Tenure rights and ancestral domains in the Philippines. A study of the roots of conflict

The tragedy of colonization in the Philippines is that it created a country but splintered a people.1 It unified a scattering of self-ruling communities into a single state but divided its citizens into those who acquired power from col onization and those who lost power because they avoided colonization (Duhaylungsod 1996; Lynch 1984). Colonization consolidated the Philippines into a political unit when it became a colony of Spain after Magellan claimed the entire Isias de Filipinas for the Spanish king in 1521 (Douglas 1970). The present Philippine republic emerged by revolutionary declaration from the Spanish colonial claim in 1898 but was unable to function as a free political entity because of subse quent colonial suppression by the United States following its defeat of Spain in 1899. The Americans ultimately gave up the territory in 1946, however, and the Philippines became an independent and sovereign state. Colonization divided the Filipino people into two groups, each with a dif ferent experience of colonization. The first group comprises the 'C-Filipinos', the colonized. They were co-opted by and collaborated with the colonial regime. They cross-bred with the colonial rulers, became acculturated into colonial ways, were christianized and were often coastal in their settlement pattern. The second group comprises the -Filipinos', who were generally considered to be politically irrelevant. They were often impoverished because of economic and political marginalization, indigenous in their ways, often inland in their habitation, and generally successful in keeping their cul tures intact in the face of colonization.2