Lanao del Sur Tourism

At the first OMAR Awards, Lanao del Sur honored seven living treasures of Ranaw while their hands are still at work

By Ahmad Nour-al-dinn A. Tamano, Jr.

Gold on the walls, thread on every shoulder

The first thing I remember is the color. By mid-morning on October 21, Bedjoria Hall at the Ranaw Business Hotel had become a moving field of landap and langkit: crimson, saffron, deep green, tubao folded over shoulders, gold threads catching the light from a wall of shimmering mosaic tiles behind the stage. The dress code for Ladiyawan sa Ranaw 2026 was strict, Meranaw attire only, and no one needed to be reminded. People had come dressed the way their grandparents dressed for the most important days of their lives.

Kulintang played while guests found their seats. Then the dancer of the Kalalag sa Darangen entered, and behind them, slowly, came our awardees. One has spent thirty-nine years bent over sesed reeds; another has woven more than five hundred landap. When the hall fell silent for the reading of the Qur’an, I watched their faces and understood something I had only known on paper. We were not handing out awards that morning. We were thanking people for keeping us who we are.

Standards made in workshops, not in boardrooms

The OMAR Awards, for Outstanding Master Artisan of Ranaw, began with two executive orders of Governor Mamintal Alonto Adiong, Jr., Nos. 001 and 012, Series of 2026. They created a multi-sectoral Steering Committee chaired by Dr. Labi Riwarung, anthropologist and lifelong scholar of the Darangen, with our office, the Provincial Tourism, Culture and the Arts Office, as its secretariat. We patterned the program on the national Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan. But we agreed early that the meaning of “master” would not be decided in an air-conditioned room.

So between May 22 and June 19, we went to them. In Marantao, we sat in a home where bamboo cut from the mountains of Piagapo and Butig dries in the sun for fourteen days before it is ever touched by dye. In Tugaya, we followed the sound of chisels down narrow lanes. In Buadipuso-Buntong, sesed reeds rustled as they were flattened under a bamboo tool. In Pualas, the backstrap loom clicked and tightened. In Poona Bayabao, a  ball rose and fell between players who never let it touch the ground. And in Bacolod Kalawi, we met the last keeper of an entire tradition.

Everywhere, the work refused to hurry. Mohammad Hadji Taha carves okir straight into timber with no drawing to guide him; the design, he showed us, is already in his hands. Amina Barazar weaves complex patterns from memory, with no chart in sight. In a world that measures everything in seconds, these artists measure in seasons, in decades, in generations.

The artists themselves shaped our criteria. Technical mastery was only the first pillar. The second was stewardship: the willingness to teach, to open the workshop to the young, to make sure the craft outlives its maker. A master who keeps the knowledge to himself, we learned, holds only half of what the word means.

The last balud, and a furnace that burns all night

During the ceremony, the curator Marian Pastor Roces stood at the podium and reminded us of something many of us had never considered. “Ang paggawa ng langkit is tapestry,” she said. “A tapestry is not a big cloth; it is a technique, and it is one of the rarest art forms in the world.” In Island Southeast Asia, she noted, only the Meranaw, Iranun, Yakan and Tausug practice it.

I thought immediately of Sonaya A. Palao of Bacolod Kalawi. She is the sole remaining practitioner of balud weaving. When a technique that rare rests in a single pair of hands, every thread she passes on is a decision about whether it survives. Her recognition is not a decoration. It is a rescue that has only just begun, and it places on all of us the duty to make sure that she is not the last.

In Tugaya, Gafar P. Deca keeps a different kind of vigil. His family has cast brass across three generations, from his grandfather to his father to him, using the lost-wax method the Meranaw call tigis. He shapes the okir in wax freehand, encases it in fine talatala sand that does not crack under heat, and fires his furnace from six in the evening until eight the next morning. All five of his children work in the foundry: his sons pour the metal, his daughters design the okir. In Gafar’s workshop, the fire is literally kept burning for the young.

And in Pualas, Rohana T. Sarip taught us a sentence I have not been able to forget. Counting the threads of a sosokipan pattern, she said: “Odinga bilanga na, karibat.” If you do not count it, it will be ruined. As a widow, she raised and educated her children on that discipline, one counted thread at a time.

Not every master works alone at a bench. In Poona Bayabao, MASCUPHIL, the Maranao Sipa Culture of the Philippines, keeps alive kasipa, our traditional sipa, played with a heavy rattan ball that must never touch the ground. Before the 2017 siege, players gathered in Banggolo in Marawi and on market days in Butig. When conflict scattered them, they carried the game to Poona Bayabao and cleared new ground to keep playing. Master player Alimodin Mangorsi began training his son Jalanie as a teenager in 2005; today they still play every afternoon after school, and the children join in. What moved me most was what the elders said the game teaches: there is no room for kibr, for pride, on the field. You share the space, you respect every player, tall or short. Kasipa reminded us that heritage is not only something we make with our hands. Sometimes it is something we do together.

A trophy made of everything they make

The trophy each awardee carried home is itself a work of mastery, hand-made by Lantong A. Pangcoga, the Tugaya woodcarver who received a Special Citation that morning as a leading Meranaw contender for the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan.

At its foundation sits a heavy wooden base inlaid with nautilus shell, the white triangles of inan set by hand one by one. Across its face runs a band of woven langkit. Mounted diagonally is a gleaming brass kampilan from the foundries of Tugaya. And rising behind it, curling at the tip, is a carved panolong, the wing-like beam end that once announced a torogan, the royal house, to anyone approaching from the lake.

Wood, shell, thread and brass: each material breaks or fades on its own, but together they hold. That is the Meranaw story too. A people who have survived war, displacement and the rebuilding of a city, and who still show up to a ceremony dressed in the patterns of their ancestors.

Seven names, and a promise

Board Member Omar-Ali M. Sharief, chair of the Sangguniang Panlalawigan’s Committee on Tourism, Culture and the Arts, read the highlights of Resolution No. 08-290, adopted unanimously two days earlier, commending all seven awardees. Then the names were called, one by one: Omelcair G. Domangcag for lakub; Gafar P. Deca for brass founding; Mohammad A. Hadji Taha for wood carving; MASCUPHIL for kasipa, a reminder that heritage also lives in play and in the rhythm of a team; Amina T. Barazar for riyara; Rohana T. Sarip for landap and langkit; and Sonaya A. Palao for balud.

Each walked up to receive the trophy, a framed copy of the resolution, and a cash incentive of PHP 50,000. Each spoke briefly in their own language. There were tears in the hall, and long applause that seemed to come as much from relief as from pride.

Vice Governor Mohammad Khalid “Mujam” R. Adiong put the purpose plainly: “Ngayon mayroon na tayong OMAR Awards para sa ating mga master artisan. Ang goal naman ay ma-preserve yung kultura ng mga Meranaw.” He announced that the awards would be held every three years and that the Sangguniang Panlalawigan would pass ordinances so that, whatever administration comes next, these artisans remain secure. Commissioner Sittie Aishah “Baicon” Cayongcat-Nuska pledged to sponsor a resolution before the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos en banc.

But the real prize is not on the trophy. It is the promise written into the resolution itself: that the awardees’ communities will be supported in establishing and running Schools of Living Traditions, so that what lives in these seven pairs of hands can move into a hundred more.

While their hands are still warm

Too often, a culture honors its keepers only at their funerals, with words they never get to hear. The OMAR Awards were built to do the opposite: to say thank you while the chisel is still in the hand, while the loom is still strung, while the furnace is still lit.

Our master artisans are not relics of a past we visit in museums. They are beacons pointing Ranaw toward its future, proof that the knowledge of our ancestors still works, still feeds families, still makes beautiful things. On October 21, in a hall full of gold and thread, Lanao del Sur finally said so out loud.