On Thursday, the government recognized two more Aboriginal communities, bringing the official number to 16, almost double the nine “mountain Aborigine” peoples that were registered by the Japanese colonial administration and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government after it took over Taiwan.
Since the Council of Aboriginal Affairs was established in December 1996 — and renamed the Council of Indigenous Peoples in March 2002 — Aborigines have seen some progress in terms of political recognition and rights, but much remains to be done.
Most of those gains came under the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, which recognized five communities: the Thao in 2001, the Kavalan in 2002, the Truku in 2004, the Sakizaya in 2007 and the Sediq in April 2008.
Six years later, two very small groups, the Kanakanavu (卡那卡那富) and Hla’alua (拉阿魯哇), in Greater Kaohsiung have been acknowledged as being distinct from the Tsou, under whom they were formerly grouped. The Kanakanavu number about 600 and Hla’alua number about 500.
While the Kanakanavu have gained recognition, they are struggling to keep their language alive. There are only about 10 speakers of Kanakanavu left, and linguists at National Taiwan University and elsewhere are racing against time to document and preserve the language, since the speakers range in age from 60 to 80.
However, preserving their languages is not the only problem faced by the Aborigines, or yuan chu min (original inhabitants, 原住民) as the government finally admitted in 1994.
Hard-fought gains that under the Local Government Act (地方制度法) gave designated Aboriginal townships special rights, including direct funding from the central government, budgetary independence and the right to elect their own mayors and representative councils have been undermined by the mergers and upgrades of Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung counties that saw them turned into special municipalities and their townships become municipal districts, whose heads are appointed by the municipalities’ mayors and decision-making rests in the hands of the city councils.
While the Local Government Act was amended to allow Aboriginal residents in such districts to elect district chiefs and representative councils, critics such as the Association for Taiwan Indigenous Peoples’ Policies (ATIPP) say Aborigines have lost power, since they no longer have budgetary autonomy and rely on funding from municipal governments and city councils.
The ATIPP and other Aboriginal activists say momentum is moving backwards, not forward toward the autonomy that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) promised to deliver in both election campaigns.
While the government is happy to use Aborigines, their music and cultures to promote Taiwan — remember the Tourism Bureau’s “Naruwan — Welcome to Taiwan” advertisements for Visit Taiwan Year 2004 — Ma’s government has joined hands with Beijing in promoting the “people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are all ethnic Chinese” myth.
That has only made it harder for Aborigines battling to have their place in Taiwan’s history recognized by the Ministry of Education’s already Han-centric system. That was the focus of a protest in February in front of the Ministry of Education in Taipei, where a representative of the Pangcah/Amis Guarding Union said that history textbooks teach the Qing Dynasty’s Shen Bao-zhen (沈葆楨) and his policy of “Opening up the Mountains and Pacifying the Aborigines” (開山撫番), but do not teach about the Kaliawan Incident, when the Sakizaya battled the Han Chinese who were invading their lands and were almost wiped out.
Taiwan’s Aborigines still have a long way to go before their contribution and importance to this nation is fully recognized. Carting visitors such as China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) to Wulai (烏來) to Atayals for some photo ops, as also happened on Thursday, does not count.
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