The Save Our Schools (SOS) Network has voiced its profound alarm over the ongoing criminalization of Lumad volunteer teachers and community advocates, following a recent Court of Appeals decision. The court upheld the controversial conviction of individuals known as the Talaingod 13, a move critics say weaponizes the law against those serving neglected Indigenous communities.
Roots of Lumad Schools in State Neglect and Dispossession
Lumad schools were not created to defy the state. They emerged as a direct response to systemic state abandonment. For generations, Indigenous communities in Talaingod and across Mindanao were denied access to basic public education, with schools often being too distant or completely nonexistent.
Simultaneously, the ancestral lands of the Talaingod Manobo, particularly the Pantaron Range, were opened to extractive industries. The government issued agreements like Industrial Forest Management Agreements (IFMAs) to companies such as Alcantara & Sons (Alsons), converting communal forests into zones of exploitation.
Facing this dual threat of neglect and land dispossession, communities established their own schools. Institutions like Salugpongan became vital spaces not just for learning, but for preserving culture, ecological knowledge, and the collective will to defend their ancestral domain. Teaching transformed into a vocation of resistance and survival.
Lawfare and the Criminalization of Humanitarian Care
The Court of Appeals' decision on December 30, 2025, is seen as an extension of state counterinsurgency tactics into the legal realm. Instead of addressing the root causes—land grabbing, militarization, and educational exclusion—the ruling criminalizes acts of care.
In 2018, Lumad children in Talaingod faced mass school closures, forced displacement, and intense militarization. When pleas for help to local government units, the Department of Education, and the DSWD went unanswered, volunteer teachers and advocates stepped in. They provided food, shelter, safety, and continued education.
Anthropologist Dr. Michael Lim Tan argues that true child abuse involves actual harm, trauma, or exploitation. Providing protection during a crisis does not qualify. The ruling, however, inverts this logic, penalizing caregivers while the structures that created the humanitarian crisis remain unaccountable.
A Dangerous Precedent for Indigenous Rights
Walden Bello, recipient of the 2023 Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award, condemned the ruling as a "brazen miscarriage of justice." He stated that the state has recast a humanitarian rescue operation as a criminal offense, capitulating to propaganda that demonizes Lumad schools.
This case highlights a pattern of selective justice, where the legal system moves swiftly against marginalized Indigenous communities while cases involving powerful actors in land conversion and extraction linger unresolved. This use of lawfare serves to discipline resistance and secure conditions for continued resource extraction.
The SOS Network warns that allowing this precedent to stand normalizes the criminalization of community care. It authorizes the use of law to suppress Indigenous self-determination and could lead to a future where fear prevents solidarity, classrooms empty, and Indigenous children bear the ultimate cost.
The network affirms that care is not a crime, and teaching as a vocation is not abuse. As legal remedies like a Motion for Reconsideration are pursued, the call for justice for the Talaingod 13 grows louder, underscoring a fundamental struggle for Indigenous rights and self-determination in the Philippines.
