Aboriginal activists yesterday organized a “tour group” to visit the Tourism Bureau headquarters in Taipei to protest the agency’s proposal to encourage Chinese tourists attend Ilisin festivals and other traditional events held in Amis Aboriginal communities along the east coast.
“Okay, everyone, look over to your right. We have now arrived at the Tourism Bureau and you can see that the staff here are performing the act of working,” Hualien County resident Namoh Nofu, a member of the Pangcah Amis Defense Alliance who acted as the tour guide, told a group of activists acting as tourists.
“Now, look, there’s a lady on the other side of the office showing us how to make a telephone call,” he said.
Photo: Loa Iok-sin, Taipei Times
“Wow, so this is what the Tourism Bureau people wear at work,” one of the members of the “tour group” said.
“Is there free Wi-Fi here?” another one asked.
Wearing a large straw hat, sunglasses and high heels while carrying a bag of snacks and taking pictures, Lisin Tefi, an Amis from Makuta’ay Village in Hualien County, said that she was dressed like the tourists in their village during festivals.
“Some tourists come to our festivals with absolutely no respect for us. They wander around, littering, taking pictures, making comments aloud about our traditional outfits, asking villagers to pose for them,” Lisin said.
“Some even go as far as asking villagers to take off their traditional outfits and lend it to them for pictures,” she said.
“It’s really very upsetting when such things happen,” she said.
“We would like the staff at the Tourism Bureau to understand how we feel when this happens,” she added.
Several bureau employees seemed to have been bothered by the demonstration and tried to stop the activists by saying: “This is the place where we work, not a tourist attraction.”
“Our villages are places where we live, not tourist attractions either,” the activists said.
The activists were protesting a bureau project to mark the year as “the year of Aboriginal village tourism,” and came up with a list of Aboriginal festivals — including the Amis group’s Ilisin, which is held in every village throughout the summer — for tourists to select events they would like to attend.
“We didn’t come up with the proposal out of disrespect, rather, we planned it with all due respect,” said Lin Hsiu-hsia (林秀霞), director of the bureau’s Technical Division.
“We don’t want to see tourism in Aboriginal villages being controlled by large corporates from the outside,” she said.
“This is why we would like to help Aboriginal communities participate in the planning and actually benefit from tourism in their villages,” Lin Hsiu-hsia said.
On the other hand, Lin Pei-chun (林佩君), director of the bureau’s Planning and Research Division, said it was not the bureau that initiated the project.
“It was eight Aboriginal communities in Hualien and Taitung counties that asked the East Coast National Scenic Area Administration if it could help develop tourism in the villages, and the office referred it to us,” Lin Pei-chun said.
“The mode of tourism development in the eight consenting villages would be in place only in these eight villages; nowhere else,” she said.
The bureau later agreed that it would update its Web site within a week to accent respect for the cultures of the communities, instead of treating Aboriginal festivities purely as tourist events.
SECURITY: Starlink owner Elon Musk has taken pro-Beijing positions, and allowing pro-China companies to control Taiwan’s critical infrastructure is risky, a legislator said Starlink was reluctant to offer services in Taiwan because of the nation’s extremely high penetration rates in 4G and 5G services, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said yesterday. The ministry made the comments at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee, which reviewed amendments to Article 36 of the Telecommunications Management Act (電信管理法). Article 36 bans foreigners from holding more than 49 percent of shares in public telecommunications networks, while shares foreigners directly and indirectly hold are also capped at 60 percent of the total, unless specified otherwise by law. The amendments, sponsored by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ko
The eastern extension of the Taipei MRT Red Line could begin operations as early as late June, the Taipei Department of Rapid Transit Systems said yesterday. Taipei Rapid Transit Corp said it is considering offering one month of free rides on the new section to mark its opening. Construction progress on the 1.4km extension, which is to run from the current terminal Xiangshan Station to a new eastern terminal, Guangci/Fengtian Temple Station, was 90.6 percent complete by the end of last month, the department said in a report to the Taipei City Council's Transportation Committee. While construction began in October 2016 with an
NON-RED SUPPLY: Boosting the nation’s drone industry is becoming increasingly urgent as China’s UAV dominance could become an issue in a crisis, an analyst said Taiwan’s drone exports to Europe grew 41.7-fold from 2024 to last year, with demand from Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression the most likely driver of growth, a study showed. The Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) in a statement on Wednesday said it found that many of Taiwan’s uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) sales were from Poland and the Czech Republic. These countries likely transferred the drones to Ukraine to aid it in its fight against the Russian invasion that started in 2022, it said. Despite the gains, Taiwan is not the dominant drone exporter to these markets, ranking second and fourth
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
RSS