#kankanaey

[mankadavi]

Batakagan and the Two Brothers

[binibiningdarna]

I always wanted to make an igorot oc

[midlifewonderer]

105. Victoria Tauli-Corpuz (b. 1951?)

This is a shorter entry than I would have wanted and I hope to enhance this biography over time.  But I wanted to include Victoria Tauli-Corpuz because of her remarkable work for decades on behalf of Indigenous persons’ rights, first in the Philippines and more recently at the global level.

She was born into the Kankanaey Igorot group who live in the northern part of the Philippines, most likely in 1951. In 1969 she graduated from high school in Quezon City and in 1976 she completed a nursing bachelor’s degree at the University of the Philippines, Manila.  By then she had already made the choice to become an activist and had helped organize the Indigenous people’s movement in the Cordillera region, where she originally hailed from. During this period, the Filipino authorities had decided to build a hydroelectric dam on the Chico River, where many of the Indigenous groups of the region lived, and who would be displaced by this action.  Their traditions, livelihood, and safety were not subject of much research and their voices were not consulted when the government decided to take up this project. The World Bank was a partner and supporter of this type of ‘development’ as a form of progress, ushering new opportunities for the Filipino economy, regardless of the human and environmental costs on those most directly affected.

Tauli-Corpuz was one of the leaders of what emerged as an early form of Indigenous rights environmental movement. She also fought the Cellophil Resources Corporation, which had won permission from the corrupt Marcos dictatorship to begin logging in the same region, again with no regard for the environmental, cultural, and socio-economic impact on the local Indigenous tribes in the region. To her credit and that of other leaders who helped organize local, national, and international protests against these enterprises, both projects were cancelled.

Subsequently Tauli-Corpuz rose to international prominence as a global leader in the struggle to bring about greater awareness regarding the exploitation of Indigenous people.  She founded a number of international NGOs, such as the Tebtebba International Center, whose advisory council includes Rigoberta Menchu-Tum and Winona La Duke, both of them subject of earlier entries in this blog. The majority of the members of this advisory group are also feminist activists.

The most remarkable achievements of Tauli-Corpuz after her successful actions to block potential environmental disasters in the Philippines have been in the U.N. In 1993 she helped draft the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and spent over two decades to get it adopted by the U.N. in 2007. Four countries opposed this declaration: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Since then, she and other leaders of Indigenous people’s rights have been working with these countries to overturn their position, succeeding in the case of Australia and Canada, but without any formal recognition on the part of the U.S. and New Zealand to date. 

Between 2005 and 2010 she served as Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. She was then promoted to the position of U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and worked with Christiana Figueres and other environmental feminist activists to make sure that the interests of Indigenous people and especially women’s concerns would be well represented at the Paris meeting in 2015 that developed the text of the U.N. Convention on Climate Change. It is in no small measure because of Tauli-Corpuz’s presence, insistence, and skillful collaboration with various NGOs that  references to the rights and safety of Indigenous persons are present in the final document of this Convention.

Since then, she has continued to speak strongly on behalf of the same principles, most recently in relation to U.S. government actions towards Native American interests at Standing Rock and Bears Ears National Monument. 

In 2009, Tauli-Corpuz was the recipient of the first Gabriela Silang Award, conferred by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines. 

[mankadavi]

The Huntress and the Farmer Girl

[mankadavi]

"wada kano si kabunian..."

[mankadavi]

man-katkatey

[mankadavi]

reposting old art for maysia day 5! the man on the left in the first picture is wearing a pinagpagan blanket, and the man next to him is wearing a vest and a headband. blankets are commonly worn during a cañao, which is a type of celebration. the woman is wearing a traditional Benguet Ibaloi/Kankanaey dress, the blouse part being called a sa-dey, kambal or sambra.

[mankadavi]

maysia day 3: fruit (strawberries from baguio)

[ID: A digital drawing of brightly-coloured strawberries. They form a pattern on a pink background. End ID.]