I Got My Dream Job and Ended Up Enabling Racism

Americans gone rogue, as Prentice puts it, have long been a part of the Philippines’ landscape, but Truman Hunt, an inveterate liar, a bigamist and a slave driver, seems nearly unparalleled as far as scoundrels go. In some sense, this slick-talking charlatan becomes a stand-in for America itself, or a certain version of America in its more opportun

When you are a westerner living on the East Coast, this is just the sort of folksy anecdote the city slickers expect you to tell. But I was the worst Montanan in history.

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

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

Ignoring the fact that they ate dog meat only under prescribed circumstances, Hunt insisted they slaughter dogs and eat them on a daily basis, which brought them to the brink of illness and despair. He split the group against their will and farmed them out to equally unscrupulous confederates across the country, moving them whimsically and forcing