Aboriginal rights advocates are to stage a major rally in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taipei tomorrow, calling for township names in predominantly Aboriginal areas to reflect local cultural heritage, while saying that many township names have authoritarian or patronizing connotations.
Led by the Indigenous People’s Action Coalition of Taiwan, the rally comes on the heels of a controversial act of graffiti in Hualien County’s Kuangfu Township (光復) on Sunday, in which the traditional names of two local Aboriginal villages of the Amis people, Fata’an and Tafalong, were spray-painted in red across the local township office building, as well as the slogan “Kuangfu Township has not been reclaimed.”
The name Kuangfu, meaning “retrocession” in Mandarin, refers to the handover of Taiwan from Japan to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration at the end of World War II.
Critics have denounced the term as portraying KMT rule in a positive light, while Aboriginal advocates have decried it for ethnocentrism.
Amid police speculation over electoral antics, members of the Fa-Ta Alliance for Attack and Defense, an Amis youth political group with members from Fata’an and Tafalong, said they committed the act in protest against “symbols of colonial authoritarianism.”
Alliance member Nakao Eki Pacidal posted a video on Facebook on Sunday night, in which she said that the graffiti was a “gentle and harmless” means of highlighting the group’s demand for the township’s “ludicrous” current name to be changed to Fa-Ta Township, as well as calling for more political autonomy for Aboriginal villages.
“As a revolutionary organization, we will fight to the end, until we get the results that we aim for,” Nakao said, adding that the group chose to take action this month to protest against Taiwan Retrocession Day, a national holiday that falls on Oct. 25.
Nakao also denied allegations by Township Commissioner Hsieh Cheng-yuen (謝政淵) that the graffiti was related to the upcoming Nov. 29 elections.
“Do not smear our revolutionary ideals by saying that we have any relation to your dirty elections,” Nakao said.
The alliance first gained attention in August, when the group campaigned against a Hualien County Government proposal for visiting ethnic minority groups from China’s Guangxi Province to join performances at their village, Ilisin, during the most important yearly ritual of the Amis people.
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:
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