04/02/2020 E-Library - Information At Your Fingertips: Printer Friendly communities."[82] Like the Spaniards, the Americans pursued a policy of assimilation. In 1903, they passed Act No. 253 creating the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes (BNCT). Under the Department of the Interior, the BNCT's primary task was to conduct ethnographic research among unhispanized Filipinos, including those in Muslim Mindanao, with a "special view to determining the most practicable means for bringing about their advancement in civilization and prosperity." The BNCT was modeled after the bureau dealing with American Indians. The agency took a keen anthropological interest in Philippine cultural minorities and produced a wealth of valuable materials about them.[83] The 1935 Constitution did not carry any policy on the non-Christian Filipinos. The raging issue then was the conservation of the national patrimony for the Filipinos. In 1957, the Philippine Congress passed R.A. No. 1888, an "Act to effectuate in a more rapid and complete manner the economic, social, moral and political advancement of the non-Christian Filipinos or national cultural minorities and to render real, complete, and permanent the integration of all said national cultural minorities into the body politic, creating the Commission on National Integration charged with said functions." The law called for a policy of integration of indigenous peoples into the Philippine mainstream and for this purpose created the Commission on National Integration (CNI).[84] The CNI was given, more or less, the same task as the BNCT during the American regime. The post-independence policy of integration was like the colonial policy of assimilation understood in the context of a guardian-ward relationship.[85] The policy of assimilation and integration did not yield the desired result. Like the Spaniards and Americans, government attempts at integration met with fierce resistance. Since World War II, a tidal wave of Christian settlers from the lowlands of Luzon and the Visayas swamped the highlands and wide open spaces in Mindanao.[86] Knowledge by the settlers of the Public Land Acts and the Torrens system resulted in the titling of several ancestral lands in the settlers' names. With government initiative and participation, this titling displaced several indigenous peoples from their lands. Worse, these peoples were also displaced by projects undertaken by the national government in the name of national development.[87] It was in the 1973 Constitution that the State adopted the following provision: "The State shall consider the customs, traditions, beliefs, and interests of national cultural communities in the formulation and implementation of State policies."[88] For the first time in Philippine history, the "non-Christian tribes" or the "cultural minorities" were addressed by the highest law of the Republic, and they were referred to as "cultural communities." More importantly this time, their "uncivilized" culture was given some recognition and their "customs, elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocsfriendly/1/36882 21/148