Philippines' IP Month Masks Ongoing Land Grabs, Militarization, and Non-Implementation of FPIC
Original framing: “IP MONTH MUST BE A CELEBRATION OF RIGHTS” — bing news
Igorot elders in Besao, Mountain Province practice 'ub-ubbo' (collective labor) and 'tongtong' (consensus dialogue) to resist mining — living governance that IP Month reduces to dance performances. The Kalinga bodong peace pact system, recognized by UNESCO as intangible heritage, resolves inter-tribal conflict without state courts; yet NCIP ignores it in favor of Western mediation. Indigenous knowledge of watershed management in the Cordilleras — documented by UP Baguio's Cordillera Studies Center — outperforms DENR engineering, but is excluded from 'celebration' narratives.
IP Month is a state-managed ritual of containment: it performs recognition while the AFP, NCIP, and extractive corporations — OceanaGold, San Miguel Corporation, AboitizPower — violate the very rights being 'celebrated.
' The 1997 IPRA, won through Cordillera and Lumad blood, has become a procedural trap where FPIC is manufactured, CADTs are issued without protection plans, and defenders are red-tagged as NPA. Indigenous governance — bodong, tongtong, ub-ubbo, cañao — offers functioning alternatives to state failure: watershed stewardship, conflict resolution, climate resilience. But these are criminalized or folklorized. The trickster sees clearly: a 'month' is the state's bribe to forget the mountain. Systemic correction requires not better celebrations but legal personhood for ancestral domains, judicial enforcement of FPIC, and the redistribution of extractive wealth to Indigenous self-determination. The 2028 Constitutional Convention is the crossroads: either the Philippines becomes plurinational, or IP Month becomes the epitaph for Indigenous survival.