Jake Verzosa recalls the time he first got a tattoo from Whang-Od. The year was 2009, and he paid for his markings in brown sugar and posporo. “When Whang-Od started getting tired after tattooing for a few hours, Grace would take over,” he tells me. Indeed, the cuff on his arm starts off a bit crooked. Grace would have been 13 at the time, but “her lines were very clean.” Growing up in Tuguegarao, Jake would see the tattooed elders near his school and would often hear stories about Buscalan. It was not an easy trek to make, and at the time it was mostly foreigners who happened upon the village. Jake would spend three years completing his portrait series of the women elders of Kalinga. His iconic black-and white image of Whang-Od, which has been exhibited all over the world, can be found in various permutations all over Buscalan.
Whang-Od’s face is also plastered on all kinds of merch from t-shirts to coffee packaging, and that’s just in Buscalan. I don’t know if it’s because of her guilelessness and genuine desire to share her culture, but she has been at the center of several incidents that have been called out as exploitative, with a few requiring the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples to step in as the gatekeepers of indigenous intellectual property rights.
At a webinar that discussed these issues, social anthropologist Dr. Analyn Salvador-Amores noted that what was once a place-based ritual has been transformed into a commercialized practice. “Culture is an increasingly prized commodity, aggressively appropriated by other entities,” she said. “Instead of asking who owns culture, we should ask how we can promote respectful treatment of native culture and indigenous forms of self-expression within mass societies.”
Whang-Od, who turned 106 in February, is the oldest living mambabatok but certainly not the last. The three dots representing Apo, Grace, and Elyang are also ellipses, signifying an open-endedness and a continuation that extends beyond its origins. In the US, practitioners like Lane Wilcken and Natalia Roxas advocate for the ceremonial tradition of batok, and they have helped and healed many Filipino Americans seeking to connect with their heritage by wearing the symbols of their ancestors. Elsewhere in the Philippines, Bukidnon tattoo practitioner Piper Abas is reviving the art of traditional Visayan and Mindanao tattooing, or patik. More Filipinos choosing to get an indigenous tattoo, one that carries with it a long history, can be seen as a step toward decolonizing aesthetics, reclaiming our bodies, and reconnecting with our roots, our selves.
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