In this photograph taken by American photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942), are eight Negrito young men at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis with a statue of King Louis XIV in the background. As they are in an open field, this photograph could have been taken during the “Anthropology Day” games held by the fair committee to show off the indigenous Filipinos’ skills in various sports games to the public. In this case, the boys would have shown off their skills with a bow and arrow, whose straps can be seen over their shoulders.

In this photograph from the Missouri Historical Society archive, titled by author Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942) as “As God made them… Pierre Chouteau”, it depicts 4 Bontoc Igorot (an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous Filipinos from the Cordillera region of the Philippines) boys as they dance what is most likely the Ballangbang, a cultural dance performed during mass celebrations and social gatherings.

Pictured in the first photograph is pictured the champorado, a Filipino dessert dish made of sticky rice and tablea (tablets of ground roasted cocoa beans) and topped with milk and sugar. The champorado is often served for breakfast or merienda (afternoon tea), and is served alongside dried fish as a salty balance to the dessert’s sweetness.

My chosen object is a woven shawl that began from a failure. The weft here, composed of baby alpaca wool, was originally the warp of another weaving. My good friend picked up this soft brown wool in Bolivia some years ago. She has since passed.

In 1904, the United States introduced Filipino culture to the American public with their Philippine Exposition at the St. Louis World’s Fair, a faux recreation of indigenous Filipino villages located at the outskirts of the exhibition fairgrounds and populated with various indigenous Filipino tribes from across its various islands, the most well-known being of the Ifugao people of northern Luzon, referred to at the time as Igorots (Taft, 1904, 29-30).