First Posted 23:32:00 02/12/2010
Filed Under: People
BAGUIO CITY—THE HEIRS OF Ibalois Mateo and Bayosa Cariño are suing the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) because it ceded parts of their ancestral land claims to another family, whose supposed lineage suggest they are illegitimate Cariño cousins.
The great grandchildren of Cariño announced that they had initiated legal action against the NCIP for issuing a certificate of ancestral land title (CALT) to the Ikang Paus clan over 78 hectares of the government-owned Baguio Dairy Farm.
Their lawyers also asked the Court of Appeals to revoke the Paus CALT over the farm, which is still under the custody of the Department of Agriculture.
The NCIP issued the Paus CALT in March 2009 on the basis of the clan’s supposed lineage to Bayosa Cariño, although former NCIP Chair Reuben Dasay Lingating had rejected the clan’s claim during his term in 2003.
Linda Grace Cariño, one of the heirs, said they were furious because the Paus clan documents approved by the commissioners “impugn that my great grandmother, a 19th century woman, had children out of wedlock.”
Citing the published works of German author Otto Scheerer, the family said Paus never surfaced in the lineage of Mateo and Bayosa Cariño that historians had documented a hundred years ago.
Mateo Cariño was the Ibaloi who won a 1909 United States Supreme Court land case over what is now Camp John Hay.
This decision is enshrined in Philippine jurisprudence as the 1909 Doctrine of the Native Title, which legislators used as reference in drawing up Republic Act No. 8371 (the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act or Ipra).
Joanna Cariño, the oldest heir who spoke at the news conference, said the NCIP accommodated what she called “identity theft.”
The Cariño family contested the title because, it said, it also has a stake over portions of the dairy farm. It lost its final appeal in October 2009.
Joanna Cariño said Ibaloi families had approached Baguio Bishop Carlito Cenzon to complain about NCIP officials who offered to process ancestral land titles in exchange for a share of the lots.
Amador Batay-an, NCIP Cordillera director, said he participated in a September 2009 meeting convened by Cenzon and Secretary Silvestre Bello III, chair of the oversight committee on Ipra, but the claimants failed to substantiate their allegations.
Batay-an said the agency processed the claims in good faith, in spite of the controversy.
In the early 1990s Ibaloi families were embroiled in a controversy over the dairy farm when the Department of Agrarian Reform ruled that a certificate of land ownership award (CLOA) could grant control over the government lot. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon
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