The Philippine reservation at the exposition cost $1.1 million to create and operate. Similarly, members of the Southeast Alaskan Tlingit tribe accompanied fourteen totem poles, two Native houses, and a canoe displayed at the Alaska Exhibit. Mary Benson, a noted Pomo basket weaver whose work is curated at the Smithsonian Institution and National Museum of the American Indian, attended to demonstrate her basket making skills which are described as astounding. Athletic events such as a basketball tournament were held to demonstrate the inferiority of American Indigenous peoples while simultaneously demonstrating the success of the Indian Boarding Schools and other assimilation programs. These efforts were upended with the Fort Shaw Indian School girls basketball team who were declared "World Champions" after beating every male and female team who faced them in these denominational games. Organizers choreographed ethnographic displays, having customs which marked special occasions restaged day after day. Some of the people to be exhibited died en route or at the fair; bodies were immediately removed, and funeral rites had to be conducted without the bodies, in front of an oblivious public audience of fair attendees. It has been argued that the "overriding purpose of the fair really centered on an effort to promote America's new role as an overseas imperial power", and that "While the juxtaposition of "modern" and "primitive" buttressed assumptions of racial superiority, representations of Native American and Filipino life created an impression of continuity between westward expansion across the continent and the new overseas empire." Racializing concepts and epithets used domestically were extended to the people of the overseas territories. Ota Benga, a Congolese Pygmy, was featured at the fair. Later he was given the run of the grounds at the Bronx Zoo in New York, then featured in an exhibit on evolution alongside an orangutan in 1906, but public protest ended that. In contrast, the Japan pavilion advanced the idea of a modern yet exotic culture unfamiliar to the turn-of-the-century Western world, much as it had during the earlier Chicago World's Fair. The Japanese government spent lavishly: $400,000, plus $50,000 from the Japanese colonial government of Formosa, with an additional $250,000 coming from Japanese commercial interests and regional governments. A 150,000 square foot garden, set on the hillside south of the Machinery Hall and Engine House, featured a replica of Kyoto's famous Kinkakuji, showing Japan's ancient sophistication, and a Formosa Mansion and Tea House, showing her modern colonial efforts.