peoples from the rest of the population is their concept of land as granted and entrusted by one Creator for everyone to harness, cultivate, sustain, and live on. This concept is distinct because it adheres to the spirit of collectivism and rejects the notion of land as private property. The more traditional communities tend to allocate more land for communal use, devoted to controlled activities, i.e. sacred areas, conservation areas, etc. The less traditional the community becomes, individual land ownership increases, and zones designated for communal use decreases. Individual ownership gives a wider latitude to allow investments to enter and even initiate land use conversion. Hence, the demand by indigenous cultural communities (ICCs) is for the recognition of communal ownership, as individualizing ownership of the domain will lead to fragmentation of the community.19 Historical overview of indigenous peoples’ land issues and the advent of tenurial reforms Customary tenure. Prior to Spanish colonization, early Filipinos already had fairly developed indigenous property laws and customs for more than 20,000 years (Lynch, 1982). Customary tenure systems were often based on traditional norms and defined oral agreements, and many of these land systems continue to this day. Commonwealtholaws. During the American colonial government, Commonwealth Act 141 was enacted in 1936. It provided for the classification of public lands into “alienable and disposable” lands, “timber” lands, and “mineral” lands. The latter two types of lands are subject to alienation by the State but only through lease. Concerning ancestral lands, Section 44 of the same law (Chapter VII on Free Patents) as amended in 1964 by RA 3872, provided for members of national cultural minorities to be granted free patents over land, whether disposable or not, on condition that they have “continuously occupied and cultivated, either by himself or through his predecessors-in-interest, a tract or tracts of land, whether disposable or not since July 4, 1955.” However, little is known if any “cultural minority” actually benefitted from this provision. Commonwealth Act 141 also had provisions that governed the reservations for the settlement of tribal peoples. A Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes (BNCT) was Report of IP leaders, Workshop on Land Ownership, UP University Hotel, 17 May 2017. 19 76 Status of Land and Resource Tenure Reform in the Philippines 2018