The Ayta Magbukún are an Indigenous cultural community (ICC) spanning and belonging to several villages across the Bataan Peninsula of the Philippines. One of these villages today is located in Sitio Kanawan, Barangay Binaritan, Morong, Bataan, the site and community that serve as the focus of this thesis. Following the inauguration of the Philippines’ Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997 (IPRA), the recognition of Indigenous peoples (IPs) has incorporated Indigenous desires for self-determination within ongoing projects of state legitimation. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with community members conducted during June, July, and December of 2023, this thesis questions the nature of “indigeneity” as it operates in contemporary Kanawan. In mapping the Kanawan Aytas’ histories and place within the broader imagined Filipino identity, I analyze within a nested collaborative analysis (NCA) how challenges of the twenty-first century have spurred them to foster new collaborative networks of assistance, negotiation, and partnership. These emergent “collaborative mobilizations,” as I characterize them, have had shaping effects on the bureaucratic regimes governing ICCs and their land claims while inevitably transforming what it means to be Ayta Magbukún.