Igorots in the Blogosphere: Claiming Spaces, Re-constructing Identities

Indigenous peoples in the Philippines have rarely been covered by the mainstream media, despite comprising 20 percent of the country’s total population. Lacking access to the media due to various constraints, they have had limited opportunities to create content themselves. But the emergence of the Internet, particularly blogs, is now providing members of indigenous communities with the much-needed space for self-expression. More particularly, several indigenous groups in North Luzon, collectively known as Igorots, are using blogs more extensively to re-construct and re-present their ethnic identity in cyberspace. For this paper, I shall describe how a group of Igorot bloggers protested about a controversial Igorot statue and how this eventually led to its removal.