17/10/2025
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FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Join us for a CSC Research Lecture Series with Prof. Emeritus June Prill-Brett and Dr. Karminn Daytec Yañgot on 20 October 2025 (Monday), 1:00 pm onwards, at the CSS-Audio Visual Room, UP Baguio and online through Zoom.
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https://bit.ly/CSCLec1020
Revisiting Some Ethnohistorical Events and Issues in Benguet Cordillera History
ABSTRACT
This paper revisits a critical historical event in Benguet ethnohistory that investigates the Battle of Tonglo and the "Tonglo massacre" of 1759. Some current writers of Benguet history have referred to the event as the "Tonglo massacre." Consequently, social media has featured stories of a Tonglo massacre, with a news report that a certain Karyas was said to have survived the Tonglo massacre of 1759. On another occasion, during a Baguio Day celebration at Session Road, Baguio City, the Irisan National High School students reenacted the so-called "massacre of Tonglo." It appears that the narrative of the Tonglo massacre is being accepted as a historical fact. However, some writers question some inconsistencies in the "massacre" narrative with historical accounts, while other writers have dismissed the "Tonglo massacre" narrative as a myth (Paw 2015, 40). The main objective of this inquiry is to address the following questions: Did a massacre occur at Tonglo village on March 18, 1759? When and how did the current narrative of a Tonglo massacre emerge? And, is there sufficient evidence to affirm it as a historical fact? To answer these, the inquiry draws on archival documents, ethnohistorical accounts, oral traditions, and recent archaeological findings. By critically examining these sources, the paper aims to clarify whether the massacre narrative reflects historical reality or collective memory shaped by contemporary interpretation.
Since Time Immemorial: Interrogating the Provenance of Native Title Rights in the Philippine Legal System
ABSTRACT
In what is now the Philippines, Native Title, the inherent right of Indigenous peoples (IP) to territories they have occupied “since time immemorial,” finds its legal origin in the 1909 Cariño v. Insular Government case. This paper contends that contemporary interpretations of Native Title have fundamentally deviated from Cariño’s judicial intent. Moving across centuries of law and colonization, the study traces how “native” land rights have been interpreted, narrowed, and contested. It challenges the prevailing assumption that “native” and “Indigenous” are synonymous in this context, and argues instead that Cariño embraced a broader idea of justice: one extending protection not only to those categorized today as IP but to all historically dispossessed “natives” of the archipelago whose land occupation predates colonial rule. Engaging legal historical sources from Spanish laws to the 1997 Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act and current jurisprudence, the paper establishes that the current narrow scope of Native Title remains inadequate for comprehensive redress of historical dispossession. Consequently, it proposes two parallel pathways for a reframing of existing policy: (a) widening the judicial application of “Native Title” to encompass other historically displaced communities who share a history of oppression with IP, and (b) amending the IPRA to redefine the specific “claim” of legally recognized IP as “Indigenous Title.” This recovery of layered legal genealogies aims to make the case for a more historically attuned understanding of land, law, and justice in the country.
