Naked Headhunters and Dogeaters: The Filipino Freakshow of Coney Island
“The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and The Man Who Pulled Off The Spectacle of The Century” by Claire Prentice is the story of 51 Igorots shipped to the US by impresario Truman K. Hunt to perform “native rituals” in a mini-tribal village at an amusement park in Coney Island. These included wearing their traditional costumes in the cold, slaughtering and eating dogs bought from the local pound, chanting and dancing, weaving, and fighting mock battles recreating their headhunting practices. Hunt, a brilliant promoter, promised the American public nearly-nude headhunting dogeaters, and he delivered. Prentice doesn’t use “sideshow” or “freakshow” to describe the proceedings, but that’s what it was.
The Igorots, jarringly referred to as “Igorrotes”, complained about their diet: they ate dog on special occasions, not every single day. But Hunt had promised the spectators savage, spear-wielding dogeaters. News reports of missing dogs were orchestrated to stoke public interest. The crowd also watched in horrified fascination as they beat a chicken to death. Remember that movies were a new invention at the time, and there was no TV yet.
Read our column at InterAksyon.com.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 8th, 2014 at 12:35
I only read your article on this earlier as did a friend of mine, and we got into a bit of an interesting discussion on the same, particularly around the question posed: “For Filipino readers, the question that hovers over this book from the very first page is: Why don’t we know about this?”
Perhaps it’s not so much that historians are the only ones fully amiss here (after all, someone did document the events regardless), but rather the educational system. Or a mix therein.
Dissemination and discussion with the bounds of our education system may be the culprit, and considering that our current system is largely influenced by the Americans, it might not be surprising that these matters were most likely suppressed. As you said, “Before Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, there was the American adventure in the Philippines.” And as they say, history is written by the victors.
Of course, my friend also noted, “I think another important reason is the dominant nationalist historiography that has been founded by Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino. With its almost obsessive focus on the ‘unfinished revolution’ of 1898, moments that unfolded in the diaspora have been understudied, if at all.”
It’s a POV that I never really noticed but does seem to ring true. Our traditional history books do seem to have this obsession with 1898 and the Spaniards, and how much have we really been allowed to study the dark side of the American occupation? Or even Fil-American history for that matter? I think few people realize that this relationship didn’t start in the 1900s – Filipinos were settling in the Americas as far back as the 1500s-1700s across what are now California and Louisiana.
And yet again, these things rarely get highlighted in our traditional history classes.
Hopefully, an overhaul of our history curricula is forthcoming.