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.
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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.
TALAINGOD, Davao del Norte – Ata-Manobo children complained that they were included in sporadic military questioning of residents in this…
By TYRONE A. VELEZ
Davao Today
“My taxes are sent (here) for military aid. Money should build roads, should be given to health care, decent things for the people, not military aid,” says Ron Gochez of Union del Barro, Los Angeles.
