When you hear about Moro history, you probably only hear about the wars between the government and the Moro fighters, and less about the Moro families at home.
What happened to the Moros outside the war?
Imagine you lived on a land your parents inherited from their parents. You also have rice fields your family had tended for generations. Then one day, a total stranger arrived and told you they now owned your four-hectare land because the government gave it to them.
You thought he was crazy and blabbering so you went to court only to find out that the judge would side with them because they had a piece of paper proving ownership, even though everyone knew you had lived there your entire life.
You couldn’t ask your tribal leader for help because he, too, was fighting for his own land against another stranger holding another piece of paper.
This was the story of many Moros before you and I were born, during the long and painful phenomenon called settlement whose consequences still affect most of the Moros and settlers today.
Who are the “native people” in Mindanao?
If a group of people share the same ancestors, customs, traditions, and believe in the same values, they are called a tribe. But if they have their own language that they speak, making them even more unique from other people, they are called an ethnolinguistic tribe and there were 31 ethnolinguistic tribes considered to be natives or original inhabitants of Mindanao.
However, between the 13th and 15th centuries, 13 groups among them embraced Islam after learning about it from Arab missionaries and Muslim traders.
Later, those who embraced Islam became known as the Moros, or Bangsamoro now, while those who did not, are called Lumads.
The conflict was highlighted during American rule. When they saw Mindanao, they saw a future and called Mindanao the Land of Promise.
In the early 20th century, Mindanao became popularly known as “The Land of Promise” because of its fertile lands and vast forests.
This could be a good thing, if only developing Mindanao also benefited the native people of Mindanao.
But it did not.
Why the Americans Settled Mindanao
Time revealed that the Americans’ motive in Mindanao for gaining political control was to gain access to its rich natural resources and make money from them.
But despite all this, the early Moros still would rather be under the rule of Americans than the Philippine Republic.
Because although the settlement had already happened during the Spanish times, it was put in a more formal system under the Americans. But the Americans still recognized the Moro leaders’ authority. So they only let a limited number of settlers into limited areas they could reach by train or vehicles.
However, under the Philippine Commonwealth government, the tribal system and rules were disregarded. They intensified the migration by giving the settlers free transportation and free land or sold land for a very low price with free farming tools.
We all know that it’s the Americans who introduced democracy to the Philippines
Democracy has a legal system and the legal system is like a rulebook of the country about what’s right and wrong, decided by the court.
So in the courts that they set up, they trained judges about American laws that they thought should be applied to the whole country.
It was in 1912 when the Americans introduced a land ownership system that affected the Moros’ ancestral lands.
Unlike the Americans, natives of Mindanao, Lumads and Moros, didn’t know that land could be your “private property” like we practice today.
For them, lands, rivers, marshes, lakes, and all other natural resources are gifts of God that anyone can use to survive, and not property that you can own.
They have usufruct rights (not absolute ownership) to lands passed down by their ancestors also known as pusaka. It’s determined by lineage, not individual ownership.
However, when Americans came in the early 1900s, they turned land into private property. The simple rule was, if you have documents that the land is yours, the land is yours. Otherwise, it’s not. This system is called the Torrens System.
In the Torrens System, you must first own land and register it with the government, which then issues a Land Title. Then the government will put you on the Registry of Deeds.
But, this system is entirely new to the Moros because for centuries, they settled land ownership and boundaries through adat, oral agreements, and mutual trust.
From the 1900s onwards, the US government made laws after laws.
“WE want You to Register Your Land but We Won’t Tell You How”
In 1902, the US issued a law that required all landowners to register their land. This law is called the Land Registration Act of 1902, issued through the US Philippine Commission.
Unlike Christian Filipinos in Luzon and Visayas, most Moros did not possess land titles, not because they lacked land, but because they were never fully conquered by Spain and had no exposure to Spanish land documentation systems.
The Moros sought help from American officials on how to register their lands, but they were largely ignored. Some historians suggest language barriers played a role. Others argue that Americans simply favored Christians. Regardless, this system disregarded the Moros’ rights.
“If your land is not registered, it’s now ours”
In 1903, just a year after the Land Registration Act, the American-led government issued another law that treated all unregistered lands as “vacant” and declared them public lands. This is the Public Land Act of 1903.
In this law, the government could lease, purchase, or homestead land. Homestead means letting other people own the land if they live and farm on it.
However, the “free land” didn’t really attract people to migrate to Mindanao because they had to travel to Mindanao through calesa, trambia, and bancas. And riding those was really expensive at that time, so only the wealthy ones could afford to migrate. But even so, many of them left Mindanao soon and returned to their hometowns because of malaria, and being away from their relatives made them feel isolated. So in this phase, only foreign corporations could afford to occupy Mindanao at this time.
The US Government got creative and opened seven agricultural colonies.
1913-1917: Agricultural Colonies
The government took a group of people and moved them to different places in Mindanao. They told them that if they farmed crops and made the land productive, they could finally own the land. And who wouldn’t want that?
The areas where all these families farm together are called an “agricultural colony”.
These colonies were established in Pikit, Paidu Pulangi, Silik, Pagalungan, Glan, Talitay, and Momungan.
Americans and Filipino officials fought over who would settle in Mindanao: American farmers or Filipinos from Luzon and Visayas?
Later, the Filipinos won because having Filipinos from Luzon and Visayas settle in Mindanao can prevent Mindanao from separating from the Philippines.
As mentioned earlier, despite all this, early Moros still preferred to be under American rule rather than under Filipinos. Because they expected their fellow Filipinos, their fellow colonized, would correct the injustice and restore their rights. But it didn’t. It, in fact, only intensified the settlement
The Philippine Commonwealth Intensified the Homestead Program and Moved More Settlers to Mindanao
To prepare the Philippines for independence, Americans created the Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1935.
The commonwealth government is where Filipinos governed themselves but still under the supervision of the Americans. So it’s basically like a practice government or training.
But even if it seems like a practice, you still govern real people, and your actions will have real consequences for them. The actions of the Commonwealth government really left problems that the Moros and the Philippines are still learning to reconcile.
They constructed roads from 1936 to 1941 to make transportation easy.
They built the road that links Davao to Cotabato. Next was the road through the Koronadal Valley, then linking the Cotabato-Davao road to the Pulangi River, opening the Sayre Highway that leads to Carmen Basin, Pulangi Valley, then the Bukidnon Plateau. The road construction continued until it reached Agusan and Surigao.
As for Davao Gulf, they linked it to Agusan Valley and Butuan Bay. Then they also connected Lanao del Norte to Zamboanga City, then Zamboanga del Norte.
The roads might attract migrations, but since they also feared the spread of Malaria in Mindanao, the government then created rural health units. As more settlers came, small towns and municipalities grew.
The new roads and hospitals constructed in a once lush land may seem like successful nation-building if you read it in books. But for the Moros and the Lumads, it was oppression and injustice because the “free lands” that the government gave away were actually theirs.
It’s where their families and their ancestors lived and farmed for centuries. Then, out of a sudden, people came to their doorsteps claiming their lands without their consent or even compensation.
The main slogan of the government “Philippines for Filipinos” didn’t feel true for the Moros. Because from their experience, the Philippine government only took Mindanao land as part of the Philippines, but not its people.
When corporations and schools were set up in Mindanao, they still preferred hiring Christians over Moros. The mass migration to Mindanao actually pushed the edges of their own land.
Important Note: The Culprit was the System, Not the Settlers
These were before social media, so people back then could only rely on what they heard from what was within their reach. Who wouldn’t want free or cheap hectares of land?
During these times, the majority of the settlers didn’t intend to “grab” the lands of the Moros and Lumads.
The settlers were only people who had also been enslaved for centuries. They were only ordinary people who had ordinary dreams. That is, to build a new life for their families. They were farmers already from Luzon and Visayas, so they really worked hard to build their lives in Mindanao by farming from sunrise to sunset. They exchanged tools and crops. Together, they formed a village of their own.
Moros, Lumads, and Christians had learned to coexist, especially in towns and cities.
Disputes related to land conflict between settlers, Lumads, and Moro groups still exist today. Some even resort to violence.
Muslims in The Philippines Today
There are still numerous reports of land conflicts between Moros and settlers in Mindanao areas, some even resort to violent. But as time progresses, the Muslims, Christians and Lumads are getting better in coexisting. In BARMM, they are known as the Tri-people.
But learning this sode of history is important so that when people impose Western ideologies of human rights on Moros, just because Mindanao is part of a democratic country, I hope they still return to why BARMM was created in the first place. That is to restore the rights of the Moros to still be themselves.
