SUMMARY
‘Lumad’ is a Cebuano Visayan term which explicitly means ‘born of the earth’, but has come to connote words such as native or indigenous in the Philippines. The Lumads are often incorrectly referred to as the non-Muslim, non-Christian indigenous people of Mindanao (there are also few Lumad groups on Luzon). While there are eighteen major Lumad groups of that kind in Mindanao, there are at least 13 Islamised ethno-linguistic Lumad groups in the region as well. Generally, the Lumads in Mindanao subsist through swidden and wet-rice cultivation, hunting, fishing, gathering, and the trade of locally manufactured items.
Not all Filipino indigenous groups are however Lumads. In some estimates there are close to a hundred indigenous groupings, exclusive the Muslim ones, constituting around 20 percent of the total Filipino population. A common geographical distinction of the indigenous is often made between the Igorot on Luzon and the Lumad in Mindanao.
The Lumads have a traditional concept of land ownership based on ancestral territories. Ancestral lands include cultivated land as well as hunting grounds, rivers, forests, uncultivated land and the mineral resources below the land. These lands are deemed to be communal properties by the Lumads and any community member has the right of usufruct any piece of unoccupied land within the ancestral territory. At the beginning of the 20th century the Lumads controlled most of Mindanao’s provinces, but heavy migration to Mindanao, spurred on by government-sponsored resettlement programmes after the Second World War, has turned the Lumads into minorities. To exemplify, the Bukidnon province population grew with over 550 per cent from 1948 to 1970, with the proportion of Lumads falling from 64% to 14%. When the settlers came many Lumad groups retreated into the mountains and forests. At that juncture, much of their ancestral land was registered in the name of multinational corporations, logging companies and wealthy Filipino settlers to Mindanao. The Lumads have subsequently become a comparatively landless population group and are considered to be the poorest and most disadvantaged peoples in Mindanao.
Lumads have been recruited to various Moro armed groups and the military branch of the Communist Party of Philippines (CPP), as well as to the government forces, particularly to the paramilitary organizations which fight the Moro and the CPP insurgencies.
Lumads have been involved in the non-state category of violence UCDP organised violence.
