Tboli

The Tboli are an Austronesian indigenous people of South Cotabato in southern Mindanao, whose villages occupy the mountain slopes flanking the upper Alah Valley and coastal towns in Sarangani. In earlier times they also farmed the valley floor before later settlers confined them to the hills.

Unlike the Islamized Moro peoples of the coast, they kept a polytheistic religion, its later forms blending ancestral rites with Christian and Muslim elements. Tboli women weave t'nalak, a resist-dyed abaca cloth whose black, white and red designs are believed to be granted in dreams by Fu Dalu, goddess of abaca.

In 1543 Ruy López de Villalobos named Sarangani Island Antonia; in the centuries that followed, Muslim sultanates ruled the coasts while the Tboli kept their highland villages and ancestral religion.