IP month for Happy Hallow and the Maeng

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO

March L. Fianza

Mixed feelings greet this month’s IP celebration. Reading from news reports about experiences of indigenous communities worldwide, it has been shown that most minority tribes fight against suppression and discrimination oddly committed by the governments that are supposed to protect them. Mind you, that is happening in our midst – in Baguio and in other urbanized districts where there are IPs.

I am quite ready to give up talking about this in my articles. However I am left with no choice but to keep on writing about it because to this day, and as we celebrate the IP month of October, we see that policies on self-determination, justice and equity have yet to be strengthened and sustained.

Elected officials are accused of not respecting IP values, and the IP right to freely pursue development in their ancestral domains are being opposed or blocked by private interest groups in collaboration with government officials and agencies. With government becoming the opposition itself, there is the presumption that culture driven activities will never be institutionalized.

In a meeting at Happy Hallow last month, city councilor Poppo Cosalan challenged the barangay residents to nominate their IP representative to the city council. This is guaranteed by the local government code of 1991.

Happy Hallow is very much qualified to send an IP representative to the city council, being the only barangay in Baguio that has been identified as an Ancestral Domain after being issued a CADT (Certificate of Ancestral Domain).

Happy Hallow ancestral domain is inhabited by a mix of Ibaloys and Kankanaeys. The question is: will the city council that is dominated by councilors who trace their roots from other provinces outside Benguet allow this?

Aside from that forthcoming disapproval, Happy Hallow is mired in a three-cornered fight – with BCDA and Baguio City on the other side of the fence. At least Happy Hallow is safe for now because it holds a CADT. The problem is, the BCDA and Baguio are moving heaven and earth to try to have the CADT disregarded in any manner so that they can pursue their interests.

For BCDA, it has business interests over the area while the city wants to dispose the lots inside the CADT through Townsite Sales Applications (TSA), even while it is very clear that Happy Hallow has never been part of the Baguio Townsite reservation.

The so-called Townsite Reservation that the city is talking about has no approved technical metes and bounds so that it cannot be pinpointed on the map. But there is a clearing committee called “AO 504” that is co-chaired by the city mayor and the DENR secretary who have self-vested powers to identify which lots can be sold through public bidding and which are not disposable.

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 In a remote village in Abra that is hidden in a scenic corner between the more developed municipalities of Mountain Province and Ilocos Sur, a town councilor expresses thankfulness for the passage of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act or IPRA during the Bagawas, a thanksgiving ritual of the Maeng tribe.

Domingo Lawagan, a former NPA (New People’s Army) rebel, woos the crowd to be grateful because the government had at last recognized their rights to manage their ancestral domain, including the natural resources that are found within.

The Bagawas ritual and signing of manuscripts documenting “Lapat” as the Sustainable Traditional Indigenous Forest Resources Management Systems and Practices (STIFRMSP) of the Maeng tribe of Tubo was the offshoot of Joint Administrative Order 2008-01 of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples.

JAO 2008-01 guarantees the issuance of appropriate government policies that would finally integrate age-old indigenous forest management systems of tribal communities nationwide into the mainstream policies of the DENR.

It seeks to document into a finished manuscript the culture, values and traditions of the Maeng tribe of Tubo in relation to forest resource protection and management. Tubo municipality has a population of barely 6,000 today, from the last population count of only 5,719 in 2010.

Documentation processes did not commence immediately after the joint order was signed in 2008. It was only in 2011 that a small technical working group composed of Foresters Rex Sapla and FlorPacio, Engr. Simeon Micklay  and Pat Tayaban launched their first activity in Tadian, Mountain Province in coordination with the NCIP in the area.

Two years later in 2013, the TWG finished 15 manuscripts detailing in it at least seven indigenous forest management practices in the Cordillera.

These are: Batangan system in Tadian, Besao and Sagada in Mountain Province; the Pinuchu and Pinuju systems that are practiced by the Majukayong tribe in Natonin, MP; the Lapat for Tubo and Bucloc in Abra that is similarly observe in Pudtol and Calanasan, Apayao; Muyung for Kiangan, Hungduan and Asipulo in Ifugao, and Bakun in Benguet; Imong in Pasil, Balbalan and Tinglayan in Kalinga; and the Kijowan in Karao, Bokod and Ibaloi areas in Benguet.

Upon the affirmation of the DENR Secretary and Chairperson of the NCIP, the manuscripts will now be transformed into local ordinances of the respective LGUs.

For centuries, tribal communities in the Cordillera have been subjected to rigid government forest laws that were not equally responsive to the traditional practices of IPs, reason why JAO 2008-01 was crafted. This is extra justice to the IPs even while the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act was enacted in 1997.

But even with these efforts, the Philippines still has a long way to go in seeing to it that the policies that were written are executed without reservation. 

Happy IP month!