S. Lily Mendoza, a Filipina woman and professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, writes about the influence of the Doctrine of Discovery on the Philippines. Read the entire blogpost on the Doctrine of Discovery website: https://mogc.info/PH-Doctrine-of-Discovery
The following article was published in the July-August 2023 issue of NewsNotes.
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, 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. Indigenous dispossession becomes expedient and necessary “for the sake of the greater good.”
Such stark policy disconnect and contradiction cannot be accounted for merely by reference to “lack of good governance,” i.e., the notion that if only the right people were elected into office, then the implementation problem would be taken care of. The roots of the problem run much deeper—reaching back not only to the foundational land and tenure laws arbitrarily instituted in the country as part of colonial era legislation but, I would argue, to the very emergence of the Philippine nation-state—post-independence—not as a liberatory force for good, but, unwittingly, as a continuing armature of domination and conquest, this time, vis-a-vis its own indigenous populations.
This it does in its unqualified adoption of the notorious Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DOCD)—known as the Regalian Doctrine in its Spanish iteration—that served as Europe’s instrument of colonial genocide and theft of Indigenous territories around the globe.
Despite the DOCD being nothing more than a legal fiction and a religious contrivance conjured literally out of thin air, its material and symbolic power continues to grind on inexorably in many places around the globe as a destructive force majeure, its supremacist and expansionist ideology exploding worlds and introducing a death dynamic on the planet…. Referred to by scholars as “a perfect marginalization tool,” it is one that has yet to be challenged in any meaningful way up to the present moment.
I submit that a continuing source of aggravation in state-Indigenous relations in the Philippine case is the entrenchment of the logic of the DOCD in the country’s land and property laws in the form of the Regalian Doctrine or Jura Regalia. The term “regalia” derives from the Spanish crown’s assertion, upon its takeover of the islands beginning in the 1500s, of its right to ownership of all lands by sheer dint of “discovery” and conquest.
The institution of such a legal fiction of possession and ownership by the subterfuge of “discovery” and conquest did not stop with the ending of Spanish rule in the wake of a nationwide revolutionary uprising that lasted from 1896 to 1898. Rather, it was merely carried over and reinforced by the United States colonial administration upon its spurious “acquisition” (from Spain) of the Philippine archipelago at the turn of the 20th century.
Worse, it was subsequently adopted in toto by the postcolonial Philippine government with the enshrinement of its tenets in the country’s constitution, with the state taking over as successor administrator, thereby resulting in the effective negation of the nation’s Indigenous cultures and heritage.
Photo of Philippines landscape via Unsplash