Ateneo de Manila University's Citation of Zenaid Brigida H. Pawid
Zenaida Brigida H Pawid
Ozanam Award
Zenaida Brigida “Bridget” Hamada-Pawid was born in Baguio City, a “war baby” to the Ibaloy-Japanese journalist and short-story writer Sinai Cariño Hamada, and Bontoc social worker Geralda Macli-ing. She is the second of six siblings, all professionals and products of the Philippine public school system. She has two daughters, a physicist in Oregon and a governance strategist in the Philippines.
A common thread throughout Bridget’s work is the value of interface, of providing spaces for the “other,” for different voices, lifeways, and systems within national governance. Bridget believes that the law, its majesty and constancy, is both indigenous and of the state. Justice is its objective and equity is the compromise. It is the legal process in pursuit of social justice that frames her commitment to seek peaceful and equitable solutions to the issues of indigenous peoples.
This core value of building interfaces was deeply ingrained from her parents, grandparents, and extended families, both Bontok and Ibaloy. Her formative professional years were spent in Baguio as a staff writer for the family paper, the Baguio Midland Courier, one of the oldest and longest published community newspapers in the country. She served as instructor at the Baguio Colleges Foundation (now the University of the Cordilleras), at the Notre Dame of Jolo College, and then at the University of the Philippines Baguio. A pioneering interdisciplinary “Educational Assistance Program” at the UP Baguio for Cordillera students capped long years of involvement in cultural presentations, guidance and mentoring, and co-curricular activities with college students from all over the region. Documenting the stories of her people, she co-wrote “A Peoples’ History of Benguet” which constitutes one of the first ethnohistorical writings on the Ibaloy done from their own perspective, with a sequel now being written. She continues to work with the Philippine Department of Education, and various formal school programs and community-based undertakings on the formation, institutionalization, and popularization of “Schools of Living Tradition.”
Martial Law and the euphoric EDSA People Power Revolution crystallized her commitment to the value of interface in justice, law, and governance. The Cellophil Resources Corporation and Chico River Dam experience would be a watershed and defining period for each and every Cordillera indigenous person. The century-old struggle found its voice, its vocabulary, and its form. The arena shifted from armed struggle to the legal institutions of Congress, the courts, and the executive branch of government. She became deeply involved in building the interfaces for peace, beginning with efforts to conceptualize community-based areas of demilitarized “peace zones,” then participation in the National Unification Commission, to a ten-year legislative battle for the passage of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA). She helped define and differentiate the indigenous peoples’ struggle for autonomy from that of local armed movements as a member of two peace negotiation panels for the Philippine government, first with the Cordillera Peoples’ Liberation Army, and then with the National Democratic Front–Communist Party of the Philippines–New Peoples’ Army. She would then be appointed as Commissioner for the Cordillera, and later, Chairperson of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIR), the office created by IPRA.
Even as Bridget engaged the formal governance structures of the state to find interstices for indigenous peoples rights, she formed her deepest friendships and partnerships with the citizen groups she was a member of, and with the bishops and lay partners of the dioceses of the Cordillera and their social action centers. With the Cordillera Peoples Forum and the Cordillera Ancestral Domain Partners for Peace and Development, they not only articulated indigenous peoples issues and initiatives from community level to national level policy, but also actively partnered with government and non-government institutions to push for the recognition and development of ancestral domains. The dioceses of Baguio, Benguet, Bontoc, and Lagawe anchored Bridget’s involvement in the PPCRV voter empowerment and electoral reform advocacies that became part of a region’s political struggle, including two plebiscites for regional autonomy. Bridget found in this community of faith a resonance for finding interfaces. As the church in the Cordillera undertook its inculturation of the faith, it became a natural and integral partner in creating spaces and arenas for the indigenous peoples’ struggle.
“I am 150 years old!” Bridget readily quips both when her commitment to Cordillera peace and indigenous peoples rights issues is commended, as well as when she expresses frustration at the seemingly intractable challenges.
She is Manang Briggs, a term of endearment and respect, to most Philippine peace and indigenous peoples rights advocates. She continues to be sought out or carefully avoided; notorious and yet beloved in turn, to the spectrum of groups and institutions working on these issues, for her unapologetic expression of, and ability to articulate perspectives, to accompany discussion and debate, and to catalyze action.
Her work continues despite a comprehensive peace process and progressive legislation. IP communities in the Philippines remain largely outside of the politico-economic sphere of decision making and access to development options.
Indigenous peoples are in the most underdeveloped but natural resources rich ancestral domains. They occupy the last remaining bio-diverse areas of the country, but have inadequate basic social services and structures. Over 15 million indigenous peoples of the Philippines, classified by the NCIP into one hundred ten ethnolinguistic groups spread throughout the country, live in contradiction. They are culturally rooted but nationally marginalized.
The Ateneo de Manila, in its 2018 Traditional University Awards is honored to confer on Manang Briggs the Ozanam Award for her uncompromising commitment to the task of building interfaces for indigenous peoples and for being a beacon for those us us who continue to work so that all marginalized groups may be heard, understood and allowed to participate in a more inclusive social reconstruction of the Philippines.
