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Updated: June 4, 2025
It is largely by the possession or nonpossession of real property that a man is considered rich or poor. This fact is due to the more apparent and tangible form of real than personal property. The ten richest people in Bontoc, nine men and a woman, own, it is said, in round numbers one hundred sementeras each.
The sleeping hat is made only by Bontoc and Samoki; it goes extensively in commerce. The large winnowing tray employed universally by the Igorot is said to be made nowhere in the vicinity except in Samoki and Kamyu. Bontoc and Samoki alone make the man's dirt scoop, the takochug, and it is invariably employed by all men laboring in the sementeras.
The women remove their skirts, they say, because they usually possess only one at a time, and they prefer to go naked in the rain and while working in the wet sementeras rather than sit in a wet skirt when they reach home. Few women in the Bontoc area wear jackets or waists.
Five manojos of palay is the daily wage for all laborers except those mentioned in the last paragraph. This is the wage of the wood gatherer in the mountains, of the builder of granaries, sementeras, irrigating ditches, and dikes, and of those who prepare soils and who plant and harvest crops.
In other places outlooks are erected for the purpose. At this season of the year when practically all the people of the pueblo are in the sementeras. it is most interesting to watch the homecoming of the laborers at night. At early dusk they may be seen coming in over the trails leading from the sementeras to the pueblo in long processions.
Long distances in the mountains or on the trail are measured by the length of time necessary to walk them, and the length of time is told by pointing to the place of the sun in the heavens at the hour of departure and arrival. Rice sementeras are measured by the number of cargoes of palay they produce.
In this way, it is said, the rich became the richer at the expense of the poor. This condition is suggested by recent RECLAMOS made by poor people. Again, since the American heard the RECLAMOS of all classes of people, the poor who, according to Igorot custom, forfeited sementeras to those richer as a penalty for stealing palay, have come to dispute the ownership of certain real property.
I saw only one variation from the above methods in the Bontoc area. In some of the large sementeras in the flat river bottom near Bontoc pueblo a herd of seventeen carabaos was skillfully milled round and round in the water, after the soil was turned, stirring and mixing the bed into a uniform ooze.
There are two varieties of sementeras garden patches, called "pay-yo'" in the Bontoc area, the irrigated and the unirrigated. The irrigated sementeras grow two crops annually, one of rice by irrigation during the dry season and the other of camotes, "sweet potatoes," grown in the rainy season without irrigation. The unirrigated sementera is of two kinds.
It continues about six weeks, or until near the 1st of September. Sa-gan-ma' is the sixth period. It is the time when the sementeras to be used as seed beds for rice are put in condition, the earth being turned three different times. It lasts about two months.
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