Territorial rights Non-recognition by the state

RIGHTS AIPP AIPP Regional Capacity Building Program - Training Manual on the UNDRIP 80 EXAMPLE: THE BONTOK SYSTEM OF LAND USE AND OWNERSHIP The Bontok are an indigenous people of the Northern Luzon Cordillera in the Philip- pines. Bontok anthropologist June Prill-Brett writes that each of her people’s villages “is an autonomous agricultural community that is socially, politically, and economically in- dependent of all others.” Traditionally, the Bontok have a complex land use system combining rice cultivation on irrigated terraces with shifting cultivation, the breeding of livestock like pigs, buffa- los and cattle, and hunting and gathering of forest products. The Bontok, according to Prill-Brett, “view the land as a gift from ‘the one in the highest’. To them land is a source of life; ‘it belongs to no one or to everyone.’ ” Nonethe- less, the Bontok have rules specifying community members’ rights to land and resources within the village. Bontok communities recognize three categories of land rights, each with its own rules of ownership and succession: Lamoram. This is communal land; it belongs to all village members. Lamoram in- clude forests and hunting grounds, smaller woodlands, pasture land and village settle- ments. Tayan. This is land that was once part of the communal domain but has been segre- gated as the property of a kinship group. Usually, it is land that was cleared for shifting cultivation. The descendants of the person who did the work now have the right to use that land. But tayan can, instead, be a woodlot, a pasture, or a fishing site that has been used continually by several generations of only one kinship group, and so has become the group’s property. Fukod. This is land recognized by the community and the kinship group as the prop- erty of an individual. It is a plot of land that has been developed through hard labor like the building of terraces and the installation of irrigation channels. The person’s labor gives him or her exclusive right to the developed land, and it is inherited only by one of his or her own descendants. It usually consists of paddy fields or vegetable gardens. Probably in all indigenous agricultural societies, some form of individual rights over certain resources or parcels of land is recognized. Paddy fields are a typical example. Very common also is the right over perennial plants, like fruit trees – which, however, does not necessarily imply the right over the land on which they grow. Collective rights over land other than paddy fields are common among indigenous societies. In many cases, this even includes land for shifting cultivation. But collective rights are not always identical with communal rights. Such collective rights may exist on different levels. The collective in which these rights are vested may be the whole community or part of it, like the kinship groups among the Bontok who have the exclusive right over the swidden land opened by their forebears. Or they may be held by a social unit larger than a single community, like among the Bontok’s neighbors, the Kalinga. Module-4