1 The first statement is a verbatim quote from a press release. The other three are close paraphrases of speech derived from translations of my field notes. The second was spoken in Tagalog, and the final two in Palawan.

2 Erni, Christian, ‘Resolving the Asian controversy: Identification of Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines’, in The concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia: A resource book, ed. Erni, C. (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2008), pp. 275–302Google Scholar.

3 Goodale, Mark, ‘Dark matter: Toward a political economy of indigenous rights and aspirational politics’, Critique of Anthropology 36, 4 (2016): 441CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Erni, ‘Resolving the Asian controversy’.

7 ‘Cultural community’ and ‘tribe’ remain in wide usage, but they are now usually modified by ‘Indigenous’. The Tagalog word katutubo is considered to be synonymous with Indigenous.

8 Novellino, Dario and Dressler, Wolfram, ‘The role of “hybrid” NGOs in the conservation and development of Palawan Island, the Philippines’, Society & Natural Resources 23, 2 (2009): 165–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10 See Article XII, Section 2. According to Owen Lynch, the Regalian Doctrine is a ‘mythical’ concept in Philippine law attributed to ‘documents signed by Spanish Borgia Pope Alexander VI’. ‘According to the doctrine,’ Lynch writes, ‘at some unspecified moment during March 1521, ostensibly after the soon-to-be-killed Ferdinand Magellan “discovered” the archipelago and planted a cross on the island of Limasawa …, the sovereign rights of the Philippine people's forebears were unilaterally usurped by, and simultaneously vested in, the Crowns of Castille and Aragón.’ As a result, he continues, ‘every native … ostensibly became a squatter, bereft of any legal rights to land or other natural resources’, and this established a precedent whereby ‘the sole means of removing the squatter label was by procuring a documented property right from the Spanish regime or its state successors’, something that ‘was — and remains — an exceptionally difficult if not impossible task for most rural resource users’. See Owen Lynch, ‘Concepts and strategies for promoting legal recognition of community-based property rights: Insights from the Philippines and other nations’, in Communities and conservation: Histories and politics of community-based natural resource management, ed. J. Peter Brosius, Anna Louwenhaupt Tsing and Charles Zerner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2005), p. 396.

11 These were: the Office of Southern Cultural Communities, the Office of Northern Cultural Communities, and the Office of Muslim Affairs.

12 Barangay is the lowest-level administrative unit in the Philippines, analogous to a ward or village.

13 Eder, James F. and McKenna, Thomas M., ‘Minorities in the Philippines: Ancestral lands and autonomy in theory and practice’, in Civilizing the margins: Southeast Asian goverment policies for the development of minorities, ed. Duncan, Christopher R. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 62Google Scholar.

14 Melanie Hughes McDermott, ‘Boundaries and pathways: Indigenous identity, ancestral domain, and forest use in Palawan, the Philippines’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), p. 110.

15 McDermott (ibid.) identifies these groups as the Cordilleran People's Alliance and the Indigenous People's Federation of the Philippines.

16 Ibid., p. 113.

17 For a detailed account of the CADC's implementation, see ibid., pp. 109–14.

18 Eder and McKenna, ‘Minorities in the Philippines’.

19 Under both DAO2 and the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act, a distinction is made between ancestral land and ancestral domain, resulting in CALC and CALT instruments respectively (in addition to CADC and CADT instruments). The difference between ancestral land and ancestral domain is that the former can be awarded to ‘individuals, families or clans’, while the latter can only be awarded to ‘Indigenous cultural communities’. Land Claims and Land Titles, moreover, only cover the land itself, not the resources contained there.

20 This personal communication was relayed to me by Maria Paz Luna.

21 Augusto B. Gatmaytan, ‘Advocacy as translation: Notes on the Philippine experience’, in Brosius et al., Communities and conservation, pp. 459–76.

22 Gray, Andrew, ‘The Indigenous movement in Asia’, in Indigenous Peoples of Asia, ed. Barnes, Robert Harrison, Gray, Andrew and Kingsbury, Benedict (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1995), pp. 35–58Google Scholar.

23 Republic of the Philippines, ‘Republic Act 8371: The Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997’, in Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines (30 Mar. 1998), pp. 2276–96. Emphasis added.

24 IPRA divides these rights into four general categories: (1) Rights to ‘ancestral domains’, including attendant rights to ownership of land and resources, to self-determination in the development and management of the same, to regulate the entry of outsiders, to refuse displacement, and to have certain individually owned agricultural lands classified as alienable and disposable; (2) Rights to ‘self-governance and empowerment’, including attendant rights to maintain customary juridical institutions (within the bounds of national laws and human rights), to form their own local governments in areas where they are the minority, and to participate in political decision-making at all levels (including mandatory Indigenous representation in all legislative and policymaking bodies); (3) Rights to ‘social justice and human rights’, including attendant rights to basic services, to culturally appropriate education, to equal opportunity in employment, and to equal opportunity for women and youth; and (4) Rights to ‘cultural integrity’, including attendant rights to legal protection of distinctive cultural traditions, knowledge systems, ceremonial practices, and biological and genetic resources.

25 FPIC is defined as a ‘consensus of all members of the ICCs/IPs to be determined in accordance with their respective customary laws and practices, free from any external manipulation, interference and coercion, and obtained after fully disclosing the intent and scope of the activity, in a language and process understandable to the community’. The concept of FPIC is rooted, in part, in the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169) and has since gone global – one example of how Filipino activists and policymakers have embraced international legal principles and helped to promote them internationally.

26 See Theriault, Noah, ‘The micropolitics of Indigenous environmental movements in the Philippines’, Development and Change 42, 6 (2011): 1417–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Theriault, Noah, ‘Environmental politics and the burden of authenticity’, in Palawan and its global connections, ed. Eder, James F. and Evangelista, Oscar L. (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014), pp. 347–70Google Scholar.

27 Theriault, ‘Environmental politics’, p. 348.

28 Dressler, Wolfram, Old thoughts in new ideas: State conservation measures, development and livelihood on Palawan Island (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; McDermott, ‘Boundaries and pathways’; Eufemia Felisa Pinto, ‘Contesting frontier lands in Palawan, Philippines: Strategies of Indigenous Peoples for community development and ancestral domain management’ (MA thesis, Clark University, 2000); Noah Theriault, ‘Agencies of the environmental state: Difference and regulation on the Philippines’ “last frontier”’ (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2013).

29 At the time of writing, these were the most recent authoritative numbers available. There is no indication that rates of processing or awarding have meaningfully increased since 2013.

30 See also Oona Paredes, ‘Preserving “tradition”: The business of indigeneity in the modern Philippine context’, this vol.

31 See, e.g., Macdonald, Charles J.-H., ‘Indigenous Peoples as agents of change and as changing agents’, Palawan State University Journal 1, 1 (2008): 63–86Google Scholar: 70; Colchester, Marcus and MacKay, Fergus, In search of middle ground: Indigenous Peoples, collective representation and the right to free, prior and informed consent (Moreton-in-Marsh: Forest Peoples Programme, 2004)Google Scholar.

32 See Lynch, Owen, ‘Native title, private right and tribal land law: An introductory survey’, Philippine Law Journal 57 (1982): 268–305Google Scholar; Lynch, ‘Concepts and strategies’, p. 396.

33 Gatmaytan, ‘Advocacy as translation’.

34 Theriault, ‘Agencies of the environmental state’.

35 Li, ‘Indigeneity’.

36 McDermott, Melanie Hughes, ‘Invoking community: Indigenous People and ancestral domain in Palawan, the Philippines’, in Communities and the environment, ed. Agrawal, Arun and Gibson, Clark C. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 32–62Google Scholar; Tessa Minter, ‘The Agta of the northern Sierra Madre: Livelihood strategies and resilience among Philippine hunter-gatherers’ (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2010).

37 Hirtz, Frank, ‘It takes modern means to be traditional: On recognizing indigenous cultural communities in the Philippines’, Development and Change 34, 5 (2003): 887–914CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Republic of the Philippines, ‘R.A. 8371: Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997’.

39 Theriault, ‘Environmental politics’.

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41 Paredes, ‘Preserving “tradition”’, this vol.

42 Resurreccion, Bernadette P., ‘Gender, identity and agency in Philippine upland development’, Development and Change 37, 2 (2006): 375–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 In addition to the studies cited in n.4 above, see, e.g., Hale, Charles R. and Millamán, Rosamel, ‘Cultural agency and political struggle in the era of the “indio permitido”’, in Cultural agency in the Americas, ed. Sommer, Doris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 385Google Scholar; Hodgson, Dorothy L., ‘Precarious alliances: The cultural politics and structural predicaments of the Indigenous rights movement in Tanzania’, American Anthropologist 104, 4 (2002): 1086–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sylvain, R., ‘“Land, water, and truth”: San identity and global indigenism’, American Anthropologist 104, 4 (2002): 1074–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Patrick, ‘Neoliberalism, indigeneity and social engineering in Ecuador's Amazon’, Critique of Anthropology 28, 2 (2008): 127–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kowal, Emma, ‘The politics of the gap: Indigenous Australians, liberal multiculturalism, and the end of the self-determination era’, American Anthropologist 110, 3 (2008): 338–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nadasdy, Paul, ‘Boundaries among kin: Sovereignty, the modern treaty process, and the rise of ethno-territorial nationalism among Yukon First Nations’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 3 (2012): 499–532CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Youdelis, Megan, ‘“They could take you out for coffee and call it consultation!”: The colonial antipolitics of Indigenous consultation in Jasper National Park’, Environment and Planning A 48, 7 (2016): 1374–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baird, Ian G., ‘“Indigenous Peoples” and land: Comparing communal land titling and its implications in Cambodia and Laos’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54, 3 (2013): 269–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keating, Neal B., ‘Kuy alterities: The struggle to conceptualise and claim Indigenous land rights in neoliberal Cambodia’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54, 3 (2013): 309–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Milne, Sarah, ‘Under the leopard's skin: Land commodification and the dilemmas of Indigenous communal title in upland Cambodia’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54, 3 (2013): 323–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Astuti, Rini and McGregor, Andrew, ‘Indigenous land claims or green grabs? Inclusions and exclusions within forest carbon politics in Indonesia’, Journal of Peasant Studies 44, 2 (2017): 445–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Cordillera Peoples Alliance, ‘IPRA and NCIP: 18 Years of IP Rights Violations’, statement released on social media, 29 Oct. 2015, https://www.facebook.com/cpaphils/posts/today-marks-the-18-years-of-indigenous-peoples-rights-act-or-ra-8371-the-cordill/1063349143701946/ (accessed 29 Dec. 2018).

45 Povinelli, Cunning of recognition.

46 I agree with Goodale that overly ‘micro’ perspectives are equally problematic insofar as they ignore the broader political economy in which local struggles for recognition unfold. As I have argued elsewhere, however, ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ processes are mutually constitutive, and what I aim to do here is understand how the latter engage with, contest, and potentially subvert the former.

47 Cepek, Michael L., ‘Foucault in the forest: Questioning environmentality in Amazonia’, American Ethnologist 38, 3 (2011): 501–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the concept of environmentality, see Agrawal, Arun, Environmentality: Technologies of government and the making of subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Applying Foucault's concept of governmentality to environmental regulation, Agrawal defines ‘environmentality’ as ‘a harmonization of the interests and organization of state and community’ (p. 121) and argues that it characterises relations between rural communities and the state in Kumaon, India. In particular, he examines how the colonial state first used statistical measurements to produce the forest as an object of government and then, when faced with peasant resistance to restrictive policing of the forest, devolved stewardship to village forest councils. Through participation in the practice of government, he argues, villagers have adopted an environmental rationality — ‘environmentality’ — that leads them to ‘care’ for the forest in a manner consistent with the state's needs and expectations. ‘Kumaonis,’ he contends, ‘control themselves and their forests far more systematically and carefully than the forest department could’ (p. 8). Although the term ‘environmentality’ has remained fairly limited in use, many scholars have used ‘governmentality’ or ‘eco-governmentality’ to analyse the intersection of environmental regulation, state–minority relations, and indigeneity. See, e.g., Dressler, Wolfram, ‘Green governmentality and swidden decline on Palawan Island, the Philippines’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, 2 (2014): 250–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldman, Michael, ‘Constructing an environmental state: Eco-governmentality and other transnational practices of a “green” World Bank’, Social Problems 48, 4 (2001): 499–523CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cuasay, Peter, ‘Indigenizing law or legalizing governmentality? The Philippine Indigenous Peoples Rights Act and postcolonial legal hybridity’, in Commonplaces and comparisons, ed. Cuasay, R. Peter L. and Vaddhanaphuti, Chayan (Chiang Mai: RCSD, Chiang Mai University, 2005), pp. 54–78Google Scholar; Bryant, ‘Non-governmental organizations and governmentality’; Gregory, Gillian and Vaccaro, Ismael, ‘Islands of governmentality: Rainforest conservation, indigenous rights, and the territorial reconfiguration of Guyanese sovereignty’, Territory, Politics, Governance 3, 3 (2015): 344–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hanson, Paul W., ‘Governmentality, language ideology, and the production of needs in Malagasy conservation and development’, Cultural Anthropology 22, 2 (2007): 244–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huei-Chung Hsiao, ‘Becoming indigenous: The making of the politics of nature and indigeneity in two Atayal villages of Taiwan’ (PhD diss., Lancaster University, 2011); Lindroth, Marjo and Sinevaara-Niskanen, Heidi, ‘Adapt or die? The biopolitics of indigeneity: From the civilising mission to the need for adaptation’, Global Society 28, 2 (2014): 180–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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50 Warren, James Francis, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The dynamics of external trade, slavery, and ethnicity in the transformation of a Southeast Asian maritime state (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

51 Macdonald, Uncultural behavior; Macdonald, ‘Indigenous peoples’.

52 Theriault, ‘Agencies of the environmental state’; Theriault, ‘A forest of dreams’.

53 The document is titled ‘Lokal na batayang gabay para pagtukoy at pagpili ng kinakatawan ng katutubo sa sanguniang barangay, sanguniang bayan at sanguniang panlalawigan’ [Local guidelines for the definition and selection of indigenous representatives for barangay, municipal, and provincial councils].

54 Nadasdy, ‘Boundaries among kin’, p. 500. See also Henkel, Heiko and Stirrat, Roderick, ‘Participation as spiritual duty: Empowerment as secular subjection’, in Participation: The new tyranny, ed. Cooke, Bill and Kothari, Uma (London: Zed, 2001), pp. 168–84Google Scholar.

55 See Scott, James C., Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

56 Jimi never fully acknowledged that this account of his motives was accurate. But, as with many ‘off-transcript’ narratives, this one came to me in fragments over the following months as I interviewed people about other things.

57 Intimately connected to the recognition of Indigenous rights, post-authoritarian Philippine laws have also embraced neoliberal approaches to regulation that envision ‘local stakeholders’, particularly Indigenous ones, whose stewardship of local resources is rewarded by the market. Under this logic, commodification of NTFPs becomes an ideal way to promote Indigenous rights and sustainability, provided that their extraction is regulated customarily by a ‘validated’ Indigenous collective. Such thinking about NTFPs is, of course, a global trend and one that has been much debated by anthropologists and other social scientists. As Michael Dove observed more than two decades ago, we should not expect NTFPs to differ drastically from any other resource that is extracted from the hinterlands. The labour of extraction is performed by poor rural people, while most of the economic benefits accrue to the elites who control the supply chains. See Michael R. Dove, ‘Smallholder rubber and swidden agriculture in Borneo: A sustainable adaptation to the ecology and economy of the tropical forest’, Economic Botany 47, 2 (1993): 136–47.

58 The regional trader in question was even using permits from Bordo's association to fraudulently certify copal sourced in other areas in order to circumvent the costly permitting process there.

59 Mamdani, Mahmood, Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

60 Paredes makes a similar observation in ‘Preserving “tradition”’, this vol.

61 Hirtz, ‘It takes modern means to be traditional’.

62 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, ‘Contingent commodities: Mobilizing labor in and beyond Souheast Asian forests’, in Taking Southeast Asia to market: Commodities, nature, and people in the neoliberal age, ed. Nevins, Joseph and Peluso, Nancy L. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 27–42Google Scholar.

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67 Povinelli, Cunning of recognition.