They never returned home
But like the rest of the Filipino exhibits of people, animals and objects, Markod never returned home. Fuentes, in retelling the story of his grandfather, believes that there is a larger story behind the disappearance of Markod and his people after the exhibition ended.
Despite the carnival features of the villages, the cycle of life – birth, deaths, and courtships, including wed-dings, which outnumbered other social activities – went on in the different villages. As live human museum objects, the Filipino natives settled into their respective quarters on the reservation; they continued with their daily lives, including the rituals practiced by the Igorots where animals, including dogs, were sacrificed for the traditional occasion.
A few years later, when the exhibition was dismantled and gone, a similar sight was observed by William D. Boyce, an American journalist and publisher who had seen an Igorot village when he visited the Philippines in 1914.
He attended a dog market day in Baguio where he witnessed ‘About a thousand half-starved yelling curs [are] dragged up to the mountains to be sold to the dog-eating Igorots.’
Boyce continued, ‘As early as evening of Friday dogs begin to arrive in the dog section of the market and by Saturday night the section, which is purposely assigned to them by the municipal authorities, is crowded.
It was dog market day and early in the morning hundreds of Igorots have come down the trails to Baguio with the men clad in old coats and g-strings while their partners, the little brown women in homespun skirt and blouses, laden with baskets on their backs, held by a thong over the forehead, followed them quietly.
The women, according to the foreign observer, were coming only to sell a little produce. They are not the shoppers. Dog-buying is ‘man’s work,’ he observed. The American writer also said that the Igorots like their dogs thin. After the purchase, dogs are fattened with rice for two weeks before they are prepared for the big feast.
Formal lives
Like in the exhibition at the reservation where Americans curiously watched the ‘native’ Filipinos go about their lives, they watched how a dog was prepared and said: ‘… they take a long, sharp rattan and run it through the live dog. Then they tie the rattan to posts on both sides of the fire.
They swing the dog round and round for about fifteen minutes and, when he is half cooked, they cut him up in small pieces and eat everything but the feet and tail.
The tail is considered fit only for an enemy. When the meat is being served, they all sit around the fire, with their bolos upright between their toes, and tear the meat into smaller bits on the edge of the sharp knives, scorching it again before eating. It is anything but a pleasant sight.’
Of course, as with the indigenous Australians, many of the Filipino natives were forced to live a regimented life, and became the subject of countless ‘scientific studies’ by American scientists who found in them a rich source of laboratory specimens.
Movements by Filipinos were controlled, like the Aborigines in Australia. It was similar to the concentration policy of the American military government during the Filipino-American War where ‘thousands and thousands of people, mostly children, women, and old men, congregated in a very small place, without work nor means of living, many of them without a home, starving and dying from inanition, …’
Some of the human exhibits ended up in museums and laboratories long after the St. Louis Fair was finished. Fuentes viewed many of them preserved at the Smithsonian Institute. Brains in jars, skulls lining an exhibition cabinet, and hundreds of photographs of the ‘native’’ Filipinos measured and studied.
They became the subject of many articles in scientific journals that brought fame to the scientists and their institutions.
Despite his efforts, including numerous visits to museums and the Smithsonian Institute trying to track down the journey of his people, particularly his grandfather Markod, Marlon Fuentes did not find the answer to the many questions in his mind, but is still hopeful that one day his children will stumble on the destiny of their ancestors kept in musty cabinets of science laboratories and museums in America, and only then he will take a rest.
In 2004, the University of the Philippines published an extensive research undertaken by author Fermin. The author tracked down a few of the Bontok Igorot descendants, now living in the United States: Maria ‘Mia’ Christina Antero,
Apolinar Abeya, a descendant of Antero, and Takay, now a financial manager in the US federal government and who lives in Maryland; Antonio Betuangan, grandnephew of Pepe Betuangan and Tugamenda, now residing in San Francisco, who, like Marlon Fuentes, did considerable research to identify his descendants whom he saw in pictures at various museums and archives in the United States; and Yolanda Lacpac-Morita, a grand daughter of Buli-e Lauyan, who was in his early twenties when brought to the St. Louis as a human museum object. She is a cousin of Betuangan, who migrated to the United States in 1974 and worked as a registered nurse.
She lives in Tacoma, Washington. Author Fermin encountered thousands of articles published by people who were against the treatment of Filipinos as human museum objects. They were all about the degradation of Filipinos in the Philippine villages re re-creted for them to live in.
One interesting part of Fermin’s book is the subject of an apology, the way it haunted a succession of Australian Federal governments from the time the Aborigines were recognised as inhabitants of this country and included in the official national population census.
In 2000, 120 sixth-grade students of Wyndon Middle-School, which was built over the original site of the Igorot village in St. Louis, undertook a preparation for the commemoration of the centenary of the infamous event of the 1904 World Fair where Filipinos were paraded as ‘savages and barbarians’ and as human display.
The school has established its Igorot connection through the help of Rex Botengan, officer of the Igorot Organisation in California, who assisted some of the descendants to visit St. Louis officer of the Igorot Organisation in California, who assisted some of the descendants to visit St. Louis where a re-enactment of some events of the World Fair, including Igorot dances, were performed. Mia Apolinar Abeya was one of them.
During the occasion, she expressed her gratitude for being invited and said: ‘. . . I am deeply honoured to stand here before you on the very ground that my grandfather and grandmother stood upon ninety-six years ago. We are here once more to make the gongs reverberate in their name, in the name of the Igorots and in our children’s name.
For is it not the children who brought us back to this officer of the Igorot Organisation in California, who assisted some of the descendants to visit St. Louis where a re-enactment of some events of the World Fair, including Igorot dances, were performed.
Mia Apolinar Abeya was one of them. During the occasion, she expressed her gratitude for being invited and said: ‘. . . I am deeply honoured to stand here before you on the very ground that my grandfather and grandmother