Reading 4: In Defense of ancestral land. Carino, J., Regpala, M.E. & de Chavez, R. (Eds.). (2010).

Asserting
land rights. Baguio City: Tebteba Foundation

The Cordilleras in northern Philippines is one region in the country which has a strong
indigenous peoples' movement. One key organization that has helped advance indigenous
peoples' rights in the region is the Cordillera People's Alliance, which now federates more than
100 grassroots people's organizations. The alliance was born out of the upland indigenous
peoples' defense of their ancestral lands from intrusive and destructive development projects of
the Marcos regime in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the late 1970s, people of the Cordilleras - particularly in Bontoc, Mountain Province
and Kalinga - rose up in arms against a planned series of big dam projects along the Chico
River, the cradle of agriculture in both provinces. The World Bank-funded projects would have
inundated centuries-old rice fields, some residences, rotational farms and burial and sacred
grounds. Some Cordillera leaders who were in the frontlines of defense against these threats to
their homeland lost their lives. One of them was Kalinga chieftain Macliing Dulag, who was
assassinated by Marcos' soldiers on April 24,1980.
Alongside the River Chico conflict, the Tinggians of neighboring Abra province also had
to keep vigil over their forest lands and rivers being threatened by another Marcos project. A
Marcos crony had embarked on a paper mill project, requiring volumes of timber from Tinggian
forests. Chemicals used in milling paper also contaminated river and other water systems. The
Tinggians tried all legal means to stop Cellophil Resources Corporation but to no avail.
The Chico River and the Cellophil debacle prompted indigenous peoples from these
affected areas and neighboring provinces to organize themselves. It was only in organizing
themselves that they could face a military regime.
The protest actions in various parts of the Cordillera interior soon spread to the town
centers and Baguio City. The indigenous peoples of the Cordillera learned the value of
concerted and unified action. The 1980's ferment led to increased coordination among the
growing number of organizations and their experiences contributed in defining the substance
and features of a program for self-determination.
So, in 1984 the Cordillera People's Alliance was established. Indigenous socio-political
systems such as the bodong (peace pact) and pagta (agreement) and the role of elders helped
unify and strengthen the Alliance in devising concerted action. The Alliance's main goal was to
advance a people's movement for the defense of ancestral lands and for self-determination. It
still maintains this goal up to now.
Upon its inception, the Alliance launched some major campaigns. The Chico and
Cellophil issue inspired public educational forums on ancestral land, self-determination and
collective rights of indigenous peoples. Through these forums, the Alliance was able to build
broader unities with other Igorot (the collective term for the various indigenous groups of the
Cordilleras) advocates and other members of society from the academe, church, non-
government organizations, solidarity groups and the media.
Leaders of the Alliance have since articulated that the problems in the Cordillera are not
isolated from wider Philippine and global realities. They also have sought to shatter the"
indigenist" and romanticized view of tribal society as a static society that should be preserved in
its pure form.
After the Marcoses were ousted in 1986, the Cordillera People's Alliance was among
indigenous peoples' organizations that helped lobby for the inclusion of respect and recognition
of indigenous peoples' rights in the 1987 Philippine Constitution. That Constitutional provision
needed an enabling law and that led to the enactment of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act in
1997.
With Marcos gone and a new Philippine Constitution in place, the Cordillera peoples'
struggle to defend their ancestral land continued. Since the mid-1980s, in the mining town of
Itogon, Benguet, upland folk sought the help of the Cordillera People's Alliance in resisting
open-pit mining operation of Benguet Corporation, a big mining company. The Alliance helped
them in employing various means and forms of defending their lands. It helped them file
petitions to concerned authorities, arrange dialogues and community meetings, and mobilize
them for marches and human barricades.
In the 1990s, particularly during the term of former President Fidel Ramos, the Ibaloi
people of Dalupirip and other adjoining villages in Itogon town in Benguet province also sought
the help of the Alliance. At that time the Ibaloi were protesting against the planned construction
of the giant San Roque Dam along the River Agno in the Itogon-Pangasinan border.
Despite the Ibaloi's resistance, the Ramos government pursued the dam project. But the
Alliance could still count some gains. These included the organization of the people, and, as
Abigail Anongos of the Alliance articulated, "raising their political awareness on the nature of the
State and the need for a wider struggle for national democracy and self-determination."
Today, there are various efforts, including those in government, to pursue autonomy for
the Cordillera, which still remains an administrative region. But the Alliance maintains that "there
can be no genuine regional autonomy when indigenous peoples' rights are violated, and
ancestral lands are treated as a resource base for plunder, exploitation and profit."
With its rich experience in ancestral land defense, the Alliance has been sought by other
indigenous communities to help them devise ways by which to defend and protect their lands
and resources. Just recently, the Tinggians of Baay-Licuan in Abra province sought the help of
the Alliance after a mining company wanted to explore there. To appease and convince the
people to allow its activity, the company had said that it was "just exploring" the area if it had
minerals or not. So the field staff of the Alliance had to alert the Tinggians, warning them that
exploration was actually the first phase of mining operations.

4.1 Macliing Dulag

To the Marcos dictatorship, the indigenous communities of the Cordillera mountain
range in the north of Luzon could easily be dealt with as it proceeded with its plan to build a
huge dam on the Chico River.
But the Kalinga and Bontok peoples knew that the project would flood their ricefields and
their homes, communal forests and sacred burial grounds. It would destroy their lives by
changing their environment forever.
Macliing Dulag was a respected elder of the Butbut tribe in the tiny mountain village of
Bugnay in the 1960s. He was a pangat, one of those listened to by the community because of
their wisdom and courage. He was also the elected barrio captain of Bugnay, serving out three
terms since 1966.
Ordinarily, he tended his ricefields and worked as a laborer on road maintenance
projects (earning P405 a month).
In 1974, the regime tried to implement a 1,000-megawatt hydroelectric power project, to
be funded by the World Bank, along the Chico River. The plan called for the construction of four
dams that would have put many villages under water, covering an area of around 1,400 square
kilometers of rice terraces (payew), orchards, and graveyards. As many as 100,000 people
living along the river, including Macliing’s Bugnay village, would have lost their homes.
Macliing became a strong and articulate figure in this struggle which pitted small nearly
powerless communities in the Cordilleras against the full powers of the martial law regime.
Kalinga and Bontok leaders were offered bribes, harassed by soldiers and government
mercenaries, even imprisoned. But the anti-dam leaders, including Macliing, stayed firm in their
opposition to the project. They argued that development should not be achieved at such
extreme sacrifice.
 “If you destroy life in your search for what you say is the good life, we question it,”
Macliing said. ”Those who need electric lights are not thinking of us who are bound to be
destroyed. Should the need for electric power be a reason for our death?”
Macliing expressed the people’s reverence for the land, affirming their right to stay:
“Such arrogance to say that you own the land, when you are owned by it! How can you own that
which outlives you? Only the people own the land because only the people live forever. To claim
a place is the birthright of everyone. Even the lowly animals have their own place…how much
more when we talk of human beings?”
Resistance to the dam project unified the Cordillera region. Macliing and other Cordillera
leaders initiated a series of tribal pacts (bodong or vochong), which helped cement this unity
and create a very broad alliance of the communities and their supporters. They recognized the
leader of the Butbut as their spokesperson, for although Macliing had had no formal education,
he always found the right words for what they needed to say.
Macliing was murdered by government soldiers on April 24, 1980. They surrounded his
house one night and sprayed it with bullets. His assassination merely solidified opposition to the
dam and won it sympathizers from all over the country and even abroad. Even the World Bank,
which would have funded the dam construction, withdrew from the project, finally forcing the
martial law government to cancel its plans.
Four of Macliing’s killers were charged and in 1983 tried before a military tribunal. An
army lieutenant and a sergeant were subsequently found guilty of murder and frustrated murder.
The lieutenant was later reinstated in the army, rose to become a major, and then himself was
killed in 2000 by the New People’s Army.
(Raluto, R.D. (2015). Poverty and ecology at the crossroads. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University. F 201.77599 R1399). 4.2
THE CONTEMPORARY OPPRESSIONS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN MINDANAO. The
postcolonial government of the Philippines that uncritically adopts many of the agrarian policies
of the colonizers systematically perpetuates the agrarian oppression of the poor peasants. The
most affected among them are the indigenous peoples (IPs) who are mostly found in Mindanao.
Technically, the IPs include not only the native occupants of the place but
also those who had settled there long before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in the second
decade of the 17th century. In this sense, the Muslim Filipinos who had been in Mindanao since
pre- Hispanic colonization may also be considered IPs. As a whole, IPs comprise around 14
million of the Philippines' population, of whom 61 percent reside in Mindanao. Since the
colonial period, they and their forebears have suffered various forms of oppression. Let us turn
our narrative to their agrarian and religious struggles.
Land-Grabbing. In the Mindanao context, the non-Islamized and non-Christianized IPs
are commonly called Lumads - a generic term derived from the Cebuano language, which
literally means "native" of the place or one who is "born of the earth." The term suggests an
identity that is intimately connected to the native land. Many tribal communities name
themselves after the river where they reside. They consist of at least 18 local ethnolinguistic
groups that are rightly recognized as original inhabitants of the mainland of Mindanao outside
the Moro provinces. According to Mindanao historian Rudy Rodil, the Lumad "could claim, circa
1900, legitimate control over a vast area of territory now encompassed in 17 out of a total 20
provinces, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi excluded. Today, however, many Lumad communities are
marginalized by the government resettlement policy, which promotes internal colonization of
their ancestral lands and territories.
The dream to reclaim their ancestral domain is at the heart of the Lumad struggle for
self-deterrnination. They struggle to regain the ancestral land where their forefathers grew up,
raised their families, and were buried. Ancestral land, for them, is very sacred because" it is
where the spirits of their ancestors roam." Thus they spontaneously nurture a certain spiritual
relationship with their ancestral land as part of relating with their ancestors. For them, the
ancestral domain does not only refer to the piece of land but also includes the "spirit guides"
that dwell in the trees, rivers, and lands. They consider as sacred all the resources on, above,
and beneath the ancestral lands. As Bukidnon Datu Saway puts it, "the earth is our flesh, the
water is our blood, the trees are our bones, the vines are our veins, the sun is our torch and
sight, the air is our breath and strength, the sound is our language, the cosmic energy and the
spirits are our soul."?" Since their lives are deeply interwoven in the very fabric of their ancestral
domain, the Lumad consider its ecological destruction as outright self-destruction.
On the other hand, the indigenous Muslim Filipinos were also displaced with the coming
of the Christian settlers in Mindanao. Their main agrarian problem started with "the
forcible/illegal annexation of Moroland to the Philippines under the Treaty of Paris in 1898,"
which led to the "imposition of confiscatory land laws."68 They felt that the central Philippine
government, dominated by Christian politicians, was blind and deaf to their grievances for
national recognition, justice, and equality." They perceived that the central government was
unjustly treating them as "socially lower" than Christian Filipinos. “Consequently, many Muslim
provinces are among the poorest in the country" and remain socially neglected, especially in
terms of government development programs.
For some Muslim Filipinos, it is not enough to reclaim a piece of their ancestral domain.
They want the Mindanao-Sulu islands to be separated politically from the Philippine Republic."
This was the case of Datu Udtog Matalam's Mindanao Independence Movement (MIM) in 1968.
For the proponents of this separatist movement, the Muslim struggle for self-determination
would not be possible in a government that systematically promotes integration and assimilation
of the Muslim culture into the national mainstream culture. For them, such an approach would
simply eradicate their Islamic identity and religion. They keenly perceive this as a strategy to
perpetuate the colonial approach to Christianization." As we know, the secessionist movement
did not succeed, largely due to lack of international support among Muslim countries and to the
Philippine government's explicit rejection. Nevertheless, the petition for the Autonomous Region
in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) was strategically granted, allegedly, to soften the worsening
decades of Mindanao conflicts.
The struggles of the indigenous peoples in Mindanao continue. Until now, many Lumad
and Muslim Filipino communities are still victims of many government-sponsored development
projects that have become instruments of "cultural invasion" and systematic eradication of their
indigenous identity. They feel excluded from government development plans, as they are still
the most affected victims of other people's development projects, such as logging operations,
establishment of ranches, mining concessions, agribusiness plantations, industrial tree
plantations, government reservation areas, and power-generating projects. The IPs unjustly
bear the costs of mass displacement-the price of someone else's "development." They
continue to desperately cry out for justice, as they hold on to a dream that someday their human
rights will be duly recognized and that they will be given the right to fully govern their
communities according to their own customary laws.
Religious Prejudices. As in the past, religious oppression continues to exist today in
the frontiers of the country, especially in Mindanao, where the believers of tribal, Islamic, and
Christian religions coexist. Historically, the present tripeople composition (i.e., Lumad, Muslim,
and Christian) in Mindanao was made possible by the phenomenon of migration owing to the
government resettlement program in the early 20th century. Numerically, the Lumad and Muslim
Filipinos are the minority communities as they comprise only about 20 percent of the total
Mindanao-Sulu population. Accordingly, the IPs are not only the least in terms of demographic
quantity but also the last in matters of development priorities.
The existing conflict in Mindanao has been commonly framed from the perspective of
religious differences between Muslim and Christian communities. Oftentimes, the religious
conflict between Christians and Muslims has been exaggerated at the expense of neglecting
and marginalizing the religious interests of the Lumad. Nevertheless, the perception of religious
conflict between armed Muslim groups and Christian settlers in Mindanao is not without basis. It
can be confirmed by the existence of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which allegedly
forged a tactical alliance with the NPA-NDF against the government. As Eliseo Mercado has
argued, "The Moro struggle that is, rightly or wrongly, associated with the MILF has a religious
face. The conflict in Southern Mindanao has something to do with religion.” For Mercado, the
religious nature of the Mindanao conflict is evident in the killings and kidnappings of many
Christian personnel, including bishops, nuns, priests, pastors, and foreign missionaries by the
alleged Muslim fundamentalist groups. In fact, the reality of threats and violence against church
workers still continues today. All these would seem to indicate that there is a religious factor in
the Filipino Muslim's struggle in Mindanao.
There is no need to insist that the Muslim struggle for peace is inseparable from the
dream for liberation and a sustainable future. Too much attention has already been given to
insurgency problems to the neglect of the equally important environmental issues that today are
indiscriminately plaguing the people-both rich and poor. It is high time to include the urgent
ecological issues among the top priority agenda for Mindanao!