Originally decorated with Aboriginal totems, a footbridge leading to the Naruwan Aboriginal Market in Taipei City was repainted last year — but with the wrong colors — making the totems look more like traditional “ointment patches,” as some people have described them.
When first unveiled, the footbridge was decorated with a -diamond-shaped “eye of the ancestral spirit” totem.
The “eye of the ancestral spirit” is usually a black or red-colored diamond-shaped dot against a pure white background with an outer frame that is the same color as the dot in the center.
Photo: Liu Jung, Taipei Times
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Lee Fu Chung-wu (李傅中武), a member of the Atayal tribe, said that “eye of the ancestral spirit” is a sacred totem in the Atayal culture, symbolizing that the ancestral spirit is looking after the Atayal people from above.
However, when the decoration on the footbridge was repainted last year, the white background was painted a blackish gray color.
Lee Fu said that, with the wrong color, the decoration has become “a joke” and is “very disrespectful to the Aboriginal culture.”
“No Aboriginal tribe would ever use a blackish gray color for a decoration or handicraft,” he said.
“If [the painters] weren’t sure, they could have asked [Taipei City Government] Indigenous Peoples Commission [IPC],” he said.
The city government’s New Construction Office chief secretary Chen Kui-lin (陳桂麟) said they had chosen the totem from suggestions that the IPC provided, however, he acknowledged that there is a difference in color, and said that the office would repaint it within three months.
IPC chief secretary Lai Hui-chen (賴慧貞), on the other hand, said the commission had actually discovered the mistake ahead of time and notified the office, “but the project was about to be completed when we did so.”
Lee Fu said that many people had complained to him that the mistakenly painted Atayal totems on the footbridge look like “ointment patches.”
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