After walking along a steep, rough road in the middle of the hinterlands of Panalum, one sees the three-classroom building made of amakan leaves in the center of a hectare wide ancestral domain of the Ata tribe of Paquibato.
The SOS network said that Lumad schools have been constantly attacked by government troops. Prior to the Martial Law declaration in Mindanao, there have documented 87 incidents of attacks on schools under the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte starting July 2016.
There are 14 million indigenous peoples in the Philippines, making up about 11% of the country’s population. Almost 60% of them are in Mindanao, comprising 18 ethnolinguistic tribes that are collectively known as Lumad, which literally means “native to the place”.