locations. The prized agate beads, or adyongan, are from India. The blue and white chevron is from Venice, as are many of the colored glass beads.

Speaker 2: The tinali is like four-armed beads of seed beads that is different colors wound around here. That is for the arms. And they have chokers. And they have head beads, forehead beads, and practically all parts of the body.

Speaker 3: Ifuga of Asipulo is that if the Parents have a daughter or a son who being a teenager, they will have performed first the balihung. That they will bless the beads, this necklace, so that people will know that they have a growing daughter or son. So there is the Balihung. So after which is grown up in, she or he will get married, they will now use these accessories as the Mumbaki will bless them so that they will have a long, long life because this Pa'angaw will never fade out. It will be always yellow.

So a thousand years ago, brought by the Malays, bartered with pigs and chicken and rice, so they never want to sell or be brought by anyone, but it will be passed from generation to generation. This can be valued by the 1 truck of land. If you borrowed it and you lost it with your cousin, you will pay with your land, rice field. If you will buy another like this and you will pay it, you can get back your property.

Speaker 0: In a vanished world where cash did not exist, these beads were more than just simple adornments or vanities. They embodied the concept of karangyaan, wealth, beauty, prestige.

Speaker 2: Some say that why collect beads, trade beads, when they are not indigenous to the Philippines. So what you can answer is, well, they have become part of our culture. Not like, for example, comparing it with the textiles. They make textiles, So you can say it is original. But the beads, the only thing that you can call original there is the way they string them together, the way they wear them, or the way they make beadwork out of them.

Even though they don't originate from the Philippines. It has been part of our culture.

Speaker 0: From pre-Hispanic gold to the jewels of the Ivatan, then on to the batok of the Kalinga, then to the fascination for beads of many Filipino cultures. In Maykawayan, contemporary Filipino craftsmen continue to indulge our love for adornment, for precious objects. Their design vocabulary now incorporates Western motifs as well as Spanish, colonial, and neo-tribal.

Speaker 4: Right after the war, the Micawayans started making souvenirs. The Micawayans started making souvenirs. So, they sold the bell to the soldiers, and they put the Philippines on it. Those were the souvenir items. Then, when Manila was destroyed, many workers died.

They were looking for workers. The labor was cheap in Maycabayan because it was actually only farmers. That's when the industry started to develop. Because the workers are there, the materials are there. What's giving the industry energy is the new designers, the young designers.

Speaker 0: It is not so much about the object or the precious metal, but about how different Filipinos have taken these and made them into their own expressions of beauty and value.

Speaker 5: Contemporary artisans and craftsmen can learn so much from the devotional ways of traditional artists in terms of what they consider beautiful or rich or wealthy. Because wealth in our traditional culture is a question in terms of the cost of materials. Our traditional Artists emphasizes creativity. No matter how modest, no matter how cheap materials are, what's important is your imagination. And this is the reason why in our traditional art, any available material is just for art.

And it is what our craftsmen and our artisans can learn from our traditional art. There's beauty in everything. In other words, The point of art in our traditional cultures is to enhance life. Because if you transform everything into an art, whatever you find in the house, furniture, cloth, clothing, mats, windows, as in Panay, the very beautiful window patterns in Panay. The moment you transform everything into art, you heal people, because 1 of the best ways to heal, to integrate our being is through art.

When you find beauty, we feel so much peace of mind. And so it's a healing function that is very important in our traditional culture. A healing function of art that is the reason why we can learn so much from the traditional artists in terms of creating beauty.

Speaker 1: In the second season of Daya, we looked at the many ways of being Filipino. From what we eat, to how we build our homes, how we use music and dance to create rituals that heal and connect us to the natural world. How we celebrate our bodies with beautiful motifs, all in the quest to achieve that most elusive of qualities. Kabuuan ng loob, the feeling of wholeness within and without. It is a gift many of our indigenous peoples struggle daily to preserve.

Next season, we explore the materials used to build symbols and expressions of our race, as well as the artisans whose life's work we must acknowledge and take pride in. Always and in every story we do, we will show you that there is really much to be

Speaker 0: preserved. Dayao, our knowledge, our pride. ♪

See all NCCA Philippines transcripts on Youtube

Dayaw Season 2: Episode 6 – Karangyaan – Celebrating the Body (Part 2)