Thanks for drawing attention to the indigenous people in our communities. Their land keeps getting taken from them and exploited. We should be doing more to help and protect them.

The real Filipinos..

Around 20,000 of them lost their homes in the Pinatubo eruption — they used to live on the slopes. My wife says she remembers, as a kid, hundreds of them huddled under bridges and anywhere else they could find shelter. Their ancestral land was wiped out by the eruption and the government didn't have a plan.

There are lots here in Tarlac. Locals call them negritos.

I've never understood the term 'indigenous' in this country. If you applied it the way it's used in Latin America or the US, 85–90% of the Philippine population would be indigenous, and only a very small share have mixed ancestry with a non-Filipino ethnic group.

Filipinos are a hybrid of those indigenous people and white people.

If they're who I think they are, in Angeles I've heard them called, or pronounced, 'Va gow'.......... and the common negative stereotypes about them are similar to the ones about the Roma, aka Gypsies.