As 2024 comes to an end, Davao Today looks back on the stories that impacted and resonated with Davaoeños, ranging from politics to the environment.
Posts by tag: talaingod
On the heels of impeachment filing against Vice President Sara Duterte and the quad-comm House hearings on the war on drugs and POGO, an ethics complaint was filed against a House member who played a key role in the hearings, ACT Teachers Representative France Castro.
“When our schools were closed in November 2018, the military threatened our lives. They said that if we don’t leave our school, they would kill a teacher or a student,” a Lumad youth said during the launch of Defend Talaingod 13, October 17.
A Talaingod chieftain found freedom after three years of detention as the Tagum City court acquitted him of trafficking Lumad students.
Even after her death, discussions about Talaingod chieftain Bai Bibyaon Ligkayan Bigkay raise the issue of ancestral rights and red tagging that continue to hound and divide her tribe.
For Lumad students, she was called ‘Ino Bai’, their term for elderly or grandmother, whom they encountered over the past seven years and helped them understand their campaign to defend their Lumad schools and ancestral land.
As the first ever woman chieftain of the tribe, Bigkay was credited for uniting, empowering, and rallying the Lumad across villages to stand up to the loggers.
A group of Manobo evacuees seeking refuge inside the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) Haran compound decried on the repeated accusations of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) that ‘’bakwit schools’ train child warriors and earn profit from taking shelter in the cities to expose their plight in the communities they temporarily left behind.
Datu Benito Bay-ao was one of the Lumad leaders who were taken into custody after that disgraceful raid at the Bakwit School in Cebu City. Just six years ago, Dats Bens (as we call him) spoke with pride and optimism in this documentary about their Lumad school in their village of Dulyan, and across the other upland villages in the Pantaron under the Salugpongan Ta Tanu Igkanugon organization. Schooling in the cities made them ashamed of, and forget about, being a Lumad, he said. But with their schools built right in their domain, young Lumad could learn while keeping their tradition alive.
Some 1,500 Ata Manobos left their villages last April 1 in the hinterlands of Talaingod, Davao del Norte after what they said were harassments brought by military troops occupying their communities for weeks.