Whang-od Academy

» see nasacademy.com/ph/whang-od/ancient-art-of-tattooing as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Maria Oggay was 104 years old in 2021, and everyone knows her as Apo Whang-od. She lives in Buscalan in Tinglayan, Kalinga, and she is the oldest mambabatok of the Butbut people, the hand-tap tattooist who started inking Butbut headhunters at eleven. In late June 2021 Nas Academy announced that she was one of twelve Filipinos whose craft it was turning into paid online courses.

The course cost 750 pesos, roughly fifteen US dollars. It was three videos plus two live sessions, sold on the Nas Academy platform under a title about the ancient art of tattooing. It was on sale for about five weeks.

On 4 August 2021 Whang-od's grandniece Grace Palicas wrote on Facebook that the course was a scam. Her great-aunt had signed no contract, she said, and had not understood the translators who were in the room. What she was describing was her community's art being sold by somebody from outside it. The course page came down that same day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the thumbprint ~

Nas Academy's answer arrived on 5 August: a 22-second video of Whang-od and her niece Estella Palingdao putting a thumbprint on a contract. The company treated the footage as proof of consent and said so publicly.

The National Commission on Indigenous Peoples opened a review the same day. Under the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act, a project that reaches into a community's cultural heritage needs free and prior informed consent from the community, not from one person inside it, and the community here was the Butbut. By the end of the month the commission had reported that Whang-od was not aware of any contract and had not affixed her thumb mark to one. When its validation team compared the mark on the contract against a fresh mark she made on a clean sheet of paper, the two did not match, and the difference was sent for forensic study. Nas Academy Philippines had already suspended operations on 8 August.

~ what it cost ~

Nas Daily, the video brand the academy was built on top of, had 20.5 million followers on its Facebook page on 3 August. It lost around half a million of them in the three days after Palicas posted.

On 24 October 2021 the commission confirmed that Nas Academy had apologized to the Butbut in a customary process held in Barangay Buscalan, with Whang-od and the community elders present. At the community's request, the contract was declared null and void. Nas Academy Philippines resumed teaching later that year. The course did not come back.

~ one capture ~

The course page has exactly one capture in the Internet Archive, timestamped 4 August 2021 at 03:32 UTC, which is the day it was pulled. Nothing from the five weeks it spent selling was ever crawled. The platform underneath it has moved on as well: nasacademy.com now redirects to a marketing school under a different name.

This is a Philippine story and I have no standing in it past having read the documents. The one thing a stranger can still check is the archive, and the archive holds a single copy of this course, grabbed while it was already being taken away.

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