Filipino Lumad, the indigenous people in Mindanao, march to protest Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s state of the nation address in Manila in July 2019. (Photo: AFP)
By Fr Shay Cullen, SSC, Manila
Aug 23 2021
Honest rulers supported by an enlightened public can put an end to the exploitation and abuse of vulnerable communities
Indigenous people are under threat as never before and need the international community to stand with them to end the exploitation and abuse they suffer in many countries.
More than 476 million indigenous people live in 90 nations around the world. According to the United Nations, they make up 6.2 percent of the world’s population.
They have their own unique languages, cultures, customs, traditions and ancestral rights to their lands, having possessed them from time immemorial.
They are capable of self-governance and survived for many thousands of years before nations emerged in history. But today they suffer discrimination, stigmatization and racism.
How disingenuous that is since all people in the world have descended from some indigenous tribal people through the ages. In fact, DNA tests show that everyone in the world is descended from one common ancestor in Africa.
Real science does not lie. The human species emerged in the Makgadikgadi-Okavango wetland. It was not just any home but the ancestral homeland for all modern humans today.
In the Philippines 500 years ago, the Spanish invasion began a war of extermination against the Moro people in Mindanao
In the last 500 years, colonialism spread across the world and foreign nations invaded the lands of indigenous people, killed millions and stole and occupied their lands.
The indigenous people were infected with Western diseases against which they had no defense and millions died. Others were massacred and driven to the edge of extinction.
This month it is 500 years since the Aztec civilization in South America was wiped out by the Spanish conquistadors.
In the Philippines 500 years ago, the Spanish invasion began a war of extermination against the Moro people in Mindanao. It eventually failed but they conquered the rest of the islands.
The aggression, land grabbing and attempted extermination of groups of indigenous people are still going on.
The murder and attacks against indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest continue. Miners, loggers and agri-farming planters invade ancestral lands in search of gold and plantations. They burn and devastate the environment and drive away indigenous people.
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 declared that a cultural genocide was inflicted against the Canadian indigenous people.
As many as 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly abducted from their natural families and locked up in residential schools. Hundreds of children died from hunger, neglect malnutrition, disease, physical and sexual abuse.
The schools, to their eternal shame, were run by religious groups of several denominations and the Catholic Church had the most schools. The children’s human dignity was taken, their language forbidden, their family ties erased.
“These measures were part of a coherent policy to eliminate aboriginal people as distinct peoples and to assimilate them into the Canadian mainstream against their will,” the commission’s final report declares.
“The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”
Some nationalistic Philippine officials object to them being called Lumad because they wrongly believe that the word refers to communists
The greatest moral scandal was government agents co-opting churches into running these schools when, in fact, what the churches did was against the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth himself.
He taught that the rights and dignity of every human being are of eternal value. Children are the most important in the kingdom, he said, and whoever accepts a child accepts him. Anyone who hurts a child or drives a child from him or abuses a child ought to be held seriously accountable, according to his millstone statement. (Matt. 18:1-7)
In Mindanao, many aboriginal groups have inhabited their ancestral lands for thousands of years. I mention their names to give them their identity, recognition and respect: Subanen, B’laan, Mandaya, Higaonon, Banwaon, Talaandig, Ubo, Manobo, T’boli, Tiruray, Bagobo, Tagakaolo, Dibabawon, Manguangan and Mansaka. They are collectively known as the People of the Earth or Lumad people.
Some nationalistic Philippine officials object to them being called Lumad because they wrongly believe that the word refers to communists.
“Lumad is a word associated with the Communist Party and its armed wing, the New People’s Army,” the government’s National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) said in an order issued on March 4.
However, Archbishop Jose Cabantan of Cagayan de Oro disputed this and said the order was branding the indigenous people as insurgents and rebels.
“The order only reveals its members’ ignorance as to how the struggles of the Lumad have unfolded in Mindanao over the last 60 years. It arose without an ideological agenda, let alone that of the communist movement,” he said.
As many as 71 indigenous leaders have been killed by paramilitary groups in recent years
The struggles arose out of a united people’s concern to defend the rights of the Lumad from the perspective of a Christian faith that is concerned with the least of our brothers and sisters, victimized by both a repressive state and businesses interested in usurping their ancestral domains for profit, he explained.
All in all, the indigenous people are estimated to comprise 15 percent of the Philippines’ population of about 100 million, according to the Journal of Philippine Statistics, 2008.
As many as 71 indigenous leaders have been killed by paramilitary groups in recent years. The groups are tasked to drive the people from their ancestral lands so that mining corporations and palm oil plantations owned by agro-corporations can move in. Mining and plantations are destroying the environment and remaining forests in the process.
All this is against Philippine law, the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997, which is supposed to protect their rights.
However, like many laws in the Philippines, they don’t apply to rich and powerful politicians and their business cronies. Some big business corporations supported by their “elected” cronies and puppets in government work to grab the forests, minerals, water, land and resources of the indigenous people and grow incredibly rich.
Indigenous people need honest rulers of integrity who believe in the rule of law and are supported by an enlightened public that lives the values of goodness, justice and their rights.
Irish missionary Father Shay Cullen, SSC, established the Preda Foundation in Olongapo City in the Philippines in 1974 to promote human rights and the rights of children, especially victims of sexual abuse. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News. – UCANews
