MANILA, Philippines — When President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo delivers her state of the nation address (SONA) on Monday, July 28, the “lumad” (indigenous people) will gather in Davao City to deliver their own State of the Indigenous Peoples Address (SIPA) to “expose the real state” of their lives.

A statement from the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center-Kasama sa Kalikasan (LRC-KsK) said the SIPA will be on the first day of a three-day conference that will focus on assessing the implementation of Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA), particularly the distribution of the Certificate of Ancestral Domain Titles (CADTs).

Hundreds of lumad are expected to attend the conference, which aims to come up with a list of recommendations, resolutions, and calls to action, which will be given to lawmakers and local government units.

The statement recalled that, in 2001, Arroyo vowed to distribute 100 CADTs a year. “But records from the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) show that…almost seven years have passed and only 29 CADTS have been issued.”

Of these, only eight were issued in Mindanao and cover a million hectares, or only one percent of the entire ancestral territory of the indigenous people. Mining sites, on the other hand, occupy more than 60 percent of lumad lands, the statement said.

“SONA is nothing but a catalogue of mining opportunities that only worsens the living condition of the IPs [indigenous peoples] across the Philippines. The entries of mining operations bring nothing but human rights violations, destroy the culture and lives of the IPs and degradation of the environment,” LRC-KsK said. (Inquirer.net)

The group also said mining had led to an increasing incidence of human rights violations against lumad, with more than 1,337 families forced to evacuation because of mining.