“Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
-Rudyard Kipling
While I’ve heard the phrase “White Man’s Burden” in many contexts, I only recently learned that the full title of Rudyard Kipling infamous 1899 poem that brought the phrase into usage was actually “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.”
I’m still surprised the US role in the Philippines was never discussed by anyone we met with in Mindanao, although the Spanish colonial period was. The US was ostensibly liberating the Filipinos from Spanish rule during the Spanish American war but instead that war ended with the 1898 Treaty of Paris which ceded the Philippines to the US, apparently at the cost of 20 million dollars, and so Philippine rebels found themselves no longer under the rule of the Spanish but of the US. They were not the only ones who objected to this change in terms, many Americans, including many in government, objected as well. One of the most prominent critics was the celebrated American author, Mark Twain, who spoke eloquently against the annexation and occupation and joined the Anti-Imperialist League, which was formed in New England in response to the US role in the Philippines.
The resettlement policy that so drastically altered demographics and land ownership (and usage) that was described to us so often in Mindanao as a major cause of Moro and Lumad dispossession and the modern conflict was initiated by the Spanish Regalian doctrine was continued during the US occupation , as a policy of “Philippinization;” Thomas McKenna writes “Muslims Rulers and Rebels” how in 1917, Governor Frank Carpenter stated that the “problem of civilization” in Mindanao and Sulu could be addressed by the government direction of Christians from the Visayas and Luzon to settle in the “Mohammedan and pagan regions.” The colonization of Mindanao was undertaken as explicit policy by the new Philippine commonwealth after 1935, primarily as a way to provide a new frontier for “impoverished (and increasingly embittered)” tenant farmers.
It is interesting to frame the US policy in the Philippines and its role in the resettlement policies in Mindanao not just by the precedent of the Spanish Regalian doctrine but by situating them in the context of US domestic history, specifically the “manifest destiny” policies invoked first in the annexation of Texas and later Oregon in 1845 (the Mexican-American War followed). The westward expansion of the national frontier and resettling the continent “from sea to shining sea” was quite devastating for the indigenous occupants of the land. This expansion included aggressive settlement, questionable land purchases, the imposition of new land ownership systems, and of course acquisitions by force in the wars against the indigenous Native American tribes, all of which would sound very familiar to the indigenous Moro and Lumad of Mindanao. By the time the US won its war against the Spanish and began a new war with the newly “liberated” inhabitants of the Philippines, the “Indian” wars had only recently come to an ignominious end; in December of 1890 Sitting Bull was killed and two weeks later came the massacre at Wounded Knee. By 1897, when President McKinley took office, all but five of the current states of the US had been ratified and by 1898 US warships arrived at Manila Bay.
