Introduction Judy Pasimio On March 16, 2020, the Duterte government imposed a lockdown as it determined the presence of the highly infectious COVID- 19 in the country. In an attempt to control the spread of the virus, the entire Luzon and other major cities were immediately placed under the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), a strict stay-at-home policy to limit movement, and impose stringent physical distancing measures. Only essential travels were allowed such as individuals considered as frontliners, and quarantine passes issued by Local Government Units (LGUs) are required for people to get groceries, and medicine. Transportation and other establishments considered as non-essentials were not allowed to operate. These lockdown policies have great impacts on the Filipino families who suddenly had to stop working, stop going to school, and stay at home while worrying about their safety, their health, but more urgently, about their food on the table. This is the case with indigenous women and their families. Third week into the lockdown, LILAK (Purple Action for Indigenous Women’s Rights) reached out to its partners to ask how they were. According to a Higaonon woman leader, “The drought brought in poor harvest. That’s why many of us in our community worked as farm workers, construction workers, and domestic helpers. But because of the lockdown, many of us were forced to stop working – by our employers to avoid transmitting the virus or because there was no more transportation that could take us to our jobs.” This was echoed by several others. Indigenous communities that were able to produce good crops, on the other hand, were then unable to sell them due to the quarantine. Earlier on, they were living on vegetables and root crops from their gardens. But they could not afford to buy rice, and anything else. In some areas, the quarantine restrictions prohibited them from going into their own collective farms by the Barangay or local government units. This was the case for the T’boliManobo in Brgy. Ned, Lake Sebu. Furthermore, they were prevented from harvesting the vegetables and corn in their collective farm, by the presence of armed groups surrounding their farm. We see this as something beyond the COVID-19 issue. This was a sinister way of taking advantage of the medical emergency as a way to ease them out of their ancestral domain, given the expansion of the coffee plantation of the DMCI corporation. Over the months, we saw the government creating a military-led COVID 19 Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF), implementing guidelines which seemed to be oblivious to the realities of the indigenous women on the ground - one of which is imposition of face masks and shields, with harsh penalties for people caught without them; wash hands with soap; social distancing. The realities then - because of the lockdown, indigenous women were finding it very difficult to put Page 1 of 206