THE Save Our Schools (SOS) Network expresses grave concern over the continuing criminalization of Lumad volunteer teachers and community advocates in the Talaingod 13 case. These are individuals who answered a calling to teach, care for, and defend Indigenous children in communities long subjected to neglect, dispossession, and repression by the State.
This statement responds to the Court of Appeals decision upholding the unjust conviction of the Talaingod 13, a ruling that entrenches the criminalization of Lumad volunteer teachers and community advocates under the guise of child protection.
Lumad schools arose from state abandonment and dispossession
Lumad schools did not arise out of defiance of the law or the State.
They arose because the State abandoned Indigenous communities and neglected its obligation to provide education, while at the same time enabling the dispossession of their ancestral lands.
For decades, Lumad communities in Talaingod and across Mindanao were denied meaningful access to basic education. Public schools were distant, inaccessible, or entirely absent. Teachers were not deployed. Indigenous children were structurally excluded from the public education system, not as an accident of geography, but as a consequence of persistent neglect.
At the same time, the Pantaron Range, the ancestral territory of the Talaingod Manobo, was opened to extractive interests through state-issued agreements such as Industrial Forest Management Agreements (IFMAs), including those granted to Alcantara & Sons (Alsons). These mechanisms converted communal forests into zones of extraction, directly threatening the material basis of Indigenous life, livelihood, and survival. As communities resisted this dispossession, militarization followed, marked by heightened military presence, the formation and deployment of paramilitary groups, and the red-tagging and closure of schools.
Within this context of abandonment, dispossession, and repression, Lumad schools, including Salugpongan, arose. Education became a deliberate assertion of self-determination, and teaching became inseparable from the defense of ancestral domain. Schools functioned not only as spaces of learning, but as institutions that sustained collective memory, ecological knowledge, and the political will to remain on the land.
Lumad communities—together with parents, elders, church workers, and solidarity formations—built their own schools. Teaching emerged not as employment, but as a mission and vocation rooted in collective responsibility, Indigenous self-determination, and the defense of land, life, and dignity.
It is precisely this assertion of collective survival and self-reliance, sustained through education, that state security forces and counterinsurgency agencies have increasingly treated as a threat. To be continued
Lawfare, Counterinsurgency, and the Talaingod 13
As Lumad communities resisted displacement and environmental destruction, the State responded with counterinsurgency. Militarization intensified, and community institutions, including schools, were deliberately framed by security forces and state agencies as threats to public order and national security.
The Court of Appeals decision in the Talaingod 13 case cannot be separated from this counterinsurgency framework. Rather than confronting the structural exclusion, land grabbing, and militarization that compelled communities to establish their own education systems, the ruling extends repression into the legal arena. It criminalizes acts of care and protection undertaken during a crisis produced by state policies and militarized intervention, transforming humanitarian response into alleged criminal conduct.
In doing so, the decision disregards Indigenous realities, community consent, and the fundamental purpose of child-protection laws. Law is used not to shield children from harm, but to legitimize the dismantling of community institutions that arose where the State failed or refused to protect Indigenous life.
In 2018, Lumad children in Talaingod faced mass school closures, forced displacement, and escalating militarization. Volunteer teachers and advocates acted only after repeated appeals for assistance were ignored by local government units, the Department of Education, and the Department of Social Welfare and Development. Their actions—providing food, shelter, safety, and continuity of learning—were not acts of intrusion, but acts of necessity under conditions shaped by counterinsurgency policy and state abandonment.
What child abuse really means
As anthropologist and public health advocate Dr. Michael Lim Tan has emphasized, child abuse must be understood in terms of actual harm: injury, exploitation, coercion, or lasting trauma. Providing care and protection during crisis does not constitute abuse.
The real harm lies in exposing children to fear, hunger, violence, and deprivation—and in abandoning them when state institutions withdraw protection or are weaponized against their own communities. When child-protection laws are stripped of context and intent and deployed within a counterinsurgency framework, they do not protect children. They invert justice, criminalizing those who provide care while shielding the structures and actors that produce harm.
Selective justice and the function of lawfare
The Talaingod 13 case reveals a broader and entrenched pattern in which the justice system moves swiftly and punitively against poor, Indigenous, and marginalized communities, while cases involving powerful actors linked to land conversion, resource extraction, corruption, and human rights violations remain slow, selective, or indefinitely unresolved.
This is not equal justice.
This is selective justice, enforced through lawfare.
In this context, the law does not function as a neutral arbiter. It operates as a mechanism to stabilize and legitimize outcomes already produced by dispossession, militarization, and elite interests. Child-protection statutes are emptied of their meaning when they are mobilized against caregivers and educators, while those responsible for displacement, intimidation, environmental destruction, and systemic deprivation remain insulated from accountability.
Lawfare here serves a clear purpose: to discipline resistance, criminalize solidarity, and foreclose alternative forms of Indigenous self-organization, while securing the conditions necessary for continued extraction and control.
Political Meaning of the Court of Appeals Ruling
The political meaning of this legal inversion has been made explicit by Walden Bello, 2023 Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Awardee. In response to the Court of Appeals ruling, Bello described it as “a brazen miscarriage of justice,” emphasizing that the charges against the Talaingod 13 arose from a humanitarian rescue operation conducted amid threats, harassment, and militarization directed at Lumad communities. As he noted, the State “recast this humanitarian act as a criminal offense,” transforming protection into prosecution.
Bello stressed that the ruling “is not about protecting children,” but about capitulating to narratives and propaganda long advanced by state security forces and counterinsurgency agencies that have demonized Lumad schools, communities, and those who stand with them. He underscored that institutions responsible for widespread abuses against Indigenous peoples cannot credibly posture as protectors of children, while those who acted to shield children from fear, displacement, and violence are branded as criminals.
Once elevated into jurisprudence, the Talaingod 13 case does not protect children. It punishes care. It does not uphold the law. It weaponizes it. Those who acted to protect Indigenous children are criminalized, while the structures and actors that produced dispossession, militarization, and deprivation remain beyond accountability.
A Dangerous Precedent
In Indigenous communities, education and child care are collective responsibilities shaped by parents, elders, and community leaders. Criminalizing these practices legitimizes the dismantling of community institutions that arise precisely where the State has abandoned its social obligations, even as it advances extractive and militarized interests in Indigenous territories.
As legal remedies are pursued, including a Motion for Reconsideration, the Save Our Schools Network underscores the deeper danger posed by this ruling. If allowed to stand, it normalizes the criminalization of care, authorizes the use of law to suppress Indigenous self-determination, and clears the way for coercive actors to replace community authority under the guise of legality.
Lumad schools exist because Indigenous children were denied education.
Volunteer teachers arose because communities refused abandonment.
To punish those who answered this calling, while land dispossession, militarization, and impunity persist, is a profound injustice with lasting consequences not only for educators, but for entire communities struggling to survive.
If this precedent stands, future emergencies will be met not with solidarity or protection, but with fear. Care will retreat. Classrooms will empty. And the cost will be borne once again by Indigenous children.
Care is not a crime.
Teaching as a vocation is not abuse.
Justice for the Talaingod 13.