THIS MONTH IN HISTORY: National Indigenous Peoples Month

IN PHOTOS: A few of the Tribal Filipino Week Celebrations over the years.

In 2009, then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo signed Proclamation 1906 which institutionalized the month of October every year as the National Indigenous Peoples Month. It was an effort to commemorate the signing of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act into law on October 29, 1997.

But years prior to the government declaration of a National IP Month, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines had declared the second Sunday of October as Tribal Filipino Sunday as early as 1978 to stand in solidarity with the growing opposition of indigenous peoples against the development aggression projects of the Marcos dictatorship. Other church groups soon joined the celebration thus expanding it to an ecumenical event. Later, Tribal Filipino Sunday was renamed Indigenous Peoples Sunday and is now celebrated annually as an avenue for the Church and IPs to express solidarity and increase awareness of pressing issues of our IP population.

This year marks 25 years of IPRA and 13 years of the government’s National IP Month celebrations and yet our indigenous peoples continue to be threatened by the state’s sell-out of ancestral lands coupled with militarization, red tagging, terrorist-tagging, and trumped-up charges. In this light, this month should be honored the same way the church peoples sought to amplify the plight of their indigenous brethren especially since IPRA’s institution, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), has so far been instrumental in violating the rights of the people it should have been protecting. ###