Presented to the Ako Para Sa Bata International Conference
SMX
Convention Center, Manila
December
5, 2014
Aveen
Acuña-Gulo
Project
Manager, IPDEV
Fiyo Teresang! In the Teduray
language, it roughly means Good Energies.
My presentation is about the
Indigenous Peoples in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. We have heard questions like, “How can there
be IPs in a Muslim Region?”
So basically that’s the problem: the
IPs are the “unseen”, the “invisible” members of the area where we are.
Where there are Indigenous Peoples,
there are men, women, elderly, children and youth. Let me begin with saying that what the IPs
are going through, the children and the youth are also going through as well.
Who are the IP children and
youth? They are either Teduray,
Lambangian, Dulangan Manobo or Higaonon.
They live in 309,720 hectares of ancestral domain claim which include
coastal waters. They generally come from
small families: 52% with having four or less family members; and only around
40% having 5-8 family members. They
generally have reached elementary level; but only 11% graduate from the grades,
4% graduate from high school, and 1% finish college.
There are factors affecting children
and youth among the Indigenous peoples.
Just like many other children and youth around the world, they are
facing tremendous challenges in the context of globalization rapid
development. Let’s try to look at some
factors. I have 27 slides so let me try
to compress it in 20 minutes.
* * * *
Birth, rites of passage, arranged
marriages, parent-child relationship, spirituality, health, nutrition,
unregistered births, gender perspectives, discrimination, cyclical conflict,
rape-slays, peer support, pop culture, information technology, literacy,
mismatched government interventions, NGO-CSO-FBO-Academe-Business interventions,
general lack of government presence at all levels.
These set of factors are by any means not
comprehensive and in no particular order; this is only a glimpse of how much
work needs to be done for the IPs so that they can catch up after years of
marginalization without losing their identity.
Let us try to see how these factors
are being practiced, and what are its implications.
Birth. When a child is born, the father hangs the
umbilical cord to a tree that is solely for the newly-born. The father says a prayer for the child to be
as strong as the tree, and firmly rooted to the land. He also prays that the newly-born child will also
bear the values and good characteristics of his/her forebears.
Implication: With the rate that
forests are being ravaged, in a way the child – who may now be a grown person –
is severed from his connectedness to the land.
[At this point ladies and gentlemen
I’d like also to introduce to you someone who is a treasure trove of indigenous
knowledge – an IP Woman Leader. Her name
is Conchita Quinlat. She’s right
there. She is from the Lambangian and
Teduray tribe and she wears many hats in her community: she is a day care
worker, a teacher, a mother – and her recent engagement is being a member of
the IP Communications Group. The context
of the IPComm Group is that if people are not listening to the IPs, then maybe
the IPs can listen to what the world outside them is saying and communicate it
back to the communities where they come from].
To continue:
Arranged
Marriages. The
union of two people is arranged by the parents from both sides. Most marriages are dowry-driven; where girls
who live near the highway or economic centers get higher dowries than their
counterpart in the interiors. Girls are
sometimes have already been married by the time they reach their menarche. Those who are betrothed usually have low
self-esteem; thus may affect their own child-rearing capability.
Current practices may no longer involve
actual costs of dowries but tokens.
Men are said to have unlimited number
of wives; but this is only done under compelling circumstances, with the
guidance and agreement of elders. So far
with IPDEV experience the most that we know are only three. Having more than one partner not necessarily for
marital unions are said to be just a recent phenomenon.
Unregistered
Births. IP
children usually have one name. With the
entry of settlers, if a child is born in a community with strong Christian
influence, s/he is given a Western name.
If s/he is born in a community with strong Muslim influence, s/he is
given an Arabic name. For example if you
hear names starting with Mo, that means “Father
of”; similar with the Mac or Fitz which means “Son of”. Thus Mokolina means father of Kolina; Mokudef father of Kudef; and so on and
so forth.
Thus if a child/person is given other
names, his/her being IP is usually not reflected in school records. Or s/he can be given fake registration
records used in human trafficking; and be subject to multiple registrations
during elections.
Gender
Perspectives.
While males who manifest female behaviour is not frowned upon in IP
society, the person also has to contend with arranged marriages where it is the
norm for him to take a wife. Asserting
one’s rights as an LGBT is a recent phenomenon and there is tolerance in
general towards unruly behaviour associated with gay youth.
Females have very strong influence in
IP society, especially as arbiters.
Rites
of Passage. Girls
experiencing menarche are made to jump three steps from their stairs to
maintain the number of menstruation days to three. But the practice is said to be also
diminishing in the sense that even if a girl doesn’t jump, the number of days
remain more or less constant.
Circumcision among the men is said to have come only within the last 30-40
years, mostly due to social pressure.
Health.
The bliyan or healer takes care of
the pregnant woman. When she is due, the
bliyan even stays in the house to
monitor the actual moment of childbirth.
The current No-Birthing Policy of the government is seen as an affront
to the time-honored skills and handed-down gifts of the bliyan, as the policy seems to treat them as dirty and unhygienic.
The IP is also pressured to produce
money to be able to buy the medicines prescribed by health personnel, even if
they also have time-honored ways of staying healthy with plants and food that
have always been within their immediate surroundings and can be had for free.
Health
Care. Rather
than go through the indignity of putting up a fight, the IP would rather not go
to a health center if only to be treated harshly by health personnel or worse.
Nutrition. The IP has sulagad, which is the IP concept of Food Sovereignty has been there
long before modern civilization even coined the word. But feeding programs given to IP children
include what is now called Killer Whites: white rice, white flour, white sugar,
milk. This is not the diet of the
IP. The lure of commercially-produced
food is robbing children and young people of real nutrients. One implication of this is that mothers now seem
to believe that it is the duty of government to nourish her own children.
Parent-Child
Relationship. In an
IP community, the family is not nuclear, but clannish. Today parents have to juggle their parenting
roles with the challenges that they have to face every day, which include the constant
threat of encroachment into their ancestral lands. They have to look after their security
inasmuch as those who encroach into their lands are usually armed.
Today’s youth among the IP is also
confronted with the fact that their elders are being killed because of land
conflict. Due to lack of legal support,
these cases often go unresolved and the calls of young people for justice and
protection go unheeded. This leaves another generation of young people who are trying to figure out the anger and confusion
they feel within.
Parents also leave their families to
work as OFWs. Absentee parenting leaves
the IP child to ask life questions from his age group who generally doesn’t necessarily know
any better.
Peer
Support. Loyuk, or peer support among the IP has
always been present in many of their socio-economic activities: farming,
fishing, hunting, learning. The
increasing gap between young people and their parents also limit the guidance a
child is supposed to get.
Spirituality. The IP child is confronted with the concepts
and values of two dominant religions: Chistianity and Islam over his own
indigenous spirituality. Christianity is
divided futher into Episcopal, Baptist, Catholic and folk Christianity; in the
same way that Muslims has its own folk practices that are perceived to be
Islamic.
The IP child is also confronted with
the fact that his sacred grounds are being logged, deforested, mined, and
replaced with plantations. While places
of worship for Christians and Muslims are actual buildings, the places of
worship for an IP are mountains, rivers, rocks, trees – which were erected not
by humans but by nature. Implication: If
someone occupies or destroys your place of worship, what would you feel?
(Note: The very first slide in my
presentation shows the pilgrimage site of the Teduray and Lambangian
Tribes. If Muslims have Mecca and
Christians have the Holy Land, Mt Firis is for the IPs. This sacred mountain was occupied by MILF in
1997 to set up Camp Omar. The camp has recently
been taken back by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the IPs are now
gradually returning back to their ancestral land).
Pop
Culture.
Alcoholic beverages came with the entry of settlers; choice of partners
as an individual choice is a recent influence of mainstream society; drug use
is already seen among IP youth; young people become vulnerable to gang wars and
rape in hangout places like dances and videoke joints.
Information
Technology.
Relationships that are developed through texting and social media is
seen as a strain between parents and young people.
Rape-slays. The customary laws have a way of resolving
rape cases in a discreet way where only the immediate families of aggressor and
aggrieved are involved. Rape-slays are a
recent phenomenon attributed to drug use and easy access to pornographic material
through the digital age. Indigenous
forms of conflict resolution for rape-slay cases already seem to be inapplicable
because many of the present-day rape cases already involve killings.
Discrimination. Recent cases of discrimination involve a
Teduray mother and a Teduray high school student. The mother’s premature baby (7 months old)
died after falling off the delivery table in the Cotabato Regional Hospital
because she was not given immediate attention in the emergency room. The high school student was made to stop her
dance midway because the teacher thought it has no relation to Linggo ng Wika.
Cyclical
armed conflict.
Young people are recruited into the Moro armed fronts. The latest being the Bangsamoro Islamic Armed
Forces. Shortly before that was the
MILF; then earlier back, the MNLF, Tutpik. They
are also recruited by private armed groups and cattle rustlers. Families of these young people also cannot
refuse the invitation for fear of their security.
Low
literacy rates. Projects, usually infrastructure, have reached IP communities. IPDEV
has assessed quite a number; but these are either not fully utilized, neglected,
used for some other purpose, or not functioning at all. This could be attributed to the low
absorptive capacity of the community for external inputs; or that the priority
of the community is something else. And
since governance has a lot to do with transparency and accountability,
transparency can only mean something if people know how what to look for; and
accountability can only mean something if people know how to count. That said, projects can be effective if
people know how to read and write and count.
Mismatched
interventions.
School buildings instead of schools; clinics/hospitals instead of health
care; water systems instead of water source preservation; commercial inputs
instead of sustainable--not financing dependent, agriculture.
People are subjected to trainings left and right without necessarily
addressing the education part.
What are the implications? The culture
of dependence is innocently promoted with the proliferation of external
assistance thus contradicting sustainability.
Bayanihan or communal effort
is dismantled because every step of say, agricultural production cycle requires
money; even paid manual labor is already hard to come by because people have liquid cash
to spend coming from the Conditional Cash Transfers (4Ps).
NGOs
CSOs FBOs Academe Business.
That the people do not feel the presence of government is fertile ground
for non-government organizations, civil society organizations, faith-based
organizations, academe and business to intervene without government as impartial
referee. Thus, each sector comes in with
their own set of vision, agenda; their own set of rules and ways of doing
things – thus confusing the community further.
Among these sectors, it is usually business that outruns government
because it is always profitable to engage with the rest of the other sectors.
Conflicting
Government Policies. Policies on sustainable development
have a disconnect with the environment.
IPRA, DAR, DENR, Mining Laws. Ancestral
Domain Sustainability and Protection Plans of the Teduray, Lambangian and
Dulangan Manobo do not include monocrop plantations and mining.
Indigenous forms of weather
forecasting is now known as ethnometeorology;
sulagad is biodynamic farming (it’s a step above organic farming and sustainable
agriculture); the use of indigenous plants as medicines is ethnopharmacology – which means, the so-called modern civilization
has just come up with names of something that has always been there.
Bangsamoro
Basic Law. IPRA
is a peace agreement that was forged by the Philippine Government with its
Indigenous Peoples. RA 8371 was fought
without a united armed confrontation with government but in the legal
battlegrounds of congress.
Provisions on IPs, children and youth
have already been incorporated into the draft BBL which is now under review by
congress. This is seen to be another
duplication of conflicting policies that run the danger of not being implemented properly if at
all, including the law that created the ARMM.
Implication:
Government has a lot to prove that it will not make a repeat of neglecting the
IPs brought about by previous laws.
Culture cannot be legislated; and no government -- if it has wisdom -- can
afford to lose its own cultures.
General
lack of government (as duty bearers) to respond to the needs of the IPs in
general and their children and youth in particular. Duty bearers are government – its officials and
employees at all levels who are sworn to protect its people. With government officials and employees who
continue to manifest preference over personal/familial interest from common good,
the fear that violations on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, their children
and youth will continue, is validated.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Education-centered
intervention.
Any intervention can only be effective if IP children and youth know how
to read and write and count. Where there
is a child who is willing to learn and someone who is willing to teach and
learning takes place there is a school.
Results-oriented
Research.
Indigenous Skills Systems and Practices have been there since time
immemorial. It’s a race against time to
have these documented. And more
importantly, not just research for research’s sake – but for the benefit of the
IPs.
Free
Prior Informed Consent.
Before any intervention can be done on ancestral land, there should be
FPIC. In short, it is only rightful that
we (government or non-government, miners or plantation companies, etc), ask
permission from them and tell them our intentions in a language and process
they understand. Not just making them
sign documents.
Make
duty-bearers accountable.
It is not wise to duplicate what government is supposed to be
doing. Government is duty-bound to
protect its people. The rest of us can
only bridge the gap between the duty bearers and the rights holders – and in
the context of our conference, the IP Children and Youth. Let us work to make government – the duty
bearers, function.
CONCLUSION:
The Indigenous Peoples have sustained
themselves through thousands of years.
The survival of the IPs also means the survival of its men, women,
elderly, youth and children. They have
been there since time immemorial; they are meant to continue for generations to
come.
And since an indigenous person is
always connected to the land, may our intentions towards them be also connected
to the land.
May we all live long. As they say in the Teduray language: Meuyag!
* * * * *
