A group of Aborigines yesterday protested in front of the Ministry of Education (MOE) building in Taipei, calling for an end to what the protesters called colonial assimilation education and deploring the China-centered and Han-centered history perspective instilled by the Republic of China (ROC) government since its arrival in Taiwan in 1949.
The ministry’s recent announcement of adjustments to be made to the high-school history curriculum, and the way they were decided upon, have set off a furor among the political opposition parties and in education and culture circles.
More than a dozen Aboriginal awareness groups joined the protest yesterday, criticizing repression by “alien regimes, of which the ROC is the ongoing one,” and the continuing deprivation of Aboriginal people’s rights to their languages and lands.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
“We spoke Japanese, but we were not imperial subjects; we speak Mandarin, but we are not yan huang zisun (炎黃子孫, descendants of emperors Yan and Huang),” Taiwan Aboriginal Society chairman Tibusungu Vayayana (汪明輝) said.
Yan huang zisun is a phrase used by the Chinese government and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to refer to a common ancestry among people of Chinese ethnicity.
“The 14 official Aboriginal tribes and those that have not been adequately recognized in Taiwan are not ‘the 56th ethnic minority group of China,’” he said, responding to a claim made by a member of the pro-China Anti-Independence-Oriented-History Front last week.
“We belong to the world’s indigenous community,” he said. “Studies have suggested that Taiwan was the place of origin of all Austronesian-speaking people.”
Tibusungu called for an autonomous education system for the Aboriginal people to “return the children back to their home in their native land,” citing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ROC Constitution and the Indigenous Peoples Basic Act (原住民族基本法), which affirm or vow to protect cultural plurality and indigenous people’s autonomy.
Pangcah/Amis Guarding Union representative Daong said the “Han-centered textbooks” oversimplify and largely ignore the history of the nation’s Aborigines.
“The history textbook, for example, talks about Qing official Shen Bao-zhen’s (沈葆楨) policy of ‘Opening up the Mountains and Pacifying the Aborigines’ (開山撫番), but fails to mention the Kaliawan Incident in 1877” that resulted in the near extinction of the Kebalan and Sakizaya tribes, he said.
He brought up a list of rebellions and battles involving Aborigines fighting against invasive regimes that are “unfamiliar even to the ears of children of the tribes involved.”
Huang Chih-huei (黃智慧), chairwoman of the Millet Foundation, which aims to promote and preserve Aboriginal cultures, criticized the ministry’s claim that the curriculum has to abide by the Constitution.
“The government touted the ROC’s 103th birthday this year. How transient that is compared with the whole history of Taiwan. Not to mention that the history of the ROC Constitution, promulgated in 1946, is even shorter,” she said. “The Constitution is a product of history, not the other way around. It is just preposterous to say that history-writing has to follow the Constitution.”
Atayal priest Omi Wilang said they were told when they were young to be “proud Chinese” and tribes were forced to take up Chinese last names.
Saying that the adjusted curriculum is again inculcating the anachronistic notion of “a monolithic ‘Chineseness,’” he accused the ministry of degenerating into a “political hatchet man.”
Kao Ming-chi (高明智) of the Katripulr tribe, representing the Taiwan First Nations Party — the political party formed in 2012 for the rights of Aborigines, said that “the ROC government has problems understanding us even when we have long been speaking their language.”
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
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
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,