24/05/2026
This a long read, but a good one. It discusses the significance of the dap-ay to the Indigenous Kankanaey people, the role of the amam-a, the collective way of life of the umili, and the threats of modernization/colonization.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1KoSaoYJNz/?mibextid=wwXIfr
The Dap-ay System
(Traditional Governance in Besao Communities)
A journey into the living heartbeat of i-Besao governance, from the stone circle to the barangay hall
There is a place in Besao, Mountain Province, where the cold morning mist rolls in from the ridges of the Cordillera and settles around a circle of smooth, carefully arranged stones. In the center of that circle, a fire breathes quietly to life. Old men, the amam-a, gather around it. No written agenda. No gavel. No parliamentary manual. Yet from this modest ring of stone and fire, some of the most disciplined, most just, and most community-centered governance the highlands have ever known was born. This is the dap-ay. And if you are i-Besao, this is where you came from.
Before the Barangay Hall, There Was the Fire Circle
Long before Executive Order No. 42 of June 1963 carved Besao into a formal municipality with its 14 barangays, and certainly long before any American colonial administrator ever sketched a town plan on paper, the people of Besao already had a system of governance that was profoundly democratic, deeply communal, and spiritually grounded. It was called the dap-ay.
The dap-ay is, at its most visible level, a physical structure, a raised, paved ceremonial platform ringed with stone seats, centered on a communal fireplace. But to call it merely a "structure" would be like calling the rice terraces of the Cordillera merely "farms." It is both the building and the idea. The place and the process. The dap-ay was the social, religious, and political center of a cluster of families within each ili (village). And in Besao's Kankana-ey tradition, it was the original seat of everything that mattered- governance, law, ritual, education, and community belonging.
Every household in the ili was affiliated with the dap-ay nearest their home. Those member-households, the dumap-ays or dumadap-ays, were not simply residents of a neighborhood. Their membership in a dap-ay was, in the words of Matthew Tauli, a Kankana-ey scholar of the Batil-ang Peypeyan Clan, a signifier of "the household's oneness with the ili." You were not just a family living somewhere. You were a dumap-ay, a participant, a contributor, a stakeholder bound to your community from birth to death.
The Amam-a - Governance Without a Paycheck
At the center of dap-ay governance sat the amam-a, the council of elders. These were not officials appointed by any state authority, nor were they elected through a formal ballot. Their authority came from something the Kankana-ey have always understood- age, wisdom, lived experience, and the trust of the community.
The amam-a was both the legislature and the judiciary of the ili. They made and amended customary laws, planned and declared the dates of agricultural activities, settled disputes between families or between villages, and enforced the moral code of the community. They were, as one study on Mountain Province political tradition puts it, practitioners of "democratic principles such as consultation, participatory decision-making, consensus-building, representative government, and a commitment to the common good", all without a single written law or a single peso in official compensation... in rare to some occasions, a generous cut of meat.
Their primary tool for conflict resolution was the tong-tong, a process of earnest, face-to-face dialogue where conflicting parties were called together by the elders and guided toward resolution through sincere conversation. No lawyers. No lengthy litigation. Just men who had lived long enough to know that lasting peace is always better than a temporary win.
When disputes were too serious for words alone, the amam-a of Besao's ancestors reportedly employed methods that would seem dramatic today, the accused staring directly into the sun, or immersing their hand in boiling water- ordeals through which, in the community's belief, the truth would surface. Harsh as these may sound to modern ears, they reflected a deep commitment to accountability in a world where reputation and community trust were everything.
Inayan - The Law You Carry Inside You
You cannot tell the story of the dap-ay without speaking of inayan.
Among the Kankana-ey people of Mountain Province, and most certainly in Besao, inayan is not merely a rule. It is, as Dr. Caridad Fiar-od describes in her scholarly work on indigenous knowledge, "a value, belief, strategy, customary law governed in the council of elders" and "a natural law/principle and strategy for discipline." It means, simply, "it is wrong to do this." When an amam-a declared something inayan, the community understood it as both a moral and a communal boundary.
Inayan nan men-akew (it is wrong to steal) . Inayan governed how you treated your neighbor's field. How you spoke of another person. How you used the forest. Dr. Fiar-od observed that the degree of a community's adherence to inayan was directly tied to its care for the natural environment- the higher the adherence to inayan, the greater the protection of forests, fields, and rivers. This was not coincidental. The dap-ay governed not just human relationships but the relationship between the umili (the community) and the land that sustained them.
This is why, in Besao, forest management systems like the batangan, the communal pine forest owned and protected by the ili, grew directly out of the dap-ay system. The amam-a did not merely hold meetings. They held the community's relationship with creation itself.
Dap-ay is More Than a Meeting Place
If you were a young boy in old Besao, your life was shaped by the dap-ay in ways you perhaps did not fully understand until you were much older.
The moment you were old enough to leave your parents' sleeping quarters, you moved into the dap-ay. This was not an act of separation but of initiation. The dap-ay was your dormitory, your classroom, your training ground. It was where the older men passed down stories, skills, values, and the unwritten codes of being a man of the ili. You learned to farm, to weave community obligations into the fabric of your daily life, and to understand that the fire at the center of that stone circle was not just warmth, it was the shared life of your village.
When the planting season approached, it was the amam-a of the various dap-ays who gathered together to coordinate. No family planted ahead of another. No household was left behind. If a family was not yet ready, the planting was postponed, because the ili moved together or not at all. This was unity in its most practical expression.
The dap-ay was also the stage for the begnas, the community ritual of thanksgiving to Kabunian (the Almighty) for a bountiful harvest. The elders led the ceremony, the community feasted together, and the spiritual and civic were woven into one seamless act. In Besao and the surrounding Applai municipalities of Mountain Province, the begnas was, and in living communities, still is the great communal expression of gratitude, solidarity, and hope.
The Coming of New Systems in a Constantly Changing World
Then came the Spaniards, the Americans, the Commonwealth, and the Republic.
Documents from the 1700s already name Payeo, Catengan, Suquib, and Agawa among Besao's communities, proof that these villages existed and thrived long before colonial administration arrived to rename and reorganize them. The Spanish tried to reach the Igorots of the mountains to extract gold and save souls, but the Cordillera held firm. The Americans, through their colonial reorganization of local governance, introduced the concept of the barrio as an administrative unit, a concept that gradually layered over, though never entirely replaced, the dap-ay's authority.
By 1963, Besao became a formal municipality. By the 1990s, the Philippine barangay system was codified in the Local Government Code. Elected captains and sangguniang barangay took the official seats of power. Budget allocations, IDs, permits, and ordinances became the new vocabulary of governance.
The dap-ay did not disappear overnight. But it found itself in a strange in-between world, still standing beside many barangay halls, still gathering the old men, still the keeper of the deepest community memory, but no longer holding formal juridical authority. Some dap-ay structures were abandoned. Others became cultural markers, photographed by tourists rather than sat in by deliberating elders.
The Barrio Era (When America Renamed the Village)
On March 1, 1904, Besao was formally recognized as a Municipal District under American colonial administration. It was a small territory then, consisting of the settlements of Besao Proper, Payeo, Banguitan, Suquib, Ambagiw, and Balas-iyan, each of them a living ili with its own dap-ay, its own elders, its own fire circle. The Americans saw what they recognized as "villages" and called them by a name that was, in fact, borrowed from a much older Spanish colonial habit: barrio.
The word barrio was not indigenous to the Cordillera. It was not Kankana-ey. It was not even genuinely Filipino in origin, it came from the Arabic barr, meaning "open land," filtered through centuries of Spanish colonial usage. As scholars have noted, the term "barrio" is of foreign origin, a colonial transplant grafted onto communities that already had their own names for themselves and their own systems of self-governance far older than the word being imposed on them.
For the Americans, however, nomenclature was governance. On August 18, 1908, the Americans created the Mountain Province, which consisted of Benguet, Amburayan, Bontoc, Apayao, Ifugao, Kalinga, and Lepanto, and most of the Americans sent to the Cordillera were designated the rank of lieutenant governor, in charge of governance in the sub-provinces. Besao, then part of the sub-province of Lepanto, found itself administered within this new provincial architecture. Its communities, the barrios, were now units within a Western municipal framework, with American-appointed officials layered above the elders' circle.
What the Americans introduced was not just a new name for the village. They introduced a new logic- that the smallest unit of governance should be defined by geography rather than by kinship, covenant, or customary relationship. The most glaring difference between the modern barrio and the precolonial community-unit was that the modern entity represented a geographical entity, while the old community represented loyalty to a particular head and a collective covenant. For the i-Besao, whose identity had always been tied to the ili as a community of obligation and shared life, not merely a neighborhood on a map, this was a fundamental reimagining of what a "village" even meant.
Still, life in Besao's barrios continued much as it always had. The barrio lieutenant, the appointed or later elected head of each barrio, was the new face of state authority at the grassroots. But in practice, many communities still looked to their amam-a for real decisions. The barrio lieutenant might sign the paper. The elder still held the trust.
For decades after independence in 1946, the barrio system inherited from the American colonial period persisted as the smallest unit of local government, comprising elected barrio lieutenants and councils with limited fiscal and administrative powers focused primarily on basic community needs. It was governance of minimal reach, just enough to connect the upland village to the lowland state, but not enough to supplant the dap-ay's moral and social authority.
The turning point came post-war, when the Philippine government began to take the barrio more seriously as a governance unit. Republic Act No. 1408, the Barrio Council Law of 1955, initiated legal recognition of barrio councils, though still with limited autonomy. Republic Act No. 2370, the Barrio Charter Act of 1959, marked a critical shift by formalizing the barrio as a legitimate local government unit, providing for the election of officials, legislative functions, tax collection, and the establishment of a barrio assembly.
So by the time Executive Order No. 42 of June 1963 carved Besao out as its own municipality, separating it from the old larger Bontoc administrative unit that had grouped many Mountain Province communities together, Besao's communities were already operating under the barrio framework. The Municipal District of 1904 had grown. Its original six barrios had expanded. And now, as a stand-alone municipality, Besao and its barrios were fully integrated into the formal Philippine local government structure.
Then, in 1974, a president decided to change the name again.
On September 21, 1974, President Ferdinand Marcos signed Presidential Decree No. 557, declaring barrios all over the country as barangays, reviving the name which had existed as the basic political unit of the forebears even before the arrival of the Spaniards, until its renaming by the Americans in the 19th century to the barrio. The preamble of PD 557 itself acknowledged that it was through the barangays that the forebears consulted on matters of community interest, and that the term "barrio" was of foreign origin, prompting calls from communities nationwide to officially restore the indigenous name.
And so the barrio became the barangay once more. In Besao, the barrio of Payeo became Barangay Payeo. Besao Proper was divided into Besao East and Besao West. Agawa, Ambagiw, Banguitan, Catengan, Gueday, Lacmaan, Kin-iway, and the others- all formally redesignated as barangays, now with elected Barangay Captains, Sangguniang Barangay councils, Barangay Secretaries, and Barangay Treasurers.
The ili had been renamed twice in less than a century. But the dap-ay had been there all along.
IPRA and the Reclaiming of Indigenous Governance
In 1997, something important happened at the national level. The Philippines enacted Republic Act No. 8371, the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act, or IPRA, which formally recognized the rights of indigenous cultural communities to maintain their own political structures, customary governance systems, and ancestral domains.
IPRA did not simply offer cultural lip service. It mandated the recognition of indigenous political systems at the barangay, municipal, and even provincial level through mechanisms like the Indigenous Peoples Mandatory Representative (IPMR). It required free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) before any development project could proceed on ancestral domains, a principle deeply aligned with the dap-ay's tradition of collective decision-making before any ili-affecting action was taken.
For communities like Besao, IPRA was not the introduction of a new idea. It was the formal acknowledgment of what the amam-a had always practiced.
The Dap-ay Today
Stand in any of Besao's 14 barangays today and you will likely find the evidence of both worlds. A barangay hall with its printed resolutions and official seal. And nearby, perhaps slightly worn but still present, the stone circle of the dap-ay.
The dumap-ays of today's generation hold college degrees. Many have left for Baguio City, Manila, or abroad for work. The iPads are in the hands of the teenagers who sleep in comfortable rooms, not dap-ay dormitories. The tengaw and begnas and ob-obbo are still practiced in many communities, but the urgency of preserving them has become a topic of conference halls and Facebook groups as much as it is a lived daily practice.
And yet there are those who refuse to let the fire go cold.
Cultural workers, indigenous scholars, community elders, and the youth organizations of Besao continue to argue, rightly, that the dap-ay is not a relic but a resource. The tong-tong model of dialogue is arguably more suited to genuine conflict resolution than any adversarial court proceeding. The amam-a's tradition of consensus governance is more participatory than most barangay assemblies. The inayan principle, that inner moral restraint anchored in community accountability, addresses something that no amount of CCTV cameras or ordinances can fully manufacture.
As one cultural observer has rightly noted, the dap-ay's practices deserve to be taught not only around its own fireside but also in the sociology classrooms of schools at every level, where the younger generation of i-Besao and all Igorots can rediscover what their ancestors built with nothing more than wisdom, stones, fire, and each other.
A Circle That Has Never Truly Closed
The dap-ay of Besao is old. Older than the municipality, older than the province, older than the republic that now governs it. It emerged from the deep understanding that a community is not a collection of individuals living near each other, it is a living covenant of shared responsibility, shared memory, and shared destiny.
The amam-a who once sat in that circle of stones had no constitutions to quote, but they understood constitutionalism. They had no written code of laws, but they upheld justice. They held no formal elections, but they earned genuine mandate. And they did it all by the light of a communal fire, with inayan as their moral compass and Kabunian as their ultimate authority.
Today, as Besao navigates the intersection of modern local governance and indigenous heritage, the challenge is not to choose between the barangay hall and the dap-ay. It is to let them speak to each other, to let the wisdom of the stone circle breathe life and soul into the sometimes cold, procedural halls of official governance.
The fire is still there, i-Besao. It just needs tending.
https://besaomountainprovince.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-dap-ay-system-traditional.html
