Tribe hoax doubted

Press, 15 April 1986, Page 10

Tribe hoax doubted

NZPA-Reuter Manila An American journalist, John Nance, said yesterday that he was confident a group of stone-age cave dwellers reported in the southern Philippines 15 years ago were genuine and not a hoax engineered by a Marcos Government Minister. Nance, who wrote •books on the Tasaday tribe which was reported in 1971 to be living in a remote area of Mindanao Island, said he would like to see the evidence found by a Swiss journalist who has denounced their “discovery” as a fake set up by a former Presidential assistant for tribal minorities, Mr Manuel Elizalde. The newspaper "Neue Zuercher Zeitung,” describing a visit by a reporter, Oswald Iten, to the area of south Cotabato province where the Tasa-

days lived, quoted residents as saying they had been forced to act as near-naked cave men. Nance returned to Manila after learning that outsiders had been allowed into the reserve 975 km south of Manila. It was declared out of bounds after the “discovery” of the Tasadays. “I would like to go back there to see them again,” he said. “It is possible Elizalde had some other motive for sealing off the area other than preservation of the tribe. “But I still feel strongly that these people are genuine. It would have been so complicated, impossible to have set all that up as a hoax.” Discovery of the Tasadays was heralded as the ethnological find of the century. “National Geographic” magazine pro-

duced a television special about it. Nance, then a journalist based in Manila, spent 10 weeks with them. Nance said a photograph he had seen, apparently of Iten’s tribesman, Bilangan, “was certainly not the Bilangan we spoke to.” “They gave no impression that they were forced into doing anything, like go around nearly naked or be made to live in the cave. They were very affectionate towards Elizalde,” Nance said. Nance said he hoped to bring out the facts. “A dozen different social scientists from overseas have been in there and have been convinced and so are those I have since spoken to here. But there is no way they are going to resolve this thing in just a few days,” he said.