In celebration of the National Language Month (Buwan ng Wika) this August, the National Museum of the Philippines (NMP) formally launched on Saturday the free electronic book “Lumad Mindanao” dedicated to the indigenous group in the Southern Philippines for the purpose of narrating their place in the Filipino society.

For many years, the Lumad tribes of Mindanao have been facing a multitude of struggles, including the alleged human rights violations since the imposition of Martial Law in the region, the mining operations in their ancestral domains, and the continuous Red-tagging of the government which led to the closure of 55 Lumad schools back in 2019.

“We hope that this publication will help narrow gaps in accounts written about them and understand their present situation by providing accessible and updated reference material,” the NMP said, citing that the move is also the beginning for more bilingual publications in the future.

Based on the permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Anthropology, the NMP said the publication features over 200 material culture from the National Ethnographic collection, a comprehensive ethnolinguistic map and language tree of both Lumad and Bangsamoro groups collated from different historic, ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and linguistic sources, including some historic and contemporary photographs from the NMP archives, the Field Museum of Natural History, University of Michigan Digital Collections, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Southeast Asian Studies Image Collection.

The book also contains Lumadnon tangible and intangible cultural heritage, including a narrative on the widely disputed history of the Tasaday -- a catalog of the ethnographic, archaeological, herbaria, and zoological collections displayed at the Lumad Mindanao gallery.

The electronic copy of the book can be accessed through this link: http://nationalmuseum.gov.ph/nationalmuseumbeta/img/Lumad%20Mindanao%20(NMP,%202020).pdf