On 228 Memorial Day yesterday, several Aboriginal groups sent up smoke signals to raise awareness of the nation’s history and development and to bring attention to “Aboriginal transitional justice.”
On Feb. 28, “the memorial that society uses to promote freedom from the grip of confrontations between different ethnic groups and classes and to attain truth and reconciliation,” Aborigines are not to be excluded from the nation’s history, the Smoke Signals League (狼煙行動聯盟) said in a statement.
“Whose country? Whose development?” the statement said.
The league was established in 2007 to improve communication between Aboriginal tribes and to offer mutual help on various fronts. It has organized nationwide smoke signal campaigns on 228 Memorial Day for several years.
“Aboriginal rights have been repressed and violated by the government in at least three major areas in the past year: history, culture and land,” the league said.
With regard to history, the government has re-emphasized the Chinese and Han-centered historical perspective with its adjustments to the history curriculum, the league said.
In culture, it has attempted to incriminate Aborigines found in the possession of shotguns, a practice that has long been vindicated by the legislative body as a preservation of traditions and the Taitung County Government has forced the relocation of Katripulr tombs, the leagues said.
On the issue of land, at least five disputes over land development either sprung up or continued last year, including Taitung’s Hongyeh Hot Spring Area and the build-operate-transfer project at Sun Moon Lake, to which the Thao objected, the league said, adding that the Bunun people in Hongyeh Village (紅葉) and the Thao people in Nantou County joined the cause and sent up smoke signals as a form of protest.
Independent Tainan City Councilor Kumu Hacyo (曾秀娟), accompanied by a group of Aborigines, sent up smoke in front of a statue of Koxinga in Tainan, calling for the removal of the statue of the person who “killed indigenous people and deprived them of their land” and the termination of the Koxinga Cultural Festival sponsored by the city.
The group said that just as the statues of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Republic of China (ROC) founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), figures symbolizing a colonial regime, are to be torn down, statues of “invader Koxinga” should be removed, too.
“Koxinga is by no means our hero; he was an invader. What Koxinga means to Aborigines historically parallels what Chiang Kai-shek means to Taiwanese,” Hacyo said.
Meanwhile, the campaigners in Taipei rallied against changes to school curriculum guidelines that they said rob Aboriginal children of the opportunity to learn about their own histories and cultures.
“Studies have shown that there was human activity on the island thousands of years ago. How is that all part of Chinese history?” Taiwan Aboriginal Society chairman Tibusungu Vayayana said. “Chinese [ROC] history is part of Taiwan’s history, not the other way around. All the ethnic groups living here have a place and say in this country’s history,” he added.
Savungaz Valincinan, one of the organizers of the Taipei event, said that the smoke was a traditional way to communicate with ancestral spirits and that the league aimed to raise consciousness about the survival of Aboriginal tribes and their cultures.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not