Concepts:Salugpungan/Catherine “Katkat” Dalon and Jose Monfred C. Sy

Salugpungan, meaning “unity” in the Talaingod Manobo language, is both a philosophy and a practice that guides the Lumad peoples of Mindanao in their struggle for land, life, and self-determination. Rooted in collective farming, rituals, schools, and everyday acts of cooperation, salugpungan reflects how survival and resistance are inseparable. Catherine “Katkat” Dalon recalls learning unity as a child in Lumad schools, where lessons combined literacy with communal practices like sharing food, planting seeds, and caring for children. Historically, the term also names the movement born in the 1990s against logging corporations and state militarization, when Lumad leaders and communities organized to defend the Pantaron Range and their ancestral territories. From this struggle emerged community schools that wove together education and resistance. Despite repression, closures, and the loss of teachers and leaders, salugpungan endures as a moral and political force: a reminder that victory is certain when strength is united.

As defined by
Catherine “Katkat” Dalon, Sabokahan Unity of Lumad Women and Jose Monfred C. Sy

• Read summary and other definitions

"“Let us not allow the fire of our unity to die, even if we are the ones who will be wounded, even if our shoulders bleed. Stoked by our courage, this fire must keep burning. Especially in times when our lives and our land are being stolen.”"

Concepts:Salugpungan

Origins and philosophy.

Salugpungan means unity. It comes from the Talaingod Manobo language, spoken by the Lumad who live in the mountains of Pantaron. Let us not allow the fire of our unity to die, even if we are the ones who will be wounded, even if our shoulders bleed. Stoked by our courage, this fire must keep burning. Especially in times when our lives and our land are being stolen. Because if we let it die because of fear and hopelessness, it is as if we have turned our backs on the duty that flows in our blood, the duty to defend our ancestral land. It is as if we have diminished the value of the land.

I may not yet deeply understand the concept of salugpungan or unity, but I have seen and experienced it in our community. From farming, rituals, and building Lumad schools to the long struggle of defending our land. Even before I learned to read and write, I already knew what cooperation looked like, from sharing food and caring for children to making sacrifices for the defense of the land and our identity, and to forging a better future for the next generation.

I attended a Lumad school for kindergarten. My favorite word written on the bamboo wall of our classroom was buvo (fish trap). Our activity was catching fish in the river using a buvo. Each of us had a role, from clearing weeds to eating together. At the end of every school year, the gift given to us was fruit seeds, so that when we grew up, we would have food to eat, and the next generations would have food too. It was there that I first learned to read and to see the concrete meaning of unity, of salugpungan.

Every terrain and mountain in Mindanao (Southern Philippines), where the Lumad live, is connected, from the Andap Valley, the Pantaron Range, Mount Apo, and the Arakan Valley to Mount Matutum may differ in form, location, and length, but all are home to the Lumad. We, the children of these mountains, may speak different languages and have different clothes and traditions, but we are united by the culture of collective struggle for the defense of the land. Our universal language is the struggle for land. That is why when I was in high school at the Lumad school, it was not only Lumad who studied there but also Bisaya and Moro. The denial of our right to education united us.

What I will never forget are the lessons taught by Bai Bibyaon Ligkayan Bigkay, Kerlan Fanagel, and many other Lumad leaders who offered their lives in defense of the land. They taught us the great importance of unity among the Filipino people. That the struggle cannot succeed without unity. That is why we have Chad Booc, Jurain Ngujo, Maolyn Siatoca, Rowe Libot, and Roshelle Porcadilla, volunteer teachers who lived and embodied true solidarity.

That is why we are certain that our struggle to defend our ancestral land and to assert our right to self-determination will triumph. History has taught us that victory is sure when strength is united. Someday there will no longer be militarization in our community, no more mining, dams, or plantations. We will achieve justice. Someday, when the sun rises, we will rebuild the Salugpungan school (one of the Lumad schools, named after their concept of unity). Victory is certain, because as long as our hearts continue to beat, we will keep raising our fists until triumph.

Praxis and Challenges (Notes on “Salugpungan” by Catherine “Katkat’ Dalon)

Katkat’s powerful essay on the concept of “salugpungan” is not just a historical elaboration (in the gesture of autoethnography), but the very demonstration of it. A Manobo, she used to be a student in a school established through the support of the Mindanao Interfaith Services Foundation (MISFI). This is among the many Indigenous schools formed by and for the Lumad, which is a collective autonym (formerly exonym) of around 18 ethnolinguistic groups in Mindanao, Philippines. Remolding and retooling the curricula of the public school system, the “Lumad schools” provided an education adapted not only to the cultures and histories of the groups comprising their main clientele, but also to the continued struggle of the Lumad to defend their “yutang kabilin” (“ancestral land”) from foreign incursion, development aggression, and militarization.

I met Katkat in her 8th grade. But not as a student of MISFI. I had the pleasure of being her teacher at the Bakwit School, a makeshift, temporary school operated by the Save Our Schools (SOS) Network, which is an alliance of advocates, institutions, and organizations that sought to support the Lumad movement against the abovementioned threats. The “bakwit” in Bakwit School” is a popular languaging of the word “evacuate.” Philippine state agents, the military, and their hired goons have expelled hundreds of families from their yutang kabilin to make way for big (many foreign) businesses. In order for Lumad students to continue their education, the SOS Network propped up the Bakwit School, which moved from sanctuary to sanctuary, enlisting volunteer teachers from various sectors along the way. I was lucky enough to be one of them. Later on, we would dissolve the feudal relationship of teacher-student, and become comrades in struggle.

Several Lumad elders who were displaced along with their communities joined the Bakwit School, imparting their wisdom to students and teachers alike despite being miles away from their ancestral land. One of them is Bai Bibyaon Ligkayan Bigkay, a female chieftain of the Manobo. Bai Bibyaon would tell us stories of how they fought for their yuta, nestled among the Pantaron Range in Mindanao, against corporations. Pantaron is among the largest remaining forest blocks in Mindanao. For generations, it has provided food, medicine, and water for the Lumad communities along its ridges. The forest is also a vast archive of memory: each tree, river, and clearing holds stories of kinship and ritual, of how the Manobo learned to live with the land rather than merely on it. In the 1990s, this way of life was imperiled when the Alcantara and Sons (ALSONS) logging corporation sought to expand its operations into more than 19,000 hectares of ancestral territory. Although legitimized through government permits and an Integrated Forest Management Agreement, the plan represented to the Manobo nothing less than dispossession.

The intrusion marked the beginning of organized resistance in Talaingod. In 1993, twenty-six leaders from the surrounding villages, led by Datu Guibang Apoga, formed Salugpougan Ta Tanu Igkanugon (Unity in Defense of the Ancestral Land). Complementing this was Bai Bibyaon’s formation of Sabokahan Tomo Kamalitanan (Unity of Lumad Women). Bai Bibyaon explained to us in the Bakwit School that, from the outset, “salugpungan” was more than an organization; it was a moral and cosmological community. The ritual dance bangkakawan was performed to announce panagyaw—a war—against the dispossession of land. Spears and arrows were lifted not as weapons of aggression but as emblems of centuries-long guardianship. The movement drew strength, but the state’s response was swift. In 1994, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, working alongside ALSONS security forces, launched counterinsurgency operations branding the Lumad as rebel supporters. Soldiers entered villages, burned homes, and harassed residents. In response, more than five hundred Talaingod Manobo evacuated out of their communities and marched to Davao City. The exodus was not an act of surrender but of visibility. Elders, women, and children, those often unseen in war, made themselves known. In the streets, schools, and churches of Davao, they found solidarity from workers, students, church people, and activists. The alliance’s pressure forced government agencies to heed the Manobo’s call. A Memorandum of Agreement was later signed, limiting ALSONS’s areas of operation. Though the company continued to violate the terms, the communities stood their ground. By the end of the decade, ALSONS declared bankruptcy and withdrew. The land they reclaimed came to bear the name Salugpungan, so that future generations would remember that unity could overcome what we could call an act of colonialism. The people sought to rebuild their communities around the lessons of struggle. From this vision emerged the Salugpongan Ta Tanu Igkanugon Community Learning Centers, which, along with MISFI, comprise the Lumad schools. Education became another front of resistance.

At its heart, salugpongan is a philosophy of relation, resistance, and unity. It teaches that land is not property but relation, that resistance is an act of care, and that unity is both a weapon and refuge. It reminds us that environmental defense is not only about trees or soil but about people who refuse to be erased, the Indigenous communities themselves that see the forest not as a resource but as kin.

Even though not all Lumad schools bear the name, all of them sought to live the principle of salugpungan. These schools were founded on nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented principles, yet remained deeply local. Lessons in reading and arithmetic were taught alongside agriculture, herbal medicine, and the history of the communities in Pantaron. The memory of struggle against ALSONS was not archived in museums but retold in classrooms, where every child was reminded that the yutang kabilin was both inheritance and duty. The state, however, viewed these schools with suspicion. In the 2010s, military operations and government agencies accused Salugpongan and other Lumad schools of indoctrination and insurgent activity. One by one, they were forced to close. Teachers were harassed, students displaced, and entire learning centers demolished.

Many of the names Katkat mentioned in her speech-cum-essay were volunteer teachers who, instead of looking for greener pastures in the cities or abroad, chose to fight alongside the Lumad for their ancestral land. Chad, Jurain, and Teacher Rowe are only some of the teacher-activists killed by state agents. Their only crime is to serve the underserved. We remember them with fondness—our coteachers, friends, and comrades. Mao(lyn) and Roshelle both departed this life due to illness, and the health services in the Philippine countryside remain ill-equipped to address their needs. Still, even to their last days, they actively supported the cause. They were all young.

In 2023, Bai Bibyaon also passed on. But the spirit of salugpungan continues to live on in those who continue to struggle and defend their ancestral land, the graduates of the Bakwit School, like Katkat.

• Further resources

Alamon, Arnold. 2017. Wars of Extinction: Discrimination and the Struggle in Mindanao. Lungsod ng Iligan: Rural Missionaries of the Philippines Northern Mindanao Sub-Region (RMP-NMR), Inc. Canuday, Jose Jowel. 2009. Bakwit: The Power of the Displaced. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Gaspar, Karl. 1997. “The Mindanao Lumad Social Movement.” Mindanao Focus 15, no. 1. Gaspar, Karl. 2015. “No End to Lumad Dislocation from their Homeland: The Case of the Sarangani Manobo and B’laans in Davao Occidental.” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 30, no. 2, 73–94. Imbong, Jerry D. 2020. “‘Bungkalan’ and the Manobo-Pulangihon Tribe’s Resistance to Corporate Land-Grab in Bukidnon, Mindanao.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 17, no. 1: 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180120967724. (Original work published 2021) Paredes, Oona. 2013. A Mountain of Difference: The Lumad in Early Colonial Mindanao. New York: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. Sy, Jose Monfred C. 2025. “Teaching ‘Pangiyak Ki!’: The Lumad School as a Struggle for Land, Life, and Liberation.” In Reimagining Development in Southeast Asia, edited by Sy, J.M.C., and A.P. Aban, 147–169. Asia in Transition 21. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-9140-8_11. Sy, Jose Monfred. 2022. “‘It Takes a Movement to Build Schools’: A Historical and Pedagogical Sketch of the Lumad Schools vis-à-vis the Lumad Social Movement.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 70, no. 2: 423–464. Yambao, Clod Marlan Krister, Sarah Wright, Noah Theriault, and Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo. 2022. “‘I am the Land and I am Their Witness’: Placemaking amid Displacement among Lumads in the Philippines.” Critical Asian Studies 54, no. 2: 259–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2022.2059771.