To mark World Food Day and Indigenous Peoples Month, the Philippine Task Force for Indigenous Peoples Rights (TFIP) and Partners for Indigenous Knowledge Philippines (PIKP) are conducting activities as part of our ongoing effort to keep alive the wisdom of Cordillera indigenous peoples.
One activity is an Indigenous Food workshop on October 16, 2018 in Conner, Apayao. This activity aims to demonstrate how to cook some of the indigenous food of the Isnag people of Apayao and to document these recipes, which will be included in our recipe book on Heirloom Food of the Cordillera. Local women and leaders knowledgeable in the indigenous food system of the Isnag people will participate in the event.
Another activity to be held on October 29, 2018 is a story-writing workshop with the teachers of the Alejo M. Pacalso Memorial National High School in Bua, Tuding, Itogon, Benguet. Stories about the traditional knowledge of the elders, indigenous values of the community solidarity and positive experiences of disaster response will be written and documented. Feeding of indigenous food to students of the school will also be done. This event is being held to mark Indigenous Peoples Month in the Philippines and comes at a time when the indigenous communities of Itogon, Benguet are still recovering from a recent disaster that hit the area during Super typhoon Ompong in September 2018. Almost a hundred people died, homes were buried and destroyed, and hundreds of families were forced to evacuate due to a massive landslide in Ucab, Itogon. The landslide is linked to mining operations in Itogon, where large-scale corporate mining started more than 100 years ago, displacing indigenous communities from their ancestral land, exhausting the mineral resources in the area and leaving extensive environmental destruction in its wake. Now, thousands of families that are dependent on traditional small-scale mining for a living are being blamed for the disaster and are being criminalized by the government and prohibited from engaging in their traditional livelihood. Migrant families displaced by the landslide are no longer allowed to return to the area. The Cordillera Peoples Alliance and other organizations are currently conducting relief operations in the disaster-affected communities.