Higaonon
Definition
The Higaonon are an indigenous people of northern Mindanao in the Philippines, inhabiting the mountainous interior of Bukidnon and adjacent parts of Agusan del Norte, Agusan del Sur, Misamis Oriental, and Lanao. Classified among the Manobo-speaking peoples, they speak the Higaonon language, a Manobo language partially (about 80 percent) intelligible with Binukid. Like other Lumad peoples, they traditionally practice swidden farming, maintain customary law under datu leadership, and carry a rich tradition of oral literature.
Identities (Wikipedia/Wikidata/DBpedia)
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higaonon
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5753411
- DBpedia: N/A
Also Known As
Higaonon people; “people of the living mountains” (common gloss of the ethnonym).
Examples and Analogies
The Higaonon exemplify the forest-farming cultures of Mindanao’s interior: households cultivate upland rice, corn, and root crops on mountain slopes, supplementing harvests with hunting, gathering, and crafts. Their customary system—mediated by datus and sealed by traditional pacts—functions much like a village constitution, and their mosaic of sacred groves and fallows operates as an informal protected-area network long before modern conservation borrowed similar ideas.
Usage Scenarios
Higaonon communities today engage the modern state through ancestral domain claims and Certificates of Ancestral Domain Title under the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act, community-based forest management agreements, and cultural festivals such as Bukidnon’s Kaamulan, where Higaonon are one of the seven celebrated tribes. Higaonon handicrafts, including woven mats and baskets, reach markets through cultural enterprises, and the language is taught in multilingual education programs in some divisions.
Strategies
The people’s survival strategies combine legal instruments (ancestral domain titling, FPIC processes), cultural transmission through schools of living tradition and oral history documentation, and economic diversification into agroforestry and sustainable livelihood projects to reduce dependence on external logging or plantation economies.
Security and Safety Measures
Customary law and peace-pact mechanisms regulate internal disputes and relations with neighboring groups. In recent decades, communities caught between insurgents, militias, and state forces have sometimes declared their villages zones of peace—an assertion of indigenous neutrality aimed at community safety.
Historical Context
Higaonon territory was progressively encroached upon during the American colonial and postwar periods, as Bukidnon’s fertile plateaus were opened to cattle ranches and settler agriculture, pushing communities into more remote ranges. Logging concessions in the late twentieth century accelerated deforestation of their watershedlands, and the Higaonon figured prominently among Lumad groups asserting land rights as the national indigenous rights movement grew. sacred mountains and watersheds in their domain, notably Mount Kimangkil in Impasug-ong, hold deep ritual significance.
Challenges and Controversies
Dispossession remains the core issue: plantations (notably pineapple in Bukidnon–Misamis Oriental), mining applications, and dams threaten ancestral lands, and militarization associated with the communist insurgency periodically displaces Higaonon communities, with schools and lumad advocates sometimes caught in the crossfire. Impoverishment, out-migration of youth, and language shift add cultural pressures to the political and economic ones.
Related Topic
Manobo