Phillipine Head-Hunters are more civilized than college students and have better memories than most professors, according to Chester Chard '37, graduate student engaged in research work on the East Indies at Peabody Museum.
"The deadliest tribes on the Archipelago, the Ifugao, have a very moral code and an extremely complicated system of justice," he explains. "Their medicine men, because they have no system of writing with which to preserve the rich mythology of the race, rely on their memories and can quote their father's teachings for weeks without running dry."
Chard visited the Philippines as one stop of the East Indies tour he made from 1937 to 1938 after graduating from college. Because he stayed on the island several months and found its peoples friendly he is continually amused to read of the "slaughter caused by bloodthirsty, ferocious looking pagans," there.
"Actually," he makes it clear, "most vicious mountain tribes are mild mannered and highly civilized. Far from being horrible in appearance and adorned with repellant objects, they look much like amiable South American Indians."
Reports printed in the Springfield News about the kidnapping of six soldiers in Pampana he believes, are probably inaccurate. For as he maintains, the only wild people there are mountain tribes, "Igorots"--wild dogs, and they don't abduct but behead captives.
"No, Americans in the Philippines needn't worry about head-hunters, but the Japanese stationed on Formosa are in potential danger," he claims.
"In the beginning of American governmental control the wild tribes took a fancy to the administration, otherwise the province would have remained unsubdued to this day."
But the Japanese have a different situation on their hands in Formosa. Apparently they mistreated the mountain people there who did not accept Nippon rule. So the Japanese had to content themselves with enclosing their mountain province in an electrically charged barbed wire fence to at least prevent hostile tribes from raiding the civilized lowlands.
"Since there are about 100,000 of these natives, you can see the results of a mass uprising should it ever take place," emphasizes the studying anthropologist.
And to refute further misconceptions he declares that Igorots, and other hunters collect heads for the same reason boys collect goal-posts--for the sport of it.