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This chapter profiles the political and economic contexts that fostered the expansion of the commercial logging industry and logging concessions in the Philippines in the 20th century. It addresses the role played by the American colonial government, including the involvement of Dean Worcester and Gifford Pinchot, and draws parallels between the US conservation movement and the Philippine environmental movement. It also tells the story of Nerilito Satur, one of dozens of forest guards deputized by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to safeguard local forests, and who were murdered for their work.

This chapter concerns the Baguio marketplace and American market ideology. American visitors to the marketplace sought to capture its hustle and bustle in photographs, postcards, and travel accounts. Some came to see the infamous trade in dogs, sold as consumable articles in Igorot ritual. Daniel Burnham had positioned the marketplace at one end of the central axis of the hill station, yet were one to follow the logic of U.S. imperial ideology, the marketplace stood at the very center of the colony. To some administrators, the marketplace was a site of liberation: it was the place where Philippine peoples could enjoy self-rule as they traded the fruits of their labor. Here, they could become the independent agents who might come to constitute citizens of a nascent Philippine republic. As this chapter shows, even as they celebrated the market as an incubator of individual liberty and nationhood, American imperialists judged Philippine people in part, by what they traded and what they consumed. They used representations of Igorots’ trade in dogs and Filipinos’ supposed trade in persons to entrench perceived differences among Philippine peoples, and they made these into new justifications for continued imperial rule and anything but liberty.