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Updated: June 26, 2025
It is the soil-turning stick, used by both men and women in turning the earth in all irrigated sementeras for rice and camotes. It is also employed in digging around and prying out rocks to be removed from sementeras or needed for walls. It is spade, plow, pickax, and crowbar.
Beans and rice, each cooked separately, are frequently eaten together; such a dish is called "sib-fan'." Salt is eaten with sib-fan' by those pueblos which commonly consume salt. Maize is husked, silked, and then cooked on the cob. It is eaten from the cob, and no salt is used either in the cooking or eating. Camotes are eaten raw a great deal about the pueblo, the sementera, and the trail.
In Benguet all people carry on their backs, as also do the women of the Quiangan area. In all heavy transportation the Bontoc men carry the spear, using the handle as a staff, or now and then as a support for the load; the women frequently carry a stick for a staff. Man's common transportation vehicle is the ki-ma'-ta, and in it he carries palay, camotes, and manure.
Women plant, care for, harvest, and transport to the pueblo all camotes, millet, maize, and beans. The men and women together construct and repair irrigated sementeras, men usually digging the earth while the women transport it. Together they prepare the soil of irrigated sementeras, and carry manure to them from the pigpens.
Formerly they had to make up the shortage by eating camotes, but they have now become so prosperous that they can afford to buy rice, which is carted in over the Benguet Road. There are promising gold mines close at hand. Their development would have been impossible had not the construction of the Benguet Road made it feasible to bring in the necessary heavy machinery.
More effort is needed to thrust the kay-kay deep enough into the dry soil, and it is thrust three or four times before the earth may be turned. Only one-half the surface of a sementera is turned for camotes. Raised beds are made about 2 feet wide and 8 to 12 inches high. The spaces between these beds become paths along which the cultivator and harvester walks.
Aside from this universal medium of exchange the characteristic production of each community, in a minor way, answers for the community the needs of a medium of exchange. Samoki buys many things with her pots, such as tobacco and salt from Mayinit; cloth from Igorot comerciantes, breechcloth and basi from the Igorot producers; chickens, pigs, palay, and camotes from neighboring pueblos.
However, he is not wholly lacking in taste and preference in his foods. Of his common vegetable foods he frequently said he prefers, first, beans; second, rice; third, maize; fourth, camotes; fifth, millet. Rice is the staple food, and most families have sufficient for subsistence during the year.
The camote harvest is continued fairly well throughout the year. Undoubtedly some camotes are dug every day in the year from the dry mountain-side sementeras, but the regular harvest occurs during November and December, during which time the camotes are gathered from the irrigated sementeras preparatory to turning the soil for the transplanting of new rice. Women are the camote gatherers.
It is claimed that in Sagada the public part of the ceremony consists of a mud fight in the sementeras, mud being thrown by each contending party. Loskod This ceremony occurs once each year at the time of planting camotes, in the period of Ba-li'-ling. Som-kad' of ato Sigichan is the pueblo "priest" who performs the los-kod' ceremony.
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