As The Heaven Witnessed It All: A Jeopardy of American Colonial Pacification in Sulu, 1906

Abstract

The Bud Dajo massacre has been a topic of interest for a few scholars and writers in the Philippines and in abroad. Yet, as is the case with non-Manila/Luzon histories, such events are usually non-existent in basic history textbooks. The dominant perception on Bud Dajo treats the event as a policy-receptor problem. This paper explores the points of resistance where the nuances of interaction of two different nationalities both participate in the processes of image-making, power dynamism, and forced cultural heterogeneity, thus, the gradual decimation of the recessive cultural entity’s worldview which all led to significant disarray. This research used both primary and secondary sources in which most of which were gathered from open access websites; improvisation of data sifting was meticulously applied to determine highly relevant newspapers to the topic concerned. The paper is generally divided into two clusters: first the narration of the event which encompasses three succeeding subheadings and the fourth and last as the analyses proper.