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In 1904, two years after America’s victory in the Philippine-American War, the United States government tried to put the best face on its colonization of the archipelago of more than 7,000 islands. Thirteen hundred Filipinos from a dozen tribes were put on display at the St. Louis Exposition, in replicas of their home villages,

The two men could not have been more different. Hunt was a charming risk-taker, and came to regard the tribespeople as a commodity. Schneidewind, who had been married to a Philippine woman who died giving birth to their first son, treated “his” tribespeople like family. He invited them to his home to meet his son and to eat dinner with them.

What happened next was alarmingly reminiscent of Truman Hunt’s tour. According to American newspaper reports, in the winter of 1913 a group of starving Igorrotes was found wandering the streets of Ghent, Belgium. The group’s interpreters, Ellis Tongai and James Amok, wrote to President Woodrow Wilson begging for his assistance. In their letter, the

Under their agreement with Truman, along with their monthly wages of fifteen dollars each, they could keep all the money they raised from selling souvenirs — rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, textiles, spears, and shields.

Both Hunt and Schneidewind had brought their Igorrote groups into America with permission from the U.S. government, an entity with a clear incentive to portray the people of the Philippines as primitive. How could such a society govern itself if it was filled with citizens as “backwards” as the Igorrotes? If it was true that Hunt was mistreating th

In the winter of 1906, Schneidewind returned to the Philippines to collect another Igorrote group and embarked on a second tour of America. A third U.S. tour followed in 1908.