That is the concept of “Native Title” in Philippine jurisprudence 7, i.e., those lands that were never public land subject to the Regalian Doctrine having been held under a claim of private ownership by indigenous peoples since time immemorial and well before the dawn of the nation state. The key to respecting IP collective rights is securing their free prior and informed consent (FPIC) for private and public interventions that affect their lands, customs and traditions. Collecting data for national policy-making will inevitably fall short of realizing IP rights if this “limited sovereignty” of IP is not taken into consideration. Any project or program devised by the technocrat will fail without bilateral negotiations beginning with FPIC and culminating in a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with provisions for voluntary mediation/ arbitration either under customary law or other mutually agreed upon arbitration processes. This is because the concepts of development will inevitably vary between government technocrats to IP elders from tribe to tribe and from domain to domain. And this right to alternative development is at the very core of the advocacy for IP rights. Through hundreds of years this concept of development which lives in physical and spiritual harmony with the domain has been viewed by colonial and neocolonial governments as leaving wide swathes of land “idle” and “unproductive” and therefore wanting of government efforts to “develop” the same through settler cultivation of cash crops; through corporate farming and corporate extraction of mineral and timber resources. The violations of these rights manifested themselves in government efforts at integration, assimilation, and displacement through government sponsored land grabbing. IPRA Implementing Rules define IP as a collectivity who have “resisted the inroads of colonization” and “became historically differentiated from the majority of the Filipinos” or people who have “been displaced from their traditional domains or who may have resettled outside their ancestral domains” without assigning any responsibility to the State for the displacement, impoverishment and marginalization of IPs. Only the study conducted by the Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Committee in the context of the peace process has assigned such responsibility to the State. In tracing the roots of conflicts it accounts for four (4) waves of migration to Mindanao all under government programs supported by statutes such as the Land Registration Act of 1902, the Public Land Act No. 926 of 1903, the Cadastral Act of 1907 and the Phil Commission Act No. 2254 which allowed Christian settlers and corporate interests from Luzon and Visayas to migrate and secure land titles to vast tracts of land in Mindanao. 8 In short there was a systematic and deliberate intent behind these programs to marginalize IPs and Moros under the regalian doctrine and in violation of native titles. Within the legal framework created by the IPRA, therefore, there is State failure to acknowledge responsibility and failure to take community experiences of IP mass displacement, land-grabbing and consequent destitution and political marginalization. 7 Carino vs. Insular Government, G.R. 2869, 41 Phil. 935 Annex 2, Land Report 2017, TJRC Page | 8 8