By Joel B. Belinan
Last Monday August 9 was the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples but except for maybe a couple of low-key events here and there it just passed like a wind, unnoticed. To think that we are a country with an estimated IP population of between 12 to 14 million. No, I am not making a fuss about the matter but rather I see this as the real estate of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in this country of ours. Even during the previous years, I, a pure-blooded IP-Igorot, could not recall any observance nor have we been aware of such a day.
Consulting my Google, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was declared by the United Nations General Assembly in 1994 to raise awareness on the plight of IPs all over the world. Accordingly, it took another 13 years later in 2007 before The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was finally adopted by a majority of the member countries. We could say that we are ahead of other countries as the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) was passed by Congress and signed into law in October of 1997. But in reality that is only on paper.
According to the report, more than 10 years after the adoption of the UNDRIP countries are still in quandary as to how to resolve the main issues of the Indigenous Peoples. UNDRIP has enumerated several rights of the IPs in the entire world. These however can be summarized as IPs Rights to Self Determination and the correction of historical injustices. Yes, it’s not only us IPs in this country that suffered from the hands of the majority of people. Famous countries that claim to be the bastion of Freedom, Democracy, and Justice are also well known to have committed grave injustice and abuse against the native inhabitants or the IPs in their respective countries. The United States was notorious in its historical acts of injustices against its Indigenous Peoples, the native American Indian tribes which they now call the First Nation People. Almost all those big countries, reports say, are guilty of historical acts against their respective IP populations.
In our home country, while it is true that the IPRA had been passed into law in 1997, the expected result of really empowering the IPs is still a big question. Instead, it only unveiled the continuous refusal of the affected business interest groups from recognizing and respecting the Rights of the IPs. These vested interest groups used their influence in every level of governance including influencing the highest officials in the government. This is very evident in the shabby and downgrading treatment of NCIP, reducing its powers to a second-class national line agency with a very limited budget. We however acknowledge that there is a big improvement of awareness among the people of this country on the plight of IPs and their Indigenous Cultural Communities. Furthermore, cultural awareness and values of the IPs’ arts artifacts have been given a new lease of life, while age-old practices that have sustained an ecologically balanced cultural community have been appreciated, acknowledged and recorded, hopefully, for the world to learn from.
In the entire Philippines, we Igorot IPs may be considered the most advanced among all the hundreds of tribes. And yet we still are far from what was envisioned in the UNDRIP and even in the IPRA. Such that every IP community is still struggling on how to realize and benefit from the bounty of the natural resources in their Ancestral Domains. The 34 years of struggle for the establishment of the Autonomous Region of the Cordillera is nowhere near the end of the tunnel. Meantime, the companies that have been extracting our natural resources continue their business as usual, and maybe by the time the IPs are in full control of their domains, such resources may have been exhausted.
What all these mean is that there is no easy way to success, not just for the Indigenous Peoples but for the entire Human Society. Sad, but it is the reality. **
