Ibaloys reject House bill removing NCIP power to title ancestral land

OLD MODERN Baguio’s original settlers come from big clans of Ibaloys in Benguet province. This 2008 photo shows Ibaloy elders during a festival in Kabayan, Benguet. —EV ESPIRITU

BAGUIO CITY — This city’s indigenous community of Ibaloys has drawn up a manifesto objecting to House Bill No. 9608 that will remove the ancestral land titling powers of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).

The manifesto, addressed to HB 9608 sponsor Camiguin Rep. Jurdin Jesus Romualdo, was adopted during the Ibaloy Day celebration on Feb. 23 at Burnham Park’s Ibaloy Garden, according to Councilor Maximo Edwin, the Baguio Indigenous Peoples’ (IP) mandatory representative, who also goes by his clan’s name, Bugnay.

The Ibaloy manifesto was adopted ahead of a city council resolution passed on Monday that backed the “mounting opposition by the city’s indigenous peoples organizations and IP associations to House Bill 9608 introduced by Representative…Romualdo.”

Romualdo’s measure would remove from the NCIP the ancestral domain office, which oversees the issuance of Certificates of Ancestral Land Title and Certificates of Ancestral Domain Title to IPs, and transfer it to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, which issues land patents throughout the country.

The bill said changes had to be made because “fraudulent claims to ancestral domains and ancestral lands undermine the IPs’ rights, leading to disputes and injustices.”

HB 9608 also claimed that “non-Indigenous cultural communities are also involuntarily subjected to customs not their own through the all-encompassing jurisdiction of the NCIP.”

But the Ibaloys said Congress should instead increase funding to make NCIP function more efficiently, as they acknowledged that “NCIP is not immune to controversy … (and) has its own weaknesses and lapses due to its poor and outdated organizational structure coupled with (a few) erring personnel.”

‘Tavtaval’

NCIP, they stressed, only required “timely reorganization or upgrade [for a bureaucracy it inherited from] its predecessors, the Office for Northern Cultural Communities and the Office for Southern Cultural Communities.”

The Ibaloys, which formulated the manifesto through a customary decision-making process called “tavtaval” (communal discussion),” stressed that the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997, which gave them legal rights over their ancestral lands, was grounded on the landmark “Native Title” Doctrine issued in 1909 by the United States Supreme Court, which recognized the indigenous land rights of Mateo Cariño, an Ibaloy, over what is now Camp John Hay. INQ