Summit focuses on resources

Vice President Annette Lu shakes hands with attendants of the 2008 World Summit of Indigenous Cultures held at the Taipei County Government Center in Banciao yesterday. PHOTO: CNA

Although indigenous peoples around the world usually have their own traditional laws regarding the use of natural resources, they are often victims of overdevelopment caused by outsiders, speakers at the 2008 World Summit of Indigenous Cultures said yesterday.

Organized the Taiwan Indigenous Cultural Enterprise Development Association, the Taipei County Government and the Democratic Pacific Union, the summit began on Saturday in Taipei and will close today.

Indigenous researchers, indigenous rights activists and members of indigenous communities around the world were invited to participate in the summit, with ecological issues the focus of yesterday’s discussion.

“[Taiwan’s] Aborigines know the concepts of ecological conservation and sustainable development very well,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Kung Wen-chi (孔文吉) of the Atayal tribe told the audience during his keynote speech. “They only take what they need and would never exploit [natural resources].”

Kung the Tao people living on Lanyu (蘭嶼) as an example.

“Flying fish are an important source [of protein] for the Taos, but they would only sail out in small handmade wooden boat during a designated flying fish season to catch what they would need for their flying fish harvest festival and the coming year,” he said.

However, the number of flying fish has sharply declined in recent years because non-Aborigines from Pingtung County often sail into the waters surrounding Lanyu in large motorized fishing boats.

Similar have occurred in other parts of the world.

Mark Cherrington, editor of Cultural Survival Quarterly magazine, told the audience the story of an indigenous tribe in Panama being forced to relocate because a hydraulic dam was to be constructed on their territory without their consent.

“[The construction company] asked them to sign a contract written in Spanish, which they could not understand,” Cherrington said. “Some were even told that the contract was for a study of their land.”

“This is typical of what indigenous peoples around the world face,” he said.

Other said that mainstream society should learn from the indigenous.

“The Rukai [Aborigines] told me that they were never short of animals to hunt over the past several hundreds of years,” said Pei Jai-chyi (裴家騏), Institute of Wildlife Conservation professor at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology.

After studying the Rukai hunting rules, Pei discovered that the Rukais only hunt animals with high reproductive rates, only hunt in well-defined scattered hunting grounds, and that hunting activities are only allowed during the winter months.

Although the rules were made according to the ancient Rukai belief system and not any scientific study, “the way that hunting and non-hunting territories were designated actually matched the latest theories in wildlife conservation,” Pei said.

“It’s amazing that what we finally realized after so many scientific studies is something that the Rukais already knew around 700 to 800 years ago,” he said.