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Indigenous Land Rights and Legal Pluralism among Philippine Highlanders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

June Prill-Brett
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Abstract

Indigenous people in the Philippine Cordillera Region maintain legal pluralism by invoking several legal orders—customary laws, conflicting national laws, international law, and principles of human rights—to assert claims to ancestral lands. Although the U.S. Supreme Court in 1909 held that Philippine lands that had been occupied from time immemorial are presumed never to have been public, the Spanish colonial Regalian doctrine, derived from the explorer Magellan's claim of all lands in the Archipelago for the Spanish crown, remains the theoretical bedrock on which Philippine national land laws rest. Land not covered by official documentation, such as the highland areas occupied by indigenous groups who have not acquired legal titles, is considered part of the public domain. Recently, dam-building projects, logging concessions, and commercial farming in highland areas have spurred renewed efforts by indigenous groups to assert rights to ancestral lands threatened with flooding, deforestation, and dispossession.

Type
Part III: Land & the Natural Environment
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Law & Society in Southeast Asia , 1994 , pp. 687 - 697
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I acknowledge with gratitude the Ford Foundation and the Law and Society Association for inviting me to attend the conference on Law and Society in Southeast Asia in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at which the paper was presented.

References

1 I use folk law and customary law interchangeably.

2 The mountain peoples of the Philippines who were never colonized and Hispanicized—including the Islamicized groups—have unfortunately become the cultural minorities; the westernized lowland cultures are dominant. I use indigenous to refer to the Filipinos who have retained many of their preconquest cultural practices and who are found in the uplands or highlands in settlements and villages that they have occupied since time immemorial.

3 The Spanish crown owned some land only on paper, for several indigenous groups were never subjugated by Spain and were still in actual control of their lands; some still control their lands today (e.g., in the central Cordillera) but are now being threatened by state laws like P.D. 705.

4 Another case upheld by the Court was filed by another Ibaloy in Reaves v. Fianza (Bagamaspad & Hamada-Pawid 1985:263). The former protested to the authorities against the action of an American miner, Reaves, in registering mining properties worked by him and his ancestors. Although Fianza had no patent or other paper title, his customary rights were upheld when presented in an appeal to the Court in 1907 (Keesing & Keesing 1934:183).

5 DENR has taken a passive stance. There has been no policing of the area being encroached on by vegetable farmers, who have cleared the mossy oak forest. A research team from the Cordillera Studies Center, University of the Philippines College Baguio observed the situation in 1989–91 (Prill-Brett & Salinas 1991).