LAST week, we left off with Valentine’s greeting to one and all.
This week, we got a text from the Sylvia Ruff mentioned last week, who kindly corrected this column—it wasn’t Doris who owned D and S Fine Foods, but Lina Ng; we stand happily corrected. More from Sylvia: the assistant manager was George Ng (later of Teahouse fame, as earlier written here), whose assistant was Leona. Yes, we all now remember.
As some of us also remember, D and S at a point moved to UB Square, the corner of General Luna and Assumption to be exact, though not as well-stocked as it used to be on Session Road. And while the store has long closed shop, it lives on in our memories of a quieter Baguio that did not have to fight tooth and nail to stop these moves to put parking buildings in the park. So we gotta do what we gotta do, as the saying goes, and battle these commercial interests that run contrary to the environmental well-being of our fair city.
No to parking buildings in Burnham Park!
Speaking of which, the Baguio City Council on August 16, 2010 designated “that portion of Burnham Park between the children’s playground and the city orchidarium as site for the Mateo Cariño monument and as an Iblaoi Hertiage Garden (Resolution Numbered 182, Series of 2010).” No to a parking building there, either, please.
The above resolution was preceded by one passed by the City Council the year before on September 28, 2009 (Resolution 395, Series of 2009) that declared “February 23 of every year as Ibaloi Day in the City of Baguio to commemorate the date when the US Supreme Court recognized the legitimacy of Mateo Cariño’s struggle for Native Title and to give due recognition to the original indigenous inhabitants of the City.”
Subsequently, on January 28, 2013, the City Council passed Ordinance Numbered 09 (Series of 2013) “institutionalizing the Ibaloi day and making it a regular activity of the City Government of Baguio.” This year, February 23 fall on this weekend, but Ibaloy Day activities have been cancelled due to the Coronavirus precautions we all must take.
Still, let us this weekend commemorate that US Supreme Court decision penned by legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that affirmed Native Title in Baguio, Benguet, the Philippines, the US, and actually internationally. This column revisited the decision just recently and for the nth time, again appreciating that it is indeed a masterpiece of jurisprudence and of writing.
Oft-quoted from that decision are the following lines. “Whatever the law upon these points may be, and we mean to go no further than the necessities of decision demand, every presumption is and ought to be against the Government in a case like the present. It might, perhaps, be proper and sufficient to say that when, as far back as testimony or memory goes, the land has been held by individuals under a claim of private ownership, it will be presumed to have been held in the same way from before the Spanish conquest, and never to have been public land.”
What is often missed perhaps is that Holmes decision on Native Title should not be held as ‘the enemy” by our local and national governments. Rather it is one we should as a nation be proud has its roots in Baguio, amongst ourselves, as Filipinos. For who was the old chieftain Mateo anyway, if not the original Filipino, unbowed.