Abstract

In the political landscape of the Philippines, governance and politics are distinct in the Cordillera region because individuals who identify themselves as indigenous peoples dominate local government. This political dominance—in terms of numbers as well as the levels of positions attained—rises out of the creation and maintenance of boundaries around difference, which had its beginnings in the upland resistance to Spanish colonial rule in the 16th century, and produced an elite indigenous class in the final years of the American colonial regime. It has remained more or less constant since then. Indigenous individuals in public office often attribute the success of government programs in the region to understandings between fellow indigenous Cordilleran officials. On the other hand, they attribute failed public initiatives to a lack of understanding of local conditions by non-Cordillerans in the higher echelons of national government agencies. I see these governing indigenous individuals, or professional indigenous persons, as agents in state processes of boundary-maintenance, inasmuch as they are engaged in renegotiating the very boundaries their government posts are designed to implement. They move between deploying power and being subjected to power; between being agents of the state implementing national laws and policies in the Cordillera, and being Cordilleran natives asserting the distinctiveness of being indigenous and creating spaces for a measure of indigenous self-determination within a nation-state. These movements across boundaries become quite apparent in the spaces and times when ancestral domain claims are negotiated under Republic Act No. 8371 of 1997, also known as the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA).