I’ve lived more than eight years of my life in the dusty mining town of Rio Tuba Nickel Mining Corporation in southern Palawan. The company would push for outreach programs that ironically targeted the indigenous communities they displaced, where we bring the wonders of the developed world—canned food, used clothes, and biscuits—after the natives have been uprooted from the mountains.
We gave them crumbs of civilization and technological gifts, as a company employee told me. But I now realize that the practice only served to legitimize the exploitation of their ancestral homes. I was complicit in corporations dangerously mimicking patterns found in internal colonialism.
Internal colonialism, coined by Robert Blauner, is a form of colonialism that happens within a state, where a dominant force exploits and erases the culture of a marginalized group. In the Philippines, this usually comes in the form of corporations operating in their profit-driven, neoliberal interests. From extractive and real estate industries in Palawan, to the Kaliwa Dam project, companies utilize methods that mirror colonial tactics to exploit indigenous peoples (IPs).
Many of these tactics hinge on invading local and national politics, sowing neoliberal interests as a form of cultural hegemony. This domination is twofold—influencing policy to align with corporate and free-trade interests and the tangible erasure of IP traditions through social development programs aimed at “civilizing” them.
The IPs are uprooted from their indigenous lives, and are forced to assimilate into a culture different from the one they had in their ancestral homes. In Rio Tuba alone, Almaciga tree resin and other non-timber forest products that constitute IP livelihoods are slowly disappearing due to mining operations in portions of Mt. Bulanjao.
Development through exploitation has long been a zero-sum game, where an exploited group shoulders the expenses for the benefit of a select group. This is historically how colonies work—Spain had extracted our lands and assimilated our culture into theirs. Their methodology is legitimized through national policy. Provisions in laws such as the 1995 Philippine Mining Act allow extractive industries in exchange for disproportionately less development to IPs. This is, in turn, enabled by a silent and complicit National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).
But inclusive development—guided by sustainable and equitable principles—is still very much possible. To do this, however, the state must be willing to extend itself to its IP communities, who have long sought self-emancipation from the claws of cultural domination, neoliberal policy, and exploitative corporations. It must also be willing to break free from the external forces that have long infiltrated institutions meant for IP self-determination.
The incremental progress for strengthening IP rights starts by ensuring that there are legal and financial resources that are equitable and accessible when it comes to representation in judicial cases or legislative processes. Higher posts within the NCIP, allocated for legitimate IPs, remain crucial in genuine representation of their struggles. The newly-appointed NCIP Chairperson Marie Grace Pascua has to step up to avoid her predecessor’s mistakes, streamline internal processes, and purge her ranks of corporate middlemen instruments.
Like freed colonies of the past, it is through the self-emancipation of IPs in grassroots resistance and political representation that they will pave the way for their rights to self-determination. When that right is fulfilled, the shackles of internal colonialism can finally be broken. ●
First published in the June 19, 2025, print edition of the Collegian.
