Bud Dajo 1906: The Global History of an American Atrocity

In March of 1906, American military forces launched an assault on Bud Dajo, an extinct volcano on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines, and killed hundreds of local Tausug people, known as Moros, who had entrenched themselves. The massacre of Bud Dajo rightfully belongs in the same category of historical atrocities as Wounded Knee in 1890 or the better-known My Lai Massacre of 1968. In terms of the numbers of victims, it is arguably the biggest massacre in American history. Yet while Wounded Knee and My Lai have become emblematic of American atrocities during the Indian Wars and Vietnam War, respectively, Bud Dajo has been largely forgotten. At most, it is given a footnote in accounts of the American occupation of the Philippines. This paper argues that Bud Dajo constitutes the nodal point in what may be described as the ‘blood meridian’ that links Wounded Knee and My Lai. But it is also the point at which a distinctly American tradition of racial- and settler-violence intersected with colonial warfare as practised by the major European imperialist powers. In order to reconstruct the ‘deep’ history of Bud Dajo, this paper accordingly situates the events of 1906 within a global comparative framework, revealing the trans-imperial circulation and transfer of knowledge and expertise regarding colonial violence and warfare. Bud Dajo was not merely an American atrocity, and by examining a single massacre within a comparative global framework this paper encourages us to think about violence and imperialism within new geographical, chronological and analytical registers.