Separate Concurring Opinion 28 G.R. No. 224469 It is true that, by section 14, the gover~ent of the Philippines is empowered to enact rules and prescribe terms for perfecting titles to public lands where some, but not all, Spanish conditions had been fulfilled, and to issue patents to natives for not more than 16 hectares of public lands actually occupied by the native or his ancestors before August 13, I 898. But this section perhaps might be satisfied if confined to cases where the occupation was of land admitted to be public land, and had not continued for such a length of time and under such circumstances as to give rise to the understanding that the occupants were owners at that date. We hesitate to suppose that it was intended to declare every native who had not a paper title a trespasser, and to set the claims of all the wilder tribes afloat. It is true again that there is excepted from the provision that we have quoted as to the administration of the property and rights acquired by the United States, such land and property as shall be designated by the President for military or other reservations, as this land since has been. But there still remains the question what property and rights the United States asserted itself to have acquired. Whatever the law upon these points may be, and we mean to go no further than the necessities of decision demand~ every presumption is and ought to be against the government in a case like the present. It might, perhaps, be proper and sufficient to say that when, as far back as testimony or memory goes, the land has been held by individuals under a claim of private ownership, it will be presumed to have been held in the same way from before the Spanish conquest, and never to have been public land. Certainly in a case like this, if there is doubt or ambiguity in the Spanish law, we ought to give the applicant the benefit of the doubt. Whether justice to the natives and the import of the organic act ought not to carry us beyond a subtle examination of ancient texts, or perhaps even beyond the attitude of Spanish law, humane though it was, it is unnecessary to decide. If, in a tacit way, it was assumed that the wild tribes of the Philippines were to be dealt with as the power and inclination of the conqueror might dictate, Congress has not yet sanctioned the same course as the proper one "for the benefit of the inhabitants thereof." 139 Carino established the notion that Igorots and, by analogy, other groups with similar customs and long associations, have constitutionally protected native titles to their respective ancestral lands. 140 It also emphasized that, based on native custom and long association, there exists a legal foundation that the ancestral lands of some native groups within the Philippine archipelago are owned pursuant to private, communal title. 141 The doctrine espoused in Carino was further reinforced by the United States Supreme Court in Reavis v. Fianza. 142 Reavis involved two (2) gold mines situated in the province of Benguet. These mines were in a tract of land, the sole and exclusive 139 140 141 142 Id. at 458-460. Owen James Lynch, Jr., Native Title, Private Right and Tribal Land Law: An Introductory Survey, 57 PHIL. L. J. 268, 278 (1982). Id. at 279. 215 U.S. 16 (1909). See also Dominique Gallego, Indigenous Peoples: Their Right to Compensation Sui Generis for Ancestral Territories Taken, 43 ATENEO L. J. 43, 55 (I 998). I