Marginalized indigenous tribes on Mindanao Island, collectively called the lumad, are finding themselves in the thick of an armed battleground in their own ancestral lands, pushed to the fringes of the country. After a recent spate of killings that broke through into public notice, their plight has exposed the Philippine complexities of heritage, natural resources, exploitation and internal wars.
The communist New People’s Army (NPA), which had been written off as a dwindling threat in the past three decades of free-wheeling democracy, has resuscitated the hinterlands of northeastern Mindanao into a comeback and their fighting base. There they believe they can revive mass support from among the impoverished tribes that anthropologists call the invisible Filipinos.
More than half of the country’s 110 ethnic tribes, at latest count, or “Indigenous People” as they are known legally, are found in Mindanao, which is in itself a keg of violence spawned from the Muslim rebellions since the 1970s. The lumad, a native term distinct to the various non-Muslim tribes of Mindanao, occupy the remote forests in the Christian majority provinces of Davao, Agusan, Bukidnon and Surigao.
Until the news went viral giving symbol to their name, they were a group of people who wore their costumes in public cultural shows and had strange supernatural beliefs in the eyes of most Filipinos, who are more than 80 percent Catholic. Full story...
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The communist New People’s Army (NPA), which had been written off as a dwindling threat in the past three decades of free-wheeling democracy, has resuscitated the hinterlands of northeastern Mindanao into a comeback and their fighting base. There they believe they can revive mass support from among the impoverished tribes that anthropologists call the invisible Filipinos.
More than half of the country’s 110 ethnic tribes, at latest count, or “Indigenous People” as they are known legally, are found in Mindanao, which is in itself a keg of violence spawned from the Muslim rebellions since the 1970s. The lumad, a native term distinct to the various non-Muslim tribes of Mindanao, occupy the remote forests in the Christian majority provinces of Davao, Agusan, Bukidnon and Surigao.
Until the news went viral giving symbol to their name, they were a group of people who wore their costumes in public cultural shows and had strange supernatural beliefs in the eyes of most Filipinos, who are more than 80 percent Catholic. Full story...
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