March 2009 Women Securing Food
Women Securing Food, Tradtional Knowledge and Rights: An ExhibitThe exhibit is dubbed Women Securing Food, Traditional Knowledge and Rights. The exhibit was made by Innabuyog and the Cordillera Women’s Education Action Research Center (CWEARC) to portray the important roles of Cordillera indigenous women in economic production and in empowering themselves through building women’s organizations and mobilizations as expressions of their process of empowerment. This is part of observing this year’s International Working Women’s Day. The images included paintings of well-known artist Ben Cabrera who did an artwork of Cordillera women images in agricultural production in 1989 for the Cordillera Women’s Education and Resource Center (CWERC) then. These images of indigenous peasant women were widely used in education activities of Cordillera women through Innabuyog and had been a useful instrument in advocating indigenous women’s rights and concerns not just in the local but also at national and international level of advocacy.
The exhibit also contained art work of members from the GABRIELA-USA who spent some days to learn from indigenous peasant women in Kalinga in 2008. Aside from the artwork are a variety of indigenous women’s products of native rice, seeds, woven and wood materials and other organic food items which were produced by Innabuyog member organizations and support NGOs, which were sold to support the activities of the member organizations.
Viewers were a variety, from the local to visitors from other parts of the country and overseas, from the ordinary to artists, professionals and from different vocations, and personalities. Mayor Reinaldo Bautista, Jr. was among the first to appreciate the images at the opening of the exhibit on March 2. He was very much interested if those were for sale. When told that the photos/images were only for exhibit, he ended up buying a woven material and invited Innabuyog to have the exhibit at the Baguio City Hall.
Collectors and consumers of indigenous products and organic food items did not only look at the products but also bought them. With the positive feedbacks received, it was worth it to have used the space for an exhibit in educating the wider public of the situation of indigenous women in the Cordillera. We acknowledge the secretariat of the Session Road in Bloom of the Baguio Flower Festival in offering us the space as an organization for a cause. In one way, it was an opportunity to educate the wider public on indigenous women’s role in securing food, traditional knowledge and rights and giving a different aspect of a commercial festival.
Innabuyog (alliance of indigenous women’s organizations in the Cordillera, Philippines)
#16 Loro St., Dizon Subdivision
Baguio City 2600, Philippines
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