It would be illegitimate to grant Aboriginal recognition to the nation’s Pingpu Aborigines, as they chose to be separated from other Aborigines throughout history, the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) said yesterday.
The council said in a statement released yesterday that the Pingpu do not meet the criteria to be officially recognized as Aborigines according to the Aboriginal Identity Act (原住民身分法), and that the Provincial Government of Taiwan did not make any mistakes in its call for Aborigines to register their identity in the 1950s and 1960s, “so, the Pingpu cannot legally be granted Aboriginal status.”
Article 2 of the act stipulates that only people who had household registration in Aboriginal regions before World War II, whose parents and grandparents were Aborigines or those who registered their Aboriginal identity in the 1950s and 1960s can be recognized as Aborigines.
PHOTO: CNA
However, many Pingpu argue that they never knew about the Aboriginal registration either because their families never received the notice, or because they didn’t consider themselves “mountain people” — the official term for “Aborigines” before 1994 — since they have always lived on flat land.
“In fact, throughout the course of history from the Qing Dynasty up until now, the Pingpu chose to live with the Han people, making them different from other Aborigines,” the council’s statement said. “If they want to become part of the family now, they should respect other Aborigines and not act like the ‘homeless beggar who kicked out the temple administrator.’”
The “homeless beggar” analogy is commonly used in Taiwanese to refer to a situation in which a person tries to get rid of and take the place of someone who once helped them.
“The Pingpu claim to be Aborigines, but they do not share the same historical legacy and lack interaction with Aborigines,” the statement said. “If the Pingpu are doing so in order to gain access to resources, we would like to ask a question: Did you, the Pingpu, stand with Aborigines when the Aborigines resisted Han domination?”
The statement said the CIP was created to serve all Aborigines, but not the Pingpu.
“We sympathize with the Pingpu for the loss of their languages and culture, and believe that the government should do something to make up for the injustice that they suffered — but it’s not the CIP’s responsibility,” the statement said.
The CIP released the statement in response to a demonstration outside the council headquarters in Taipei by around 100 activists seeking Pingpu Aboriginal status.
The Pingpu are made up of various Aboriginal tribes who used to inhabit flat regions across the country.
The Pingpu “disappeared” as they were culturally assimilated by intense interaction and intermarriage with Han migrants from China over the past 400 years.
In recent decades, Pingpu activists launched a campaign to restore their tribal identity and gain government recognition of their Aboriginal status.
Tuan Hung-kun (段洪坤), convener of the Tainan County Alliance of Siraya Communities, was upset by the council’s statement.
“I wonder how they would feel and what they would say if, 10 years from now, some of the Aboriginal tribes lost their culture because they had too much interaction with non-Aborigines,” Tuan said.
Taiwan Aboriginal Society chairman Wang Ming-hui (汪明輝) of the Tsou tribe said that a government agency should not make such statements.
“Some Pingpu may have worked with the Han during history, but they were forced to do so — they didn’t have a choice,” Wang said. “The CIP should be more open-minded about what the Pingpu want.”
“I am an [officially recognized] Aborigine and I welcome my Pingpu brothers and sisters to join us,” he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the