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Abstract:
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"Earlier discourse on the Southern Philippine conflict has expounded considerably on the Moro people's struggle for self-determination particularly in terms of warfare and anti-colonialism. Other contemporary analyses have dealt with the identity issue on the level of the traditional 'cultural community' in opposition to the majority and dominant Christianized Filipino communities, and the influence of transcultural forces, particularly religious (Islamic) movements in Moroland. In addition to existing approaches which are valuable, the Bangsamoro question still needs to be framed within the context of state-periphery relations, given the increasing compression of Moro communities by the forces of state and capital. The history of Philippine indigenous peoples is punctuated by various forms of struggles, with the outright colonialism of foreign powers fiercely opposed, especially in the Moro sultanates which remained unconquered by Spanish rule until the arrival of the Americans' more modern military 'Moro campaigns.' But other forms of expansionism in the post-colonial formation, inflicted by local or domestic powers have been the most difficult to counter.
"This paper documents this systematic takeover not only of the Moro traditional polity but of the Moros' land and resources. The setting of this study is Mindanao, the southern island-region with a significant history of interethnic relations with the Christianized North-Filipino migrant settlers, encouraged by state policy, emerging to dominate the political and economic activities in a region originally occupied by the indigenous Islamized Moros and the Lumads, the non-Moro natives. Part of the heterogeneity of the island's agrarian situation, as in other regions of the Philippines, is the persistence of pre-colonial land and natural resource tenure patterns, practiced by these indigenous peoples in their remaining ancestral domains which also possess much of the country's store of exploitable natural resource systems. The normative elaborations of how the Moro rights to land and resources are created, maintained and mediated by kinship and membership in the agama or inged are described in the paper. To place the study in historical perspective, the discussion begins briefly with past relations to land until the coming of Islam, Spanish and American colonization and the post-colonial period of capitalist expansion in which the Philippine state claimed its dominance over adat and Islam-influenced practices, thus restructuring Moro relations to land with other communities and nullifying rights of access to ancestral domains. We then attempt to examine how these hegemonies are presently resisted and negotiated by the collective actions of various Moro sectors and constituencies invariably linked with the movement for Moro autonomy and identity (to which state policy responses remain inadequate and ambivalent). Supplemented by empirical data from a case study of the lakeshore Maranao Moros, we also show how 'outside' forces transforming Moro tenure systems are countered in the actual life situations and social relations in the community resulting in an amalgam of various practices governing land and resource use encompassing both adat and Islamic precepts, as well as an eventual adoption of new state-advocated land-related laws and institutions."
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