Mindanao

• 1. Introduction

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  Mindanao sits at the southern end of the Philippine archipelago, and the word carved into its identity comes from a language spoken by a people who once ruled its floodplains. In the Maguindanao language, the island's name breaks into two parts: min, a past tense verb prefix, and danao, meaning "lake". Together they describe a land "where the lakes are found". That poetic etymology traces back to the Sultanate of Maguindanao, which controlled the southern floodplains of the Rio Grande de Mindanao and most of the coastal area of Illana Bay, Moro Gulf, Sarangani Bay, and Davao Gulf. This is the second-largest island in the Philippines, after Luzon, and the seventh-most populous island in the world. With a population of 26,252,442 recorded in the 2020 census, it holds more people than many entire countries. Yet Mindanao is also an island that has never settled into a single identity. It has been a meeting point of ancient trade routes, sultanates, colonial powers, and armed conflicts stretching across centuries. The questions that follow are inseparable: How did so many different peoples come to share this one island? What has held it together, and what has pulled it apart?

• 2. Layers of Belief

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  From around 900 AD onward, the people of Mindanao absorbed Hindu and Buddhist influences arriving from Indonesia and Malaysia. Indianized scripts such as Kawi and baybayin were introduced from Java and Sulawesi or Borneo respectively. Material culture followed: the sarong worn as a malong or patadyong, the pudong turban, silk, and the batik and ikat weaving and dyeing methods. Artifacts from that era include a golden kinnara, an image believed by some to be a Tara, and a Ganesha pendant. These cultural traits eventually spread northward into the Visayas and Luzon, though the Spanish arrival in the 16th century heavily modified or erased them.

  The Darangen epic of the Maranao people stands as the most complete local version of the Ramayana, a thread connecting Mindanao's storytelling tradition directly to the Indian subcontinent. The Maguindanao also carried strong Hindu beliefs well into the Islamic era, evidenced by the Ladya Lawana epic saga, which invokes the figure of Rajah Ravana and survives to the present in a form that has been heavily Islamized from the 17th century onward.

  Islam arrived beginning in the 14th century, carried largely by Muslim merchants from the western Malay Archipelago. The first mosque in the Philippines was built in the mid-14th century in the town of Simunul, Tawi-Tawi. Around the 16th century the Muslim sultanates of Sulu, Lanao, and Maguindanao rose from formerly Hindu-Buddhist rajahnates. Conversion was not always voluntary. As these sultanates expanded, the native populations of their territories had to either accept Islam or pay tribute to their new rulers. Most of northern, eastern, and southern coastal Mindanao inhabited by Visayan groups was later converted to Christianity by Spanish missionaries. The Lumad people of the interior, however, largely retained their animist beliefs.

• 3. Colonizers and Resisters

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  On the 2nd of February 1543, Ruy López de Villalobos became the first Spaniard to reach Mindanao. He called it "Caesarea Caroli", after Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. The name did not stick. Spain moved on to colonize the Caraga region in the northeast and quickly encountered a Muslim presence that would resist Spanish pressure for more than three centuries.

  Zamboanga City became Spain's most heavily fortified settlement on the island. Its garrison was drawn from soldiers sent from Peru and Mexico, and it held firm even when, in 1662, soldiers were temporarily pulled to Manila to face a threatened invasion by the Chinese general Koxinga. The Sultanate of Ternate, in the Maluku Islands, formed a close alliance with Mindanao's sultanates, especially Maguindanao, sending regular military reinforcements to assist them against Spanish-controlled Manila.

  By the late 18th century, Spain had established settlements and forts in most of Mindanao, from Zamboanga City and Misamis Occidental in the northwest to Surigao and Agusan in the Caraga region to the east and Davao along the gulf coast. Yet battles with Muslim sultanates continued until the end of the 19th century. In 1521, Antonio Pigafetta, sailing with Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe, had written an account of reaching a place he recorded as "Maingdano". Three and a half centuries later, Spain's grip on Mindanao was still being contested. At the same time as the Philippine revolution against Spain was gaining momentum, the Republic of Zamboanga rose as a revolutionary state in Mindanao, before being absorbed by the arriving Americans.

• 4. American Deals and Displacements

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  In the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain sold the entire Philippine archipelago to the United States for $20 million. Mindanao came with it. The 1900 Treaty of Washington and the 1930 Convention Between the United States and Great Britain later clarified the borders between Mindanao and Borneo.

  In the early 1900s, the Commonwealth government encouraged citizens from Luzon and the Visayas to migrate south into Mindanao. The settlers who streamed into Soccsksargen were mostly Ilocanos, Cebuanos, and Ilonggos. Their arrival displaced the Blaan and Tboli tribes who had long lived in that territory.

  The most striking episode of this period was never implemented but shows how casually Mindanao was treated by outside powers. In 1910, then-United States ambassador to Denmark Maurice Francis Egan and several Danish friends floated a proposal: the United States would trade Mindanao and Palawan to Denmark in exchange for Greenland and the Danish West Indies, and Denmark could then hand Mindanao and Palawan to the German Empire in exchange for Northern Schleswig, which Germany controlled at the time. The idea dissolved when World War I erupted. Denmark eventually recovered Northern Schleswig after the German defeat in World War I, through the 1920 Schleswig plebiscites, without any island exchanges required.

• 5. War and Its Ruins

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  In April 1942, Japanese soldiers invaded key cities across Mindanao, and many towns were burned to the ground, most notably Davao City, Zamboanga City, Lanao, Cagayan de Oro, Iligan City, and Butuan. In the months of April and May 1942, Japanese forces defeated US troops commanded by William F. Sharp and Guy Fort in a battle that began at Malabang and ended near the town of Ganassi, Lanao.

  Davao City was among the first cities occupied and was immediately fortified as a bastion of the Japanese defense system across the Pacific. Gen. Douglas MacArthur's returning forces subjected it to constant bombing before the American Liberation Forces landed in Leyte in October 1944. Filipino soldiers and local guerrilla fighters kept fighting Japanese forces until the conclusion of the Battle of Mindanao. The postwar period that followed was, by contrast, relatively stable. Through the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, ethnic tensions on Mindanao were minimal, and secessionist movements had essentially no presence on the island.

• 6. Insurgency and Its Roots

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  The Jabidah massacre in 1968 is commonly cited as the major flashpoint that ignited the Moro insurgency. Ethnic tensions that followed led to the formation of secessionist movements, including the Muslim Independence Movement and the Bangsamoro Liberation Organization.

  Under Ferdinand Marcos, Christian settlers were encouraged to form a militia eventually called the Ilaga. Anecdotal evidence shows the Ilaga committed human rights abuses by targeting Moro and Lumad people and seizing additional territory. The animosity that followed between Moro and Christian communities was lasting. Marcos' declaration of Martial Law in 1972 prohibited political parties, which pushed armed groups to the foreground. The Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front became dominant forces. Ethnic conflicts escalated through incidents including the 1971 Manili massacre, the Pata Island massacre, and the Palimbang massacre.

  The Marcos years also silenced independent media. Press outlets across the country were shuttered, including television stations, national newspapers, weekly magazines, community newspapers, and radio stations in Mindanao. Journalists who continued working faced lethal consequences. Alex Orcullo of Mindanao Currents and Mindaweek, and Jacobo Amatong of the Mindanao Observer, were among the prominent journalists killed during the Marcos dictatorship.

  In March 2000, President Joseph Estrada declared an "All Out War" against the MILF following a series of terrorist attacks on government buildings, civilians, and foreigners. In December 2009, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo placed Maguindanao under martial law following the Maguindanao massacre. On the 9th of September 2013, an MNLF faction attempted to raise the flag of a self-proclaimed Bangsamoro Republik at Zamboanga City Hall in an armed incursion into parts of the city. In May 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law on the entire island group following the Marawi siege by the Maute terrorist group. More than 180,000 people were forced to evacuate Marawi City. The official death toll across the five-month conflict reached 1,109, most of them members of a militant alliance drawing fighters from radical factions of domestic Islamist groups, though residents believed civilian deaths were considerably higher.

• 7. The Living Island

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  Mindanao's economy accounts for 14% of the Philippines' gross domestic product, and agriculture, forestry, and fishing make up more than 40% of its market. The island is the country's largest supplier of major crops including pineapples and bananas. The Davao Region holds the fifth-biggest economy in the country and is the second-fastest-growing economy in the Philippines after the Cordillera Autonomous Region.

  Mount Apo, at 2,964 meters, is the highest mountain in the Philippines and stands west of Davao City alongside the inactive volcano Mount Talomo at 2,674 meters. The Philippine Deep, an ocean trench off the east-facing coast, reaches measured depths of 34,696 feet and is the third-deepest trench on Earth, after the Mariana Trench and the Tonga Trench. The Limunsudan Falls in Iligan City, with an approximate height of 800 feet, is the highest waterfall in the Philippines.

  Today, around 25.8 percent of Mindanao's household population classify themselves as Cebuano, with Bisaya/Binisaya at 18.4 percent, Hiligaynon/Ilonggo at 8.2 percent, Maguindanaon at 5.5 percent, and Maranao at 5.4 percent. Dozens of languages are spoken across the island, from Cebuano and Hiligaynon to Tausug, Maguindanaon, Maranao, Surigaonon, and the Spanish-derived Chavacano. The 2019 establishment of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, replacing the former Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, marked the latest institutional attempt to settle the island's long-running question of political belonging. In 2024, former President Rodrigo Duterte called for Mindanao to secede from the Philippines, a call that revived a movement initiated by congressman Pantaleon Alvarez, suggesting that the question is still far from resolved.