HONORING IBALOY Baguio City’s Ibaloy clans have been celebrating Ibaloy Day at a section of Burnham Park every Feb. 23 since 2009 to honor the summer capital’s original inhabitants. EV ESPIRITU
BAGUIO CITY—The Ibaloy community here on Tuesday urged the city government to put up a “native title” monument at the popular Burnham Park in light of a Supreme Court decision that might affect their ancestral land rights.
Saying they were “under attack,” the Ibaloy families said the monument would remind the world that Baguio was where the US Supreme Court recognized their land rights and all indigenous Filipinos in 1909 after the American colonial government expropriated lands to build Baguio.
The 1909 ruling is the foundation of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (Ipra) of 1997 (Republic Act No. 8371), which exempts Baguio from its coverage. The ruling was cited in jurisprudence as the native title doctrine or the Cariño doctrine in honor of Ibaloy herdsman Mateo Cariño who won that case. Baguio exempted
When the Supreme Court Second Division voided ancestral land titles that encroached into a Baguio park, the city’s oldest hotel and a portion of the presidential Mansion, it said Section 78 of the Ipra “expressly excludes the city of Baguio from the application of the general provisions of the law.”
Some Ibaloy families feared the court’s decision issued in September would be the precedent for nullifying legitimate ancestral landholdings as well as Baguio’s only recognized ancestral domain at Camp John Hay. Last month, ancestral landholders living in one of Baguio’s major watersheds were issued notices of violation for intruding into a protected forest.
The native title doctrine was the fruit of “a great battle won by the Ibaloy for recognition of ancestral lands,” the Ibaloy families said when they were consulted by a technical working group tasked with designing a new Burnham Park.
ReservationsCouncilor Mylene Yaranon, who is overseeing the park’s rehabilitation, informed them that there were reservations about the integration of an Ibaloy garden in the park’s modernization plans.
The concept for the Ibaloy garden was to recreate an Ibaloy village before parcels of land in Tuba and Itogon towns in Benguet province were carved out for a Baguio hill station that would host the summer government of Americans escaping the Manila heat.
But some Ibaloy families have been unhappy with how it was developed. They joined a public clamor to retain Burnham Park’s original concept.
“When you talk of sentiment, the Ibaloy is very simple. We don’t think of huge structures,” said Zenaida Hamada-Pawid, former chair of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples. —VINCENT CABREZA