Indigenous peoples are under threat as never before and need the international community to stand with them as they demand justice, their ancestral land rights, and an end to the exploitation and abuse they suffer in many countries.
How disingenuous that they should suffer discrimination, stigmatisation and racism since all people in the world today are descended from indigenous tribal people. 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; not just any home, but the ancestral homeland for all modern humans [www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/controversial-study-pinpoints-birthplace-modern-humans].
Today, there are more than 476 million indigenous peoples that live in 90 nations around the world. According to the United Nations, they make up 6.2 per cent of the world population. They have their own unique languages, culture, customs and traditions and have ancestral rights to their lands having possessed these from time immemorial.
They are people that are capable of self-governance and survived for many thousands of years before nations emerged in history. Over the last 500 years, colonialism spread across the world and foreign nations invaded the lands of indigenous peoples, killed millions and stole and occupied their lands. They were infected with Western diseases against which they had no defense and millions more died. Others were massacred and driven to the edge of extinction.
This month marks 500 years since the Aztec civilisation in South America was wiped out by the Spanish conquistadors. In the Philippines, the Spanish invasion 500 years ago began a war of extermination against the Moro people in Mindanao, which eventually failed, but they conquered the rest of the islands.
The aggression, land-grabbing and attempted extermination of groups of indigenous people is still happening with those in the Amazon rainforest subject to ongoing attacks and killings as miners, loggers and agro-farming concerns continue to invade ancestral lands, burning and devastating the environment, in search of gold and plantation space.
The aggression, land-grabbing and attempted extermination of groups of indigenous people is still happening with those in the Amazon rainforest subject to ongoing attacks and killings as miners, loggers and agro-farming concerns continue to invade ancestral lands, burning and devastating the environment, in search of gold and plantation space.
In 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared that a cultural genocide had been inflicted upon the country’s indigenous people. As many as 150,000 children were forcibly abducted from their natural families and locked up in residential schools. Hundreds died from hunger, neglect malnutrition, disease, physical and sexual abuse.
The schools, to their eternal shame, were run by religious groups from several denominations, but the Catholic Church had the most. 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 declared.
“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,” it said.
The greatest moral scandal saw government agents co-opting churches into running these schools, when in fact what was done is against the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth himself. He taught that the rights and dignity of every human being is of eternal value.
I mention their names to give them their identity, recognition, and respect. They are the 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 Peoples.
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 (Matthew 18:1-7).
In Mindanao, there are many indigenous groups who have inhabited their ancestral lands for thousands of years. I mention their names to give them their identity, recognition, and respect. They are the 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 Peoples.
A few Philippine officials object to them being called Lumad since the most nationalistic think that the word equates to being communist.
“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, Mindanao, disputed this and said the order sought to brand the indigenous people as insurgents and rebels.
“The [NCIP’s] order only reveals its members’ ignorance as to how the struggles of the Lumad have unfolded in Mindanao over the last 60 years,” he said, adding, “It arose without an ideological agenda, let alone that of the communist movement.”
It 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, victimised by both a repressive state and businesses interested in usurping the Lumads’ ancestral domains for profit,” the archbishop said.
All in all, the indigenous people are estimated to comprise 15 per cent of the country’s total population of about 100 million (Journal of Philippine Statistics, 2008: 92). As many as 71 indigenous leaders have been killed by paramilitary groups in recent years.
They are tasked with driving people from their ancestral lands so that mining corporations and palm-oil plantations owned by agri-corporations can continue to move in and take the land while destroying the environment and remaining forests in the process.
All this is against Philippine law—the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997. The law is supposed to protect the rights of the indigenous people.
However, like many laws in the Philippines, they don’t apply to the 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 peoples need honest rulers of integrity who believe in the rule of law and are supported by an enlightened public that support and lives out the values of goodness, justice, and their rights.
Father Shay Cullen
www.preda.org
