What ever happened to the gentle Tasaday?
Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday By Robin Hemley Farrar, Straus and Giroux Hardcover, 339 pages, $25.00 By Jeff Wenger In the summer of 1971, major media across America reported a small tribe living in the remote jungles of Mindanao, Philippines. The tribe and the outside world had existed in ignorance of each other until then. This tribe the Tasaday lived as people lived in the Stone Age. They were thought to have existed in seclusion for 500, perhaps 1,000 years. At this point, an extraordinary cast of characters began to gather. These included Manuel “Manda” Elizalde and newsman John Nance. Elizalde was wealthy and politically connected, his reputation that of an international playboy. In the early 1970s, he headed up two organizations one governmental, one not whose missions were to serve and protect the Philippines indigenous tribes. Nance (who now lives in Portland) was an Associated Press photographer during the war in Vietnam. He worked as AP Asia Bur
