Still strangers in their own land

This October, the landmark Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) will turn a decade old. Yet this fact did not merit any mention in President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s latest State of the Nation Address, and it’s not that hard to see why it was left out. Although IPRA has enabled hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples to gain titles to their ancestral domain, most of them are still without basic services and remain disconnected with the rest of Philippine society.

The National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), the government agency tasked to oversee the implementation of IPRA, says it has delineated and issued 57 certificates of ancestral domain title (CADT), covering 19 percent of the estimated total of six million hectares of ancestral domain and benefiting some 300,000 families. But rights advocates like Jocelyn Villanueva say that measuring IPRA’s success should go beyond numbers and must dwell on the actual situation of the indigenous peoples in their ancestral domain.

The country’s indigenous peoples number more than 11 million, or over 10 percent of the national population. President Arroyo has repeatedly said that indigenous peoples are part of her 10-point anti-poverty agenda, which was launched just two years ago. The agenda was meant as her administration’s pro-poor platform to create jobs and entrepreneurs, as well as to provide clean water, better health services, electricity, and education in the country.

But this promise remains unfulfilled especially among indigenous peoples, most of whom live in areas with neither roads nor electricity and where the only medical healer available is a quack doctor. And while it had been hoped that IPRA would help give indigenous peoples the attention and respect they deserve, discrimination against them persists.

We hope the piece, as part of i Report‘s Alien Nation series, helps readers have a wider perspective of indigenous peoples’ rights.

Read on at pcij.org.