World Indigenous People’s Day
August 9 was World Indigenous Peoples’ (IP) Day, and my thoughts are about how we see the Lumads and the Moro people. We see them as “showcases” in festivals like Kadayawan. But we kind of mangle their culture with our modernized mishmash take of pop and ethnic culture.
We see the Lumads as “visitors” who come down from the hills during Christmas to entertain us with song and dance in exchange for disposable goods and food. The irony is that while the Lumads have been guardians of our forests and farms, they are hungry.
We see them as “ignorant” and “uto-uto” for joining rallies on the streets. But here’s the irony: We are educated yet our ears shut off from the Lumads’ cries about mining firms and plantations that are destroying their lands--and how soldiers are driving them away from their land.
We see them from our vantage point. But we don’t see them from the perspective of their history and struggles.
The Lumads have been striving to build schools in the past two decades, with the help of non-government organizations and religious groups, because our government is slow in building these schools or health centers. For them, government moves fast when roads are built, but no services ever follow.
The Lumads value education because they see how the “modern world,” in the form of loggers, miners, plantation workers have come uninvited to their doorsteps and plunder their ancestral land. The Lumads see literacy as key to making their next generation more articulate of the need to protect their ancestral land and culture.
Their foresight is as broad as the view they see atop the mountains. Tribal leaders mock what corporations call development, where profits matter over the preservation of the environment. What happens when the mountains are bald? Our forest cover have been alarmingly reduced to less than 10 percent of the land, with the Pantaron Range the only remaining virgin forest in Mindanao. What will protect us when climate change-induced storms and rains hit us?
The Lumads struggle to hold on to the centuries-old knowledge of preserving and balancing nature with progress. They struggle amidst threats on these schools.
August 9 was a mix of good news and bad news. In Surigao del Sur, some 1,600 Manobos were able to return to their villages after nearly a month of evacuation. The help of support groups forced provincial officials to call for the pullout of the military. Meanwhile, in Soccsksargen (South Cotabato, Cotabato City, Cotabato Province, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani and Gen. Santos City), another Lumad school organized by CLANS (Center for Lumad Advocacy and Services, Inc.) is forcibly closed in Palimbang, Sultan Kudarat, and this time surprisingly by a Department of Education principal. Her reason was that they will build a school in place of the CLANS school.
The Lumads’ struggle never end. But we must see this as our struggles as well. When investments and profits are favored over the growth of culture and preservation of our farms and rivers, we must be involved. That is why there is the call to #StandWithTheLumad and #SaveLumadSchools.
The World IP Day is not just about them. It’s about all of us. The diversity that connects us back to one earth.--SunStar Davao