{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "@id": "https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/philippine-doctrine-discovery/#article",
  "name": "The Regalian Doctrine: The Philippine Case",
  "headline": "The Regalian Doctrine: The Philippine Case",
  "description": "Introduction The Philippines has over 14-17 million remaining Indigenous peoples belonging to an estimated 110 ethnolinguistic communities (between 10-20% of the total population). It also boasts of some of the most progressive legislation in the world when it comes to protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples. One such law is the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997 with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) as its implementing arm. Yet despite such legislation, the Philippines is notorious for having one of the highest rates of murder of Indigenous land protectors in the world (alongside Brazil), not to mention, the  incidence of dispossession and displacement of tribes that happen to be “in the right of way” of mining, dam-building, tourism, and other development projects. In previous writing (Mendoza, 2020), I have noted how the only relation imagined by the Philippine state with its Indigenous populations is that of assimilation, never recognition of their autonomous rights or sovereignty. I have tracked how the government-sanctioned imperative to “keep up” with the rest of the civilized world actively (re)produces such populations as wards of the state, in need of incorporation into the national polity, celebrating their otherness only for tourism purposes. And even among well-meaning and justice-oriented Filipino academics wishing to “indigenize” the schools’ curriculum, the prevailing sentiment tends still to be that of patronage, with the driving impetus being that of “helping rescue our exploited tribal kin” out of their impoverished conditions that, perchance, they, too, might benefit from the fruits of progress and technological advancement “just like the rest of us modernized Filipinos.” And as the nation-state presses forward—climate chaos notwithstanding—in its determined drive to achieve economic growth and development at all cost, 1 Indigenous dispossession becomes expedient and necessary “for the sake of the greater good.” As in the much-touted “Build, Build, Build” program of former President Duterte and now, the “Build, Better, More’ infrastructure program” of the newly-elected President Bong Bong Marcos, son of the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos (Quismorio, Aug. 23, 2022).  ↩",
  "url": "https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/philippine-doctrine-discovery/",
  "inLanguage": "en",
  "identifier": "https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/philippine-doctrine-discovery/",
  "datePublished": "2023-04-24",
  "dateModified": "2023-04-24",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "S. Lily Mendoza"
  },
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Doctrine of Discovery Project",
    "url": "https://doctrineofdiscovery.org"
  },
  "isPartOf": {
    "@type": "Blog",
    "@id": "https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/",
    "name": "Doctrine of Discovery Project",
    "url": "https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/"
  },
  "image": "https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/assets/images/ar-_a1mNdnHE2E-unsplash.webp"
}