LEARNING the roots and the past is the only way to lead one to fully understand the story of a person, a thing and/or a place.
Kiblawan, a town in Davao del Sur, has long been struggling for its identity, thus, its local government unit (LGU) concerted efforts to conduct a cultural and historical mapping, a process done in identifying a place’s significant historical treasures.
The LGU started its mapping since 2013. For this initiative, the National Commission for the Culture and the Arts (NCCA) granted them a P2 million financial assistance for the realization of the project.
With more than over 10 volunteers for the mapping, they found out that the ancestral house of the Kiblawan’s first municipal mayor is historically significant for the town.
Magabilen’s Ancestral House
Last November 10 during the Pakigdait festival, the municipality officially unveiled and marked Magabilen’s Ancestral House as historically significant for Kiblawan.
The house was built in 1962. Like most of the hacienda-style houses during that period, it had a secret passage and an armory.
The family has long been out of residence and only Tatay Francisco, the family’s trusted in-charge, lives in the big ancestral house.
Lawyer Kaye Malilong, head of monuments and sites committee of NCCA and consultant of mapping projects from the NCCA “Safeguarding Heritage”, in an interview with VoxPop Davao said, under the Local Government Code, an LGU is required to protect its heritage as stipulated under the heritage law or Republic Act 166, mandating an LGU is supposed to come up with an inventory of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.
“We have over 1,000 towns in Philippines but very few has done this (cultural mapping), and we laud Kiblawan’s move recognizing how important safeguarding heritage is,” she said.
She added that it is but also important that it reaches a point wherein not only the teachers and the heritage enthusiasts and advocates were involved but also the local council to put into ordinance.
Through Kiblawan’s Municipal Council resolution no. 2 series of 2016 dated November 7, 2016, the heritage was declared as a significant cultural property in the municipality of Kiblawan.
The ancestral house, according to the resolution, exhibits unique aesthetic, historical, political and social significance.
Asked on the NCCA’s measures, Malilong said, the commission launched the “Busilak” project.
“The goal of this project is to teach the community to look at their place with new eyes. There are things that you take for granted because you see it often because we don’t value. We don’t have that consciousness that heritage is something precious. It is something that needs to be preserved so the next generation will still enjoy it, we need to take a measure to protect it,” she said.
She also shared that after the mapping, the next step for an LGU to do is to come out with a conservation management plan.
“A house for example, how do you make sure that it is still there after 50 years, usually condition assessment, then you do architectural documentation and then you find out what the stories are,” Malilong added.
Kiblawan is gearing towards the conservation management plan of the Magabilen house.
Malilong also explained that for intangible heritage, it is normally a skill, recipe, a technique for weaving, songs and prayer, among others. To preserve these, recording it and finding out who the masters are and pass it on to the next generation are usually what is being done.
She also emphasized that the heritage site, treasure also needs to be relevant to everyday life.
“If we don’t act today swiftly with commitment and passion, we are to lose these things, if we lose all our tangible heritage how will we know that we are in Kiblawan?” Malilong said.
Kiblawan’s Magabilen Ancestral House, a true treasure of the municipality has indeed signified that identity, culture and history are priceless and deserves to be preserved for generations to come.
