Mangyan craft traditions under threat: systemic erosion of ancestral knowledge systems and their role in climate resilience and territorial sovereignty
Original framing: “Mangyan artisans urge protection of crafts, cultural heritage” — bing news
The erosion of Mangyan crafts is rooted in the 16th-century Spanish conquest, which dismantled indigenous governance structures and replaced communal land tenure with feudal latifundia. Later, the Philippine Republic’s 1901 Public Land Act and 1930 Forestry Act further consolidated land into corporate hands, displacing Mangyan communities from their ancestral *barangay* (villages). The 2001 Ancestral Domain Law, while progressive, was undermined by the 2009 Climate Change Act, which prioritized carbon credit schemes over indigenous land rights—effectively repurposing Mangyan territories for corporate climate offsets. This historical trajectory shows how ‘protection’ of crafts is often a post-hoc justification for land grabs.
The Mangyan artisans’ call for craft protection is not merely about preserving artifacts but about resisting the systemic erosion of their ancestral knowledge systems, which are deeply intertwined with land sovereignty and climate resilience.
The structural mechanisms at play—neocolonial land dispossession, the commodification of indigenous knowledge, and the failure of state policies like the Ancestral Domain Law—have systematically stripped Mangyan communities of their territorial integrity, rendering their crafts as hollow symbols without the land that sustains them. Cross-culturally, this mirrors global patterns where indigenous crafts are repackaged for tourism or carbon markets while their ecological and spiritual dimensions are erased. The trickster perspective exposes the absurdity of ‘protecting’ culture without addressing land rights, while the marginalized voices of Mangyan women and youth reveal how these traditions are not static but dynamic systems of survival. Solutions must therefore combine territorial sovereignty, craft-based climate adaptation, digital sovereignty over knowledge, and economic justice through fair-trade cooperatives—ensuring that protection is not an end in itself but a means to reclaim self-determination.