Obit: John Edwards Nance

[Loren Billings]

The following obituary appeared recently in the Oregonian newspaper
(by way of my mom). I would welcome comments on the accuracy of claims
listed below. My sense, as a nonspecialist, is that some of the
accounts are a little twisted.

-- 

Loren A. Billings, Ph.D.
Associate professor of linguistics
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Chi Nan University
Puli, Nantou County 545 Taiwan


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John Edwards Nance  Dec 19, 195 - March 09, 2010
   John Edwards Nance, writer and photographer, who chronicled the
Tasaday tribe of the Philippies, died Tuesday, Mach 9, 2010, at his
home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 74.
   Nance spent 40 years photographing and writing about the Tasaday, a
group of cave-dwelling people discovered living in the Philippine
rainforest in 1971. He authored 3 books and took tens of thousands of
photographs of the tribe.  He also established Friends of the Tasaday,
a foundation that helped preserve their rainforest home, provided them
with education and health care, and taught them sustainable
agriculture.
   A graduate of the U of Oregon...Nance left Oregon in the late 1950s
to travel the world... landed a job with the Associated press...in
1968 he was assigned to Manila as AP bureau chief. It was there that
he covered a story about aviator, Charles Lindbergh on an expedition
to meet a group of 26 people discovered by a trapper living in
isolation in the rainforest.  John's articles and his subsequent book,
"The Gentle Tasaday," published in 1975, helped catapult the group to
worldwide attention.  The peacable Tasaday, whose unique language did
not include words for enemy or war, were studied in the caves by
dozens of social scientists, who determined that they lived a
stone-age like existence, subsisting on roots and tadpoles.
  Nance eventually left the AP, moved back to Oregon, and authored 2
more books, "The Mud-Pie Dilemma," and a history of the Philippines.
...
   In the late 1980's, the Tasaday fell victim to political intrigue,
when interests eager to claim their rainforest for mining and logging
exploitation engineered an elaborate scheme to declare them a hoax.
Despite the fact that the Aquino government conducted an official
inquiry and eventually declared the tribe authentic, worldwide media
and scientists using second-hand studies pronounced them fake.
Linguists eventually proved their authenticity. Nance spent the next
25 years working on behalf of the Tasaday...

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