Abstract
This paper examines U.S. Army officers’ contributions to discourse on indigeneity between 1879 and 1891 in the American West, and the ways in which the concept informed their interactions with the Islamic Moro peoples during U.S. Major General Leonard Wood’s tenure as military governor of the Moro Province of the U.S.-Philippines. It argues that by maintaining military government in the Moro Province, Wood’s administration legitimated the notion that the Army was fit to conduct civilizing missions on behalf of the United States; a notion which was previously not accepted outside of the military community. By emphasizing their expertise in the nature and character of racially and religiously different peoples, officers solidified their credibility as the rightful tutors of America’s most “primitive” colonial wards. Furthermore, by extolling the necessity of settler colonialism in the region, and the danger of proximate indigenous people, the U.S. Army prolonged their martial government, and transformed the precedent of a militarized frontier into a trans-imperial constant. Through this paper I hope to establish a basis on which to center domestic concepts of indigeneity, and the military-political aspirations of U.S. Army officers in future explorations of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific world.