DISCRIMINATION AGAINST indigenous peoples in a city like Manila is rather blatant. Recently, this writer saw how passengers in a jeepney plying to Diliman in Quezon City avoided getting the seat near three Aeta women and an Aeta child. The indigenous women, meanwhile, looked down whenever they noticed people staring at them. Their bags indicated they were in the city to beg.

Himpad Mangumalas, spokesperson of the non-government Kalipunan ng mga Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas (KAMP or Federation of Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines), says these only show that indigenous peoples are like squatters in their own land.

	HANUNUO Mangyan folk try to identify the boundaries and landmarks in their ancestral domain through 3-D mapping. [photo courtesy of Mangyan Heritage Center]

A Higaonon, he has spent most of his life fleeing from his home in Agusan del Norte in southern Philippines due to military operations and conflict from massive logging operations. He remarks, “We are not secured in our own ancestral land and we don’t have equal opportunities.”

Lack of equal access to basic social services, compounded by a long history of discrimination and prejudice, has ingrained poverty in indigenous communities.

According to the 2005 Philippine Human Development Report, eight of the 10 poorest provinces are populated mainly by indigenous peoples or indigenous cultural communities: Apayao, Ifugao, and Batanes in the north; and Basilan, Maguindanao, Sulu, Tawi-tawi, and Saranggani down south. These provinces share high incidence in nutritional deficiency among women and children, lack of education, homelessness, and poor income opportunities among other indicators, the report said.

Yet it may be cold comfort to the likes of Mallari and Calbayog to know that the local situation is a microcosm of the high correlation between ethnicity and poverty among 250 million indigenous peoples around the globe.

In 2005, the International Labor Organization reported that poverty is widespread and persistent among indigenous and tribal peoples and in areas where they are dominant.

The United Nations, meanwhile, has admitted that few gains were made in income poverty reduction among indigenous peoples during the First Decade of Indigenous Peoples, from 1994 to 2004. The UN has declared 2005 to 2015 the Second Decade of Indigenous Peoples, focusing more on the improvement of the well-being of the indigenous peoples. The decade ends the same year that the UN’s poverty-busting Millennium Development Goals (MDG) culminates.

INTERESTINGLY, THE Philippines has committed to both global efforts, with the Arroyo administration highlighting the role of indigenous peoples in fighting poverty. President Arroyo has said in several official pronouncements that indigenous peoples are part of her administration’s 10-point anti-poverty agenda, stressing that indigenous communities “are part of the national mainstream and should not work in isolation from all Filipinos.”

Yet indigenous peoples seemingly remain on the outside looking in. Castro, a professor at the University of the Philippines, is now even convinced that that indigenous Filipinos are virtual foreigners in their birth land and that their being Filipinos is only incidental.

Last May, he stayed for a month in Sabah, Malaysia for an anthropology project with his students. There Castro observed that Filipino Badjao, Iranun, Tausug, and Yakan — part of the Philippines’ Moro indigenous peoples — who settled in Sabah seemed to identify more with the Malaysian system than the Filipino system.

“They are not lost there because they shared the same faith, music and culture with the Badjao of Sabah,” says Castro. He also notes that the Badjao used to live in the borders of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia before colonizers of these countries arbitrarily set up boundaries.

But what was “most alarming,” Castro says, was that he could not communicate with the Filipino Badjao and other indigenous peoples there because they did not share the same language. He says this only affirms the dichotomized Philippine culture and society: the mainstream and indigenous. Often, indigenous groups cannot relate to the laws, policies, and programs of the “Manila-centric” government to advance their welfare, even if some of these are supposedly geared precisely toward that, he says.

Castro, who has spent more than 15 years of studying the struggle of the indigenous peoples of Kalinga in northern Luzon for his graduate studies, says it is about time for government to prove that its projects are indeed for the advancement of indigenous peoples. Unless no bold moves are done, he says, indigenous peoples would continue to equate government with the mining, dam construction, and logging projects they oppose.