By Athena Nikolis
I had been working at the Ateneo Human Rights Center (AHRC) for nearly two months when my supervisor invited me to join its local interns for an immersion in the Tagbanwa Indigenous community of Culion, Palawan. The interns were tasked with assisting the community in its application for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT), in response to increasing land grabbing attempts. This meant living with the community, learning from its members, and drafting affidavits to preserve their oral histories.
Many words could describe this experience, but above all I found it transformative, offering two insights that I could, in part, relate back to Canada. While the contexts cannot be equated, Canada’s lands having been violently seized from Indigenous peoples who continue to endure the effects of colonialism, the immersion nevertheless reshaped the way I think about two concepts.
First, it offered a window into Indigeneity as a particular, multidimensional relationship to the land. Second, it revealed the lesson of guesthood: how to reconcile externality and privilege with presence on ancestral land, through respect, recognition of harm, and acknowledgment of ownership.
These insights did not come all at once. They unfolded over the course of three weeks, beginning with a few days of introspection, and deepening through immersion in the life of the community.
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Step 1: Introspection
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Before this immersion, we were required to attend a five-day training. It took place in a retreat house run by nuns, an austere space of heavy silence and heat. Our rooms were bare, containing only a wooden bed, a small table, and a crucifix. We were woken each morning by the sound of roosters and the morning mass. At first, the overt spiritual dimension of the place felt out of sync with the legal training I had expected. I wondered why it could not simply be held on campus, allowing us to return home each evening.
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During the day, as expected, we heard lectures from human rights lawyers on an array of subjects including Indigenous, labor, and farmers’ rights, and visited alternative lawyering organizations.
But it was after dark, I found, that the most formative part of the training began. One evening, I was told to sit back-to-back with another intern, who was still relatively a stranger. I was instructed to speak about my life until I was told to stop. I talked, uninterrupted, for thirty minutes. That night, each of us shared our most personal thoughts with someone we barely knew.
On another, we gathered in a candlelit circle and shared the “rose, thorn, and bud” of our lives, moments of joy, pain, and hope. Some spoke of loss, abandonment, and trauma, others, of gratitude and aspiration. We stayed until 2 AM, listening in silence.
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I was initially deeply uncomfortable with these exercises. I had never imagined that a legal internship would require such vulnerability. The constant pressure to introspect and to share left me confused and uneasy, and I found myself holding back, unable, at least at first, to place my trust in strangers.
I came to understand that the isolating environment we were placed in was intentionally designed to promote introspection. We were reminded of the words of Filipino Supreme Court Justice Pompeyo Diaz: “The most dangerous man is the man of the law who has no conscience.” The program took this warning seriously. It seemed to continuously probe the contents of our conscience by bringing to light our motivations, our values, and our blind spots. Through these conversations, I began to rationalize the importance of introspection on two fronts.
First, self-awareness is essential for our own wellbeing. The human rights lawyers who spoke to us described their work in different terms, some as a calling, others as a sacrifice, but all agreed it was profoundly difficult. They told stories of being red-tagged, followed by armed men, and living under constant threat. Yet their commitment endured, sustained not only by abstract idealism, but by a clear understanding of their purpose, a realistic view of what could be achieved, and a deep alignment between their values and their work.
Second, self-awareness is essential to contribute meaningfully to human rights work without causing harm, in line with the AHRC’s philosophy of developmental lawyering. This meta-legal approach sees communities not as passive recipients of aid, but as partners who can be trained and empowered to defend their rights. This begins with mutual relationships, listening, sharing stories, and simply, as the AHRC’s director put it, by “breaking bread with them.”
Our motivations had to be scrutinized because the knowledge we carry, and the power granted to us by our association with the AHRC, impose a responsibility to act with respect, humility and solidarity. During these few days, the AHRC’s motto truly gained meaning: not only to learn the law, but also to serve the people.
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Step 2: Immersion
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On the last day of training, it was announced that we would be boarding a 13-hour ferry to Palawan. We slept in a cabin lined with metal bunk beds, rocked through the night by crashing waves.
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The next morning, smiling Tagbanwa community members met us in their community boats, ready to take us on the two-hour journey to the community’s four islands, Chindunan, Alulad, Lamud, and Marabal (CALM).
At the largest island, the community awaited us in a communal hut where a feast had been prepared to receive us as guests.
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Over the course of the two next weeks, interns lived with host families in traditional bamboo huts, sleeping on woven mats, bathing in rivers, and learning to fish or trek uphill for a cell signal. We were invited to drink local coffee, and share stories, and listened to dozens of testimonies from elders, which interns carefully recorded in affidavits.
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It was through the seemingly simple act of witnessing the everyday practices that sustain the community that I began to develop a deeper understanding of Indigeneity. The Tagbanwa speak of land not as property, but as their kin, the foundation of their culture, spirituality, and livelihood.
I learned this most vividly from Apu P., whose encyclopedic knowledge of this land seemed inexhaustible. He led us through his garden, pointing out kurot (a local tuber), Kapaeng Tagbanwa, mangoes, coconuts, bamboo, purple yams (ube), jackfruit, santol fruit, and star apples (kaimito). He explained how each crop was used, pausing over kurot to describe how it must be soaked in seawater for days to remove its otherwise deadly toxins.
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Afterwards, one of the Tagbanwa’s leaders, Ate F., served us chips and a cup of coffee they have traditionally brewed, Kapeng Tagbanwa. We listened to her describe their communal understanding of land ownership: whoever first plants coconuts or bananas is deemed the owner of the land, even if they later leave it. Inheritance, too, is determined orally, in the presence of senior community members who serve as witnesses.
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Apu P. further spoke of Tagbanwa spirituality through its burial customs, explaining that a person’s origin determines their final resting place, such as S., a cave containing the 500-year-old bones of their ancestors. The cave is shrouded in myth, said to be guarded by monitor lizards, mythical octopuses, and red bulls that appear whenever someone points to the sea or speaks ill of it. Even a single grain of sand may not be removed from its island without inviting misfortune. The land, quite literally, is considered sacred.
Ate J. further presented the landscape as an archive of Tagbanwa folklore. She explained the origins of local place names: one island was named after the Tagbanwa word for “swallowing”, after a fisherman was said to have been swallowed by a crocodile near it. Another surrounding island is named for its role as an ancestral resting place, and another for the rust-red sand left behind by a shipwreck.
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These interactions made clear that without access to their territory, the community’s legal systems, religious practices, and livelihoods would collapse. This understanding sharpened my awareness of the insidious violence of land grabbing, the acquisition of land by developers through coercion or illegitimate legal maneuvers, which often results in the displacement of Indigenous communities.
Various instances of land grabbing were recounted to us. Apu P. recounted how, as a child, he and his father had settled on Lamud Island, establishing possession through kaingin (slash-and-burn farming). Today, the land where his first home once stood has been transformed into a resort, claimed by a company he cannot name, through mechanisms he does not understand.
The full extent of this dispossession became even more evident when we visited a Tagbanwa community whose access to the coast was barred by armed men hired by a developer. He had illegally acquired tax declarations through bribery and used them as legal proof of possession. He cleared hundreds of square meters of mangroves for aesthetic reasons, removing the island’s natural protection against typhoons. In one surreal moment, we watched the chairman of the Indigenous Peoples of Culion’s federation, greeted with reverence moments earlier, ask a man lounging in a lawn chair for permission to walk along his own ancestral shoreline.
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Left: dead mangrove trees, stripped of their protective layer.
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Within the Tagbanwa ancestral domain, resorts have been built without obtaining the community’s necessary Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). One particular resort we saw, which presents itself as an ecological haven, was built on forestland legally reserved for reforestation and therefore inalienable under Philippine law. Developers acquired dubious private titles, ignoring environmental clearance requirements.
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Developers took the liberty of deeply modifying this ancestral landscape, notably by clearing mangroves and importing white sand stolen from other parts of the territory. Once, while travelling by boat, we spotted two men diving in deep waters. Our driver explained that they were stealing sand for the resort. When they noticed us, they sped away, leaving behind sandbags whose location was marked by plastic bottles.
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Resorts like these are troubling for many reasons. For one, because of the stark contrast between the interchangeability of land for the developer, and the distinct meaning and significance of each island for the Tagbanwa. And paradoxically, the community did not oppose access to their ancestral lands outright. Despite facing significant economic hardship, they welcomed us, strangers, with openness and generosity. In our conversations, they expressed a willingness to collaborate with the tourism industry, so long as their ownership was legally and financially recognized, the principles of FPIC were upheld, their sacred spaces respected, and the ecological integrity of their islands preserved.
This led me to a second insight: how to reconcile externality to the Indigenous community with presence on ancestral lands. Conversations with the community brought to mind a passage I had come across while writing an Indigenous Legal Traditions assignment, from How to Come Correct by the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. It contains a simple line: “Be a good guest.” The guide explains that while a guest is welcomed, they must first ask permission. A guest does not impose, overstay, or act entitled, but recognizes their relationship to the land. A guest respects another’s ownership while also holding deep appreciation for the land itself.
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The CADT Application: A Beam of Hope
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Faced with increased threats of land grabbing, the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) provides for the way of obtaining a CADT, or a formal recognition of collective ownership over ancestral lands, waters, forests, and sacred sites. It affirms the right of Indigenous communities to manage their territories according to customary law and requires Free, Prior, and Informed Consent before any external development can take place.
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Yet for the Tagbanwa of the Chindunan-Alulad-Lamud-Marabal Ancestral Domain in Culion, only a portion of the first phase has been completed. This is already their third submission of the same application in the past decade. For reasons unclear to the community, with some citing loss of documents or lack of government funding, their first two applications never progressed beyond their initial submission of documents. Moreover, new bureaucratic hurdles have been introduced: recently, the government translated all required forms into English, creating significant access to justice barriers for communities where most inhabitants do not speak English. The AHRC staff had to spend countless hours retranslating forms already completed in Tagalog.
Other structural barriers remain. For example, the Tagbanwa’s traditional semi-nomadic fishing lifestyle, based on cyclical return to their lands, is cited by officials to question the validity of their land claims. This narrow interpretation ignores that these cycles have been sustained for thousands of years, and their deep-rooted cultural and spiritual ties to the land.
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I left Culion with many new understandings. Above all, I came to see that human rights work must involve presence in a community, listening to its stories, and letting those stories shape our conscience and transform the way we use our knowledge and skills. This immersion also reframed what it means to be a guest on ancestral land, and the obligations and responsibilities that our presence entails.
As I return to Canada, I carry with me a deeper understanding of Indigeneity as a lived relationship to land. Though the contexts differ profoundly, I believe I have come to better grasp my role as a settler in a country where colonial violence remains ongoing, a recognition that will continue to shape how I study and practice the law.
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[1] ResearchGate, “Schematic Diagram of the Certification precondition (CP), Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC)” (last visited 30 August 2025), online (figure): <https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-Diagram-of-the-Certification-precondition-CP-Free-and-Prior-Informed-Consent_fig1_277307629>.