Regarding the blog post design, you must submit a 700 word post about the tenth blog
post you picked in the blog design.
Blog Post 10: Male privilege, patriarchy, and masculinity as drivers of IPV
In this blog post, I will use articles to illustrate how male privilege including patriarchy,
culture, and the negative masculine construct promotes male entitlement and violence against
women.
Articles:
Sikweyiya, Y., Addo-Lartey, A. A., Alangea, D. O., Dako-Gyeke, P., Chirwa, E. D., Coker
Appiah, D., … & Jewkes, R. (2020). Patriarchy and gender-inequitable attitudes as drivers
of intimate partner violence against women in the central region of Ghana. BMC public
health, 20(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08825-z
Mshweshwe, L. (2020). Understanding domestic violence: masculinity, culture, traditions.
Heliyon, 6(10), e05334. 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e05334
In Step 3, you will write your Global Media Paper, which will be 6-8 pages in length
and will include at least 5 relevant sources that you are referencing in your paper
(i.e., cite sources in-text and in the References page) to support your analysis.
The paper will be graded based on the Global Media Paper Rubric (please review
this rubric before submitting your paper to self-assess whether you have met the
expectations of the assignment).
Your paper’s central purpose and position statement on a contemporary global
media issue should be well-developed, readily apparent, clearly stated, and
consistently the focal point throughout the paper. Your paper should also
demonstrate critical analysis of a contemporary global mass communication,
compare/contrast the perspectives of relevant publics, and draw original and
thoughtful conclusions regarding the impact, opportunities, and implications of
new media developments related to the issue and society at large.
The Global Media Paper is to include the following components:
? Title page (following APA guidelines).
? Body of paper (6-8 pages) – including: 1) introduction of the global media
issue, your position statement, and brief background, 2) discussion of ideas
and analysis of the global media issue, relevant publics, and possible
alternatives. The body of the paper is to include 5 research sources that are
highly relevant, accurate, and reliable and add strength to the paper
(paraphrased and direct quotes with in-text citations in the body of the paper
following APA guidelines) that support your perspective and paper’s focus,
and 3) summary/conclusion.
? References page (i.e., bibliography with 5 sources that were used in the
paper following APA guidelines; not annotated).
Use the global media issue and the annotated bibliography in the paper
Important! All components (i.e., the entire paper) must follow APA guidelines
(e.g., style, formatting, citations, References). Resources to assist you with APA
guidelines and formatting the paper can be found below.
Annotation must be at least 150 words but no more than 500 words.
Each article will be explained in the document about the arguments made in the articles
rather than opinion based and must have its own individual citation.
The annotations must show understanding of the basic arguments and methods used
by the author.
Citations should be in APA format.
Six
•
Playing Soldier and
Going Native in
Subic Freeport’s
Jungle Tour
The Cold War era, and in particular the Vietnam War, generated
new militarized subjects and militarized indigenous knowledge
in the Philippines. As a prominent U.S. ally in the Asia-­Pacific
region, the newly independent Philippine nation positioned
itself as a long-­term partner in the fight against Communism
and renewed its commitment to host massive military bases,
most of which had been installed in the northern region of
Luzon during the U.S. colonial administration. This partnership
was mutually beneficial: the decades following World War II
were particularly troubled ones for the Philippine state, which
struggled to suppress a robust peasant movement fomented by
anemic land reform efforts. The U.S. military and political interests in stifling dangerously class-­based dissent formed the core
of the Cold War martial fraternity between the United States
and the Philippines, which showcased the Philippines as a
democratic and capitalist state in the region. Modernizing its
military bases in the Philippines as well as the Philippine military’s equipment and training, the U.S. military reinforced the
new Philippine garrison state’s goal to suppress political dissent
through force of arms. However, what the ensuing protracted
struggle made clear was that technological modernization did
not guarantee victory. As the previous chapter illustrated, the
trouble with Vietnam was that it refused to conform to the logic of technological dominance, thus assailing the hegemony of the U.S. military-­
industrial complex. Yet the Vietnam War and other instantiations of U.S.
military domination also demonstrated the U.S. military’s flexibility regarding the use, exploitation, and weaponization of indigenous knowledge and technologies for the purpose of war. During this period, the U.S.
military rediscovered and remilitarized indigenous people in the Philippines in order to study their jungle survival skills and produce soldiers
better able to withstand the guerrilla war in Vietnam. Recruiting men
from the indigenous Aeta group to share their expertise, the military administration at the Subic Bay Naval Base established a “jungle school”
within its reservation in order to efficiently transfer this training to its
troops. In other words, the U.S. military “went native” in order to become
better soldiers.
This chapter examines the Jungle Environment and Survival Training
(jest) tourist destination in the Subic Freeport after American occupation. In the early 1990s, after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Philippines, the former Subic Bay Naval Base facilities were converted into a
commercial and tourism center for foreign investors, international tourists, and cosmopolitan Filipinos. The public-­private partnership that currently manages the properties of the former military base were savvy in
marketing the jest camp as an ecotourism attraction, in line with emerging tourism trends. Today, the rainforest that had once been a staging
ground for soldier training now hosts jungle skills demonstrations, hikes,
and overnight camping trips for ecotourists. The same men who served
as jungle survival trainers for the American military—teaching American
soldiers how to build traps, fires, and weapons, and find food, water, and
shelter in hostile jungle territory in preparation for their Vietnam deployments—now work as guides for the jest camp and host domestic and
international tourists who frequent Subic Freeport’s myriad attractions.
The camp—a clearing in the jungled hills of Subic Freeport—has been
expanded and renovated but retains the basic layout of demonstration
spaces and surrounding audience seating from its military days. A rudimentary barracks now houses the Aeta guides. With its location and history, its contemporary incarnation as a tourist hub and its personnel, the
camp captures the convergent desires of being an ecotourist and playing
soldier within the militarized landscape of the Philippines.
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182
This almost seamless transition of militarized skills into the tourism
trade demonstrates how cultures of military occupation and war continue
to thrive even in the supposed absence of the U.S. military. It also emphasizes the ways in which indigenous peoples and practices are recruited
into the circuits of militarism and tourism, a development that has profound stakes in the growing militarization and policing of indigenous
people and places globally.1 Indeed, the fact that they are now tour guides
illuminates how Filipino peoples have been successfully incorporated as
participants in this New World Order that is not so different from the old.
Tourist experiences such as those offered at the jest camp are meant to
produce subjects who learn a curriculum and consume an experience that
draw on sanitized histories of U.S. military pacification and occupation,
masculine fantasies of Hollywood war narratives, romanticized ideas of
warrior indigeneity, and innate knowledge of the natural world. Also integral to the experience are neoliberal values that understand militarism
as necessary to the whole enterprise. While these lessons are not perfectly
transmitted or received, they are nonetheless derived from Vietnam-­era
U.S. military desires and crafted with contemporary investments in neoliberal governance and continuing U.S. military and political partnerships
at their core.
As tourist commodities, the experiences offered at the jest camp situate the freedom to travel and consume squarely within the confines of
a former military base, paralleling the ideological projects of Pearl Harbor. The jest experience illustrates the ideological maneuvers that connect the pleasures of tourism and playing soldier to a neoliberal economic order supported by a Philippine garrison state and the increasingly
flexible but no less efficient practices of U.S. militarism in Asia and the
Pacific. At the same time, even as the U.S. military has since given over
control of its bases to the Philippine state, the jest camp provides tangible evidence of the legacies of U.S.-­Philippine state collaborations, and
the Philippine state’s continuing partnerships with U.S. military desires
and activities in the region. The stakes are illustrated by the fact that long
after the U.S. military left the base, the jungle school that it established
still offers survival training to the Philippine National Police and U.S. soldiers alongside its menu of tourist packages. In this particular example
of the natural resources and landscapes of the global South stepping in
as the new frontier territory of sustainable tourism, what stands out are
Playing Soldier, Going Native
183
militarism’s profoundly entrenched yet responsive cultural and material
regimes, and tourism’s agility and adaptability to these regimes.
Pedagogies of Ecotourism: Neoliberal and Military Fantasies
“So you want to be a weekend Rambo?”
—Roberto Reyes, “Rainforest Trek in Subic,” Mabuhay Magazine (1993): 31
This invitation to be a “weekend Rambo” appeared in a Philippine Airlines in-­flight magazine feature article about the new attractions available
in the emerging tourist hub at the former Subic Bay Naval Base. Inviting
tourists to fulfill Hollywood-­inspired jungle survival fantasies, the travel
narrative focuses on the offerings at the newly opened jest camp. The
author describes a trek into one of the last virgin tropical rainforests in
the Philippines, using language and imagery designed to appeal to a developing consciousness about the value of the natural environment and
its allied consumer practices. His outline of the stripped-­down, basic survival techniques that are taught by indigenous guides is followed by an
account of overnight camping in virgin tropical rainforest—an experience of truly “roughing it” without food, shelter, or water. For him, the
jest camp is the perfect setting for the Rambo-­inclined thrill seeker: its
pristine jungle remains protected by the new Subic administration, and
its staff—indigenous men from nearby Aeta settlements—are old hands
at showing their skills to strangers.2
While invoking Rambo seems antithetical to ecotourism values—the
U.S. military is consistently cast as a destroyer of ecology—his primal
masculinity lends itself to a militarized fantasy of dominating and being at
home in raw nature. Even if the invitation to become a “weekend Rambo”
was nothing more than a rhetorical flourish or a marketing device, it is
no accident that ecotourism desires readily filter through the action-­hero
avatar of Sylvester Stallone’s military maverick. The Rambo conjured up
by this ecotourist narrative does not draw from the David Morrell antiwar
novel of a Vietnam veteran gone rogue, but from the filmic, muscular Stallone: a man reduced to his most basic and primitive survival skills who
can out-­native the natives of Vietnam and other global South regimes.3
Rambo’s rogue element—his story is entrenched in and critical of militarism and modernity—flavors ecotourism’s parallel desires to escape the
concrete jungle and reject the alienating trappings of civilization, but the
travel narrative does not make use of this critical potential. Rather than
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184
generating ideological contradictions, being a weekend Rambo resolves
the tensions between the perceived values of ecotourism and militarism.
Rambo—camouflaged by mud and dirt, using what he can find for weaponry and survival, and distilled to his shirtless, muscled body—is the ultimate image of masculine survival. He is the archetype of the modern ecotourist.4
However, lest the references to Rambo go too far, the author makes
clear that playing native at jest is a modern activity, not a rejection of
civilization or modernity or even militarism (as in the first Rambo film). It
is a temporary break from routine to rejuvenate modern masculinity.5 Indulging in a tour package of traditional indigenous hunting and cooking,
medicinal and survival techniques, and tramping around an unspoiled forest setting, the ecotourist also self-­consciously participates in an activity
associated with cosmopolitan travel, sustainable ecopolitics, and multicultural values. Moreover, that such an activity takes place within the
massive territorial expanse of a former military reservation a few hours
north of Manila—with its full array of tourist amenities such as hotels,
restaurants, and shopping—means that playing Rambo, while allowing
tourists to get in touch with primal and primitive masculinities, is not a
disavowal of modern life but rather an endorsement of the types of modern habits and ways of life brought about by neoliberal governance, which
itself is made possible by military-­secured stability and infrastructures.
The emergence of jest as a new tourist destination in the Philippines
also signaled the timely convergence between the ascendance of ecotourism as the latest travel trend and the acceleration of neoliberal economic
processes brought about by the conversion of the U.S. military bases.
One national Philippine newspaper headline describing how “former US
Marine instructors [were] now instructing tourists” called attention to
the new regime’s successful overhaul of the former military economy for
properly capitalist purposes.6 The “instruction” of the Aeta tour guides
was also a lesson for Filipino consumers—that Subic Freeport was open
for their business. The anxiety over the U.S. military’s exit and fate of
the base economies that had come to depend on them was thus allayed:
the tutelage of the state demonstrated that even marginalized indigenous
people could assume capitalist habits; that Filipinos once again had access
to their territory; and, more importantly, that the state—with the close
partnership of the private sector—was an authoritative and competent
Playing Soldier, Going Native
185
manager of the resources left behind by the U.S. military. Under the guise
of ecotourism, the Subic Freeport could serve overlapping desires and
constituencies: the spectacularized modes of tourism, global consumer
culture, the rise of sustainability discourse and politics, and environmentalism and “nature” writ large.
The theme of resource stewardship links both military logics and neoliberal values. Part of the effectiveness of U.S. colonial and military administration in the Philippines lay in the assumption that its modern and
efficient methods and institutions were superior to anything the natives
could produce. Projects administered by the U.S. government, such as
the military reservations, were understood to be under the best kind of
stewardship for the land. When the military prevented logging at Subic,
thereby protecting the rainforest, that too was seen as the judicious preservation of disappearing resources. Under the private administration of
the newly public and national resources at Subic, this adoption of the
familiar narrative of stewardship is essential to the perceived success of
Filipino modern management. The continuing preservation of the protected natural resources—in particular the forest and the Aeta peoples—
for new tourism regimes demonstrates not only that Philippine neoliberal
management can successfully govern this space, but that it also shares the
same values of sustainability and preservation as the previous military administration. Indeed, what makes the jest tourist experience so effective
is its unique, strategic, and opportune packaging of these values alongside
the commodification of indigenous traditions and American martial histories for the emerging ecotourism market.
Ecotourism—in the absence of the neoliberal state—is cast as the
manager and protector of the natural environment and, by extension, indigenous people. However, tourism at Subic hardly fulfills the ideals of
ecotourism: while it strategically deploys green rhetoric, it does not conform to the moralistic standards of tourism sustainability (which is not
itself unusual in the ecotourism market). The use of ecotourism idioms
illustrates the industry’s ability to co-­opt new trends. In the 1990s, the
modern tourist looked to the backward Third World as the site of his
“‘new style’ holiday,” his gaze encouraged by the restructuring policies
imposed on “developing countries” by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (imf).7 Rehabilitating its crisis-­ridden, violent
image, the Third World’s embrace of ecotourism was a way to appease
both First World environmentalism, the demands of transnational capital,
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186
and ever-­changing tourism trends. As the “passport to development,” the
phenomenal growth of tourism has contributed to the conversion of
the Third World from undesirable real estate to the new green space of
the tourism sublime.8 In its new role as the nature reserve of biological
(including human) and geological diversity, the Third World has become
the modern wilderness for the First World. Its proper management and
use, then, become concerns for the global citizen, blurring national and
local boundaries and sovereignties through the rule of a universalized
idea of the environment.9 This progressive, efficient management under
the new regimes of sustainability and environmentalism is a racialized
and gendered mode of control that casts the Third World as a resource in
need of regulation, and the tourist—armed with his (or her) environmental ethics—as its protector-­consumer, updating earlier phases of colonization that were similarly enacted through resource management and the
deprivation of rights.10 In this case, the articulation of ecotourism and
so-­called sustainable development ideologies represents a “complex alliance of transnational firms, national financial strategies, and local elites
which perpetuate discourses of the subaltern and natural other who is in
need of science, technology, productivity, narratives of participation and
restoration,” echoing U.S. military narratives of occupation and colonial
ideologies of civilizing.11 At jest, ecotourism as such operates through the
contradictory construction of the wilderness as a modern concept—the
consumption of Rambo-­esque indigenous fantasies in a preserved jungle
guarantees the tourist’s modernity and ethical superiority.
The desire to be a weekend Rambo, under these circumstances, manages the tensions between a lethal, primal masculinity and a modern,
expert authority. In the publicity materials produced by the Subic Freeport, as well as articles on tourism in print and on the Internet, potential
tourists were being educated as proper consumers of this distinctive experience in decidedly gendered and racialized terms. At jest, this shift
from soldier to tourist economies and cultures operated through a masculine register, with the figure of the indigenous man accommodating
flexible fantasies of primitivism from jungle warrior to champion of sustainability.12 Aeta indigenous masculinities translated a symbolic and material economy that had been defined by the tough masculinities of U.S.
soldiering to one defined by the management and preservation model authorized by a neoliberal Philippine state. The consistent presence of the
Aeta men—as military instructors, then as tourist guides—marks the graPlaying Soldier, Going Native
187
dations of masculine primitivism contained and managed by the promises
of ecotourism in this particular space.
The flexible uses of indigenous bodies are also part of the instruction
transmitted by the Aeta guides. The Philippine Airlines article was satisfied
with the Rambo-­as-­Stallone icon, but the fact that Aeta instructors teach
tourists how to connect with the wilderness through their primal selves
corresponds (even if only coincidentally) with the little-­remembered fact
of Rambo’s indigenous ancestry. That Rambo is part Navajo and embodies
primitive jungle masculinity is, by design, intelligible: Native people are
understood to have a natural connection to nature.13 His Special Forces
training, the experience of capture and captivity at the hands of North
Vietnamese forces, and his return to the jungle are details that mark
Rambo as the optimized composite of indigenous ability and modern military training.14 While accessing Rambo through Aeta instruction conflates
different indigenous people, it points to a long-­standing pattern that links
the ideologies underpinning ecotourism to militarism: the concurrent use
and dependence on indigenous people and knowledge while also desiring
their absence or annihilation.
“Using Indians to Catch Indians”
Playing Rambo makes absolute sense at Subic: Rambo epitomizes jest’s
ecotourist fantasies; furthermore, he gestures to the long history of U.S.
military history in this space. Rambo’s story goes beyond the truncated
narrative of a U.S. military base that was handed over to the Philippines:
it alludes to deeper and more sustained connections between the United
States and the tropical landscapes it has colonized. The fictional Rambo’s
defining Vietnam experience was enabled by the real military support
provided from Subic Bay Naval Base and other military bases in the Philippines, Okinawa, and Guam, which were all products of the systematic
militarization of the region. Rambo’s story also illuminates the role of the
Philippines as a central accomplice to this particular U.S. foreign policy in
a way that is not often made clear. The origins of the jest camp at Subic
Freeport—where tourists get to play Rambo—illuminate the fictional
Rambo’s very real Vietnam War encounters.
The story of Rambo’s real counterpart, however, began much earlier
than the U.S.-­Philippine partnership during the Vietnam War. The use of
indigenous people in combat has its historical roots in colonial military
strategy. In its initial military “pacification” campaigns of the Philippines
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188
in 1898, and in its subsequent colonial occupation and administration,
the United States was already exporting practices and patterns that had
become familiar in its nineteenth-­century subjugation of Native peoples
on the continent. Employing Native peoples against each other, the U.S.
military had a successful record of militarizing indigenous warriors.
Indian scouts were used by both British and American sides in the War
of 1812, and against Seminoles during the 1830s and 1840s. The “Indian
killer” himself, Andrew Jackson, relied on Cherokee allies to slaughter the
Creeks.15 By the century’s end, the Indian Wars and Indian Removal Act
policies had radically reduced the numbers and the territories of indigenous people in the United States.16
Not coincidentally, the weaponization of indigenous men also emerged
hand in hand with a rudimentary ethic of environmental preservation and
stewardship. Theodore Roosevelt, America’s proto-­Rambo, went native
to play cowboy and went to war and on safari to recuperate and rehabilitate an embattled American manhood via the primitive bodies of Africans
and indigenous peoples.17 Writing on the Indian Wars, Roosevelt defended
the necessity of war against “savages” to defend American civilization by
preserving the vast land reserves of the West as the necessary training
grounds for white supremacy: “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage
from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.”18 Roosevelt’s
“rude, fierce settler,” in eliminating savages, takes up the stewardship of
the land. It is no surprise that the era’s chief imperialist was himself one
of its most vocal conservationists, placing large tracts of Indian territory
under the administration of the U.S. government. Setting aside these
lands for the purposes of conservation and tourism encouraged a domestic reinvention of the traveler as naturalist and laid the groundwork for
the ecological argument as an alibi for removal and genocide.19
The twentieth century would see the personnel, weaponry, ideologies,
and institutions of Indian removal relocated to its Pacific territories with
the outbreak of the Spanish-­American War.20 Once the continental United
States had been secured, veterans of the American Indian Wars volunteered for service in the Spanish-­American War, then the Philippine-­
American War, bringing with them the techniques and ideologies they
had used against indigenous peoples in the United States.21 When the
Philippine-­American War broke out in 1898, racist epithets such as “nigger,” “gugu,” and “squaw” reflected how American soldiers navigated the
new racial terrains of the archipelago.22 As expected, the United States
Playing Soldier, Going Native
189
likened rebel Filipinos (in particular) to “bandits, ‘chifs,’ and ‘hostiles’ of a
tribe comparable to the Sioux and the Seminole,” ideologically facilitating
the genocide in the archipelago though familiar racist taxonomies.23 This
understanding of American racial warfare was shared by both parties: the
insurgent Philippine Republic government had promised to “repeat the
North American Indian warfare” should the United States not honor their
pledge to withdraw once the Spanish were routed.24
Military overreach, however, meant that the U.S. military had to recruit the help of “new Indians” in its pacification campaigns. The U.S.
war against Filipino insurgents was an uneven affair: the Philippines’ diverse geography and ethnic divisions, the localized governance of Filipino
people under Spanish colonial administration, existing enmity between
different Filipino ethnic groups, and the ongoing insurgency made “pacification” a largely ad hoc and multitactical project involving a range of
violence, the garrisoning of towns, public punishment, torture, threats,
and coercion to achieve its aims.25 In their military pacification of the
Philippines, U.S. forces were stymied by the tropical heat and humidity,
unfamiliar terrain, and disease.26 The U.S. military was also massively
outnumbered: to control nearly eight million Filipinos, it had an average
rifle strength of twenty-­six thousand men, inadequate for dealing with
the guerrilla warfare tactics of the insurgent Philippine Republic.27 Once
the Spanish had given over control of the Philippines to the United States,
military logistical dilemmas forced the Americans to resort to auxiliary
Filipino assistance to establish a military and colonial dominance on the
islands. In 1899, General Elwell Otis, a veteran of the American Indian
Wars, employed Filipino troops recruited from Luzon to police Manila
as “good Indians” while American soldiers fought elsewhere in the archipelago.28 In the middle of 1899, when the insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo switched to guerrilla warfare, the U.S. military returned to tried-­
and-­true methods from the continental Indian Wars: “us[ing] Indians to
catch Indians.”29 The most infamous of these native recruits were from
the town of Macabebe, in Pampanga Province—an ethnic group long
loyal to Spain and hostile to Tagalogs and the Philippine Republic.30 Their
success was attributed to their expertise in the local landscape and language: “The indigenous scouts were able to survive with minimal supplies
and rations, and they were able to transit the jungle quickly by using their
sharp bolo knives to cut trails, and their narrow boats, known as bancas,
to navigate the many streams and rivers.”31 This tactic of “irregular” warChapter Six
190
fare proved to be so successful that more native troops were organized,
trained, and used in combat against the Filipino rebels. By 1900, native
auxiliaries were crucial in garrisoning towns in central Luzon and Bicolandia and were routinely joining the U.S. Army into the mountains to
hunt for revolutionaries.32
The Native Scouts, as they were known, was initially a motley crew of
Filipinos from different ethnic and language groups, including some recruits from indigenous strongholds in the mountain regions of Luzon.33
Drawing mostly from central Luzon—in the Pampangan and Ilocano
speaking areas—and less from the potentially treacherous Tagalog-­
speaking population, the Native Scouts epitomized the U.S. strategy of
“fomenting and attempting to direct race war between specific Philippine
tribes.”34 As the violence of pacification and resistance escalated, the Native Scouts—eventually fifteen thousand of them—became a key source
of support for the U.S. Army.35 Because the insurrection continued after
the official surrender of Aguinaldo in 1901, and had turned to the use of
guerrilla tactics, the U.S. military switched to harsher methods, “going native” to respond to the tactics of rebel warfare. Ostensibly reduced to barbaric practices in order to battle unmanly and dishonorable savages, the
U.S. military razed the countryside, resulting in mass devastation, such
as the reduction of the island of Samar into a “howling wilderness” in
order to plant the seed of civilization.36 In the early years of the twentieth
century, the U.S. military found itself drawn into a long-­running pacification campaign stretching the length of the archipelago, but especially
in the southern Muslim region, where it lasted for the next decade. The
Native Scouts were so useful that they were sent—under the supervision
of American officers—to suppress the Muslim Moro rebels in the southern region of Mindanao when the U.S. military was otherwise occupied
with World War I.37 In concert with the deployment of Filipino auxiliaries
throughout the archipelago, the U.S. administration also encouraged the
self-­policing of indigenous peoples. In the early years of occupation, the
“non-­Christian tribes”—the new classification for indigenous Filipinos
in Luzon and Mindanao—were placed under the “protection” of the U.S.
colonial state, presumably against the incursions and race hatred of Christian Filipinos but mostly to protect the rich natural resources of their regions for colonial extraction.38 Local native scout troops were formed in
these regions, inviting “non-­Christian tribes” to take part in the project of
self-­policing and setting an early precedent for the fortification of a garriPlaying Soldier, Going Native
191
son state. Establishing the Mountain Province was part of an administrative production of indigenous people as protected subjects, which inculcated new loyalties to the American colonial administration, holding in
reserve the threat of an “upland” army against the possible insurrection of
“lowland” Filipinos.39 This early tutelage in self-­policing and U.S. military
authority and loyalty would continue throughout the colonial era.
The twentieth century reveals the initially inconsistent investment of
the U.S. military in developing the Philippines as a modern armed fortress, reflecting to some degree the ambivalence that it felt toward its
native troops: the specter of armed natives never sat easy. Insofar as the
militarization of an indigenous army was critical to the success of the empire, however, the installation of Filipinos as part of an American military occupational force was a tolerable intimacy.40 Once the Philippines
was firmly under American military and administrative control, Filipino
participation in self-­policing and self-­defense became more commonly
accepted, paralleling Filipino elites’ consent to and membership in colonial administration. U.S. military reforms in the early part of the century,
as well as the necessary growth of the military to accommodate the increasingly global reach of U.S. interests, led to the establis