The Redness of Balitok in Ibaloy Folklore and Literature

For centuries, the Ibaloys of Benguet, Philippines, have used traditional methods to mine for balitok (gold) and other precious metals from their mountains. The presence of balitok, like Promethean fire, transformed Ibaloy society: balitok was first intended by the Ibaloys’ foremost deity Kabunian to scatter the settlements called ili and introduce trade to the mountain people. Gold, however, also brought about social stratification and the arrival of colonial forces into the interior Cordilleras in the northern Philippines. As chronicled in their wealth of folk narratives, the Ibaloys’ view of balitok and its acquisition teach us not only of the value of land-based thinking, wealth distribution, and resource management but also remind us that the world as we know it is a world of landslides–of instability and precariousness. Living in our global ili where the present climate crisis destabilizes the everyday, the Ibaloy mythology of gold is a myth for our times, reminding us of our unstable place in nature. Drawing from this cosmology are literary offshoots from Ibaloy writers such as Sinai Hamada (“The Punishment of Kutnon” and “The Pagan”), Ryan Guinaran (“Umsiang”), and Melvin Magsanoc (“The Gold Rush”). They present a reimagining of how the ili is transformed by balitok (and how balitok, in turn, is transformed by us), from Hamada’s reportage of local life in the early colonial period, Guinaran’s Itogon-inspired verses about the transformation and objectification of land through gold, to Magsanoc’s poem about a gold rush that erodes not only the physicality of the land but also our collective well-being.