A pilot community-based museum for Mindanao will soon rise in the culture-rich municipality of Lake Sebu in South Cotabato.
Lake Sebu Mayor Remie Unggol and National Museum of the Philippines (NMP) Director-General Jeremy Barns signed a deed of usufruct on Oct. 5, during the Dayaw Festival 2024, allowing the NMP to establish a regional component museum and satellite office at the Local Government Unit (LGU)-owned Tourism Lodge.
According to the agreement, the LGU of Lake Sebu grants the usufructuary, the NMP, the legal rights to “repair, rehabilitate, restore, [and] convert appropriately the existing structures and grounds of the Tourism Lodge.”
The NMP shall also “develop and provide necessary personnel, exhibitions, facilities, supplies, and equipment relative to the management and operations of the regional component museum and satellite office and establish the capacity for providing to [an] appropriate extent and scale the mandated museum services of the usufructuary and the general public.”
“It is really an honor for us to do this in front of all the delegates of indigenous peoples groups from all over the country because our indigenous museum in Lake Sebu is really supposed to be tailored fit to a community like this, tailored to be a community-based museum,” Barns said.
Arvin Manuel Villalon, NMP Director for Mindanao, shared that the idea for the establishment of a museum at the Tourism Lodge in Lake Sebu emerged during the Helobung Festival here in May, following a discussion on the need to preserve the Tboli people’s tools, arts, and handicrafts.
Villalon said NMP hopes to open the museum in Lake Sebu in 2025.
Lake Sebu is known as “Home of the Living Treasures” for being the municipality with the most number of Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan (GAMABA) awardees in the Philippines. (𝘋𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘭𝘰 𝘋𝘰𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘴/𝘗𝘐𝘈 𝘙𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘯 12)
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