Activists yesterday panned the Presidential Office over its recent response to a petition from Pingpu Aborigines for official recognition, saying its reply was contradictory.
“I was shocked by the response,” Lin Sheng-yi (林勝義), a descendant of the Pingpu Ketagalan tribe, told the Taipei Times via telephone. “Both President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and [Council of Indigenous Peoples Minister] Sun Ta-chuan [孫大川] received high degrees from abroad; I don’t know why they have so little understanding of human rights.”
Responding to a petition submitted by several Pingpu Aboriginal rights groups after a demonstration last month, the Presidential Office said in a written statement addressed to Lin that it fully supported the Pingpu “in the area of culture and history,” but chose to leave the ethnic recognition issue to one side because it is “very complicated and needs to be dealt with very carefully.”
The Pingpu are an indigenous people who once inhabited most of the plains across the country. Many lost their culture and language over time as a result of their close interaction with Han Chinese immigrants from China.
Most also forfeited official recognition when they failed to “register” their ethnic identity with the government in the 1960s because of administrative failings.
“We Pingpu are an indigenous people, and that is a fact that was recorded by the Spanish, the Dutch, the Qing Chinese and the Japanese, who all ruled over Taiwan,” Lin said. “We’re Aborigines, we’re born with that identity. I don’t know why it’s a complicated issue that needs to be dealt with very carefully.”
“How do you administratively decide someone’s ethnicity?” he asked.
Another Pingpu activist, Jason Pan (潘紀揚), of the Pazeh Tribe, echoed Lin’s ideas.
“The government had no problem recognizing the ethnic identities of other Aborigines, of Tibetans, Mongolians and Hakka — but when it comes to Pingpu Aborigines, it becomes a complicated issue that needs to be further researched, and that requires social consensus,” Pan said. “If we Pingpu do not fight for our own rights, we will eventually become culturally extinct.”
Lin said that the Presidential Office called them “Pingpu” in the letter and admitted that they had their own culture and history, “so how can you say that these people do not exist?”
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