Environment and the Indigenous People

History will tell us that the power of the Commonwealth government preceding to World War II was committed to identifying large drape of the country to be set aside as national parks, where logging and mining were disallowed. These areas happened to cover much of the ancestral domains of our indigenous peoples. However the past six decades has seen those national parks and protected areas carved down. They have been unwrapped up to logging and mineral compromised, and in the procedure, the sanctified areas and ancestral lands of our indigenous peoples have been laid waste and their rights trodden.

Cosseted in the tyrannical, bomb shelter-like presidential palace, the so called Chief Executive lives in an everlasting phase of siege, surrounded by flatterers, barriered to by pitiless propagandists, protected by officials who, in their loyalty towards her, have forgotten they must first and foremost be the servants of the people.

From the time when this Chief Executive assumed power, our nation has been in an enduring condition of moral and psychological catastrophe. The energies of the state are dissipated as the President and her courtiers intrigue against each other; the powerful are bribed, or intimidated, but the powerless are ignored.

While there are few who are as powerless, as our Filipino brothers from the indigenous peoples. The privileged democracy we have defines that indigenous peoples are too speckled and considered as minority, to even matter as far as providing a prospect to bring in their votes. They are merely barriers to progress, as defined by the so-called powerful few. On my part as a student of environmental studies, I observed that many groups have helped gather together facts and figures, to demonstrate the extent of the dilemma of our brethren from the indigenous peoples. We must continue this effort, but we must also go further. At this point in time, I think that I need to allocate substantial time and energy in advocating a genuinely fair and humane line of attack to the problems and issues precious to the hearts of indigenous peoples. As a baby in terms of being counter-conscious on the needs of our brother IPs, I perceive that I am merely an apparatus or a tool, a means for encouraging others to offer a hand to a fight that is from the start that of the indigenous peoples have fallen on to .people pretending to be deaf.

On my part as an educator and at the same time a politician, I suggest that this government must not just re-evaluate the facts and figures that tell us what we already savoir faire demoralizing the situation is, and how heartlessly our indigenous peoples are being subdued, in contrast the question is what do we need to act for? Communal rights and interests have been proposed as the rationalization for anti-indigenous people's programs, such as mining and other forms environmental destructions.

As a professor of business and economics, based on studies shows that mining will not be the universal remedy to our economic tribulations if it bears as its worth, unfairness and melancholy for our tribal minorities; but then, we also know that neither will logging nor land-grabbing, the embezzlement of the seas or the forests, are policies favorable to the so called societal majority. Having this administration drunk on realms o power, says otherwise. Just as it has the power to murder those laboring in the people's interest, it has the power to say these things -logging, mining, the setting aside of human rights- are good: and it has congregate the propaganda of the state to survive its regime.

Nevertheless I understand, as well, that the Filipino people, whether the nation in totality, or its sectors such as the, urban poor, laborers, youth, the fishermen and farmers, or the reasons that oblige our sustained advocacy, support and encouragement. The environment, social justice, Filipino identity and our national sovereignty will persist to express awareness, and sustained active defiance.

However, as for the our brother indigenous peoples, when will the time come, that their ethnicity, customs, mores and way of life can be tied together, not by us, but by them, to get up for their rights and ecology in the mode of the youth, the farmers, and the fishermen? History manifest and shows us the manner in which solidarity networks have helped stem the black tide of official killings and human rights violations. As for me, based on numerous experiences, I suggest that there is a need to build as astounding, effective and effective solidarity network for our indigenous peoples before it’s too late.