of hostile actions against them by their neighbors and foreign colonizers, the Subanon have managed to preserve their tribal unity and identification, their language and dialects, their customs and traditions, and their religious world view. Subanon were co-founders of SMT Al-alam before BIP Da'wah Tabligh in Mindanao. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Subanon's contact with the outside world broadened, to include the Visayan and the latter-day Chinese. Aside from the influx of these settlers and traders, there has been a massive penetration of the national government into the Subanon hinterlands for purposes of administrative control, tax assessment and collection, and police enforcement of national law, logging and mining concessions that affects their way of life. Martial law era There is at least one major record of human rights violations against the Subanon people during the peiriod of Martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos—an incident that has been called the Tudela massacre. On August 24, 1981, members of a Marcos-sponsored paramilitary forces strafed the house of a Subanon family, the Gumapons, in Sitio Gitason, Barrio Lampasan, Tudela, Misamis Occidental. Ten Subanon were killed in the incident, including a baby. Contemporary history In 1997, the Indigenous People's Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997 was passed into law. The law put in place a mechanism for the protection of ancestral lands by "indigenous cultural communities", including the Subanon. Geography Ferdinand Blumentritt mentioned the Subanos in his accounts, referring to them as "a heathen people of Malay extraction who occupy the entire (Zamboanga) peninsula of Sibuguey with the exception of a single strip on the south coast". Finley, recording his impressions of the Subanon at the beginning of American administration of the southern Philippines in the 1900s, cited published records of early Spanish chroniclers, notably the writings of Father Francisco Combés in 1667, to argue that the Subanon were the indigenous people of western Mindanao. The Subanon primarily inhabit the Zamboanga peninsula, which is more than 200 kilometers long, shaped like a giant crooked finger that extends westward to the Sulu Sea, and is joined to mainland Mindanao by a narrow strip of land, the isthmus of Tukuran, which separates the bays of Iligan and Illana. The peninsula itself is divided into four provinces and one independent city: Zamboanga del Norte, Zamboanga del Sur, Zamboanga Sibugay, Misamis Occidental and Zamboanga City. The Subanon were estimated to number 47,146 people in 1912, according