National Arbor Day should be replaced with a holiday to commemorate ancestral spirits, Aboriginal activists yesterday said in Taipei, citing mismanagement of national forests as part of renewed calls for the return of ancestral lands.
Activists from the Taiwan Indigenous Conserved Territories Union rallied on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building, singing several traditional songs before speaking out against what they said was a “colonial” holiday.
“Planting trees has other content injected into it because ‘planting’ and ‘colonialism’ are two sides of the same coin,” said Kavas, a member of the Bunun community and a Protestant pastor, playing on the identical pronunciation and similar appearance of the first Chinese characters in the phrase “plant trees” (植樹) and the word “colonial” (殖民).
He called for the end of what he called “the colonialist policy of the Republic of China [ROC] toward Aborigines.”
“The ROC brought Chinese ideas over and said that we should plant trees, but in reality that’s just damaging the environment. God has already planted lots of plants — we do not need to plant anything more,” Kavas said, calling for a revival of traditional living practices.
National Taitung University professor of biology Liu Chiung-hsi said Arbor Day has its origins in commemorating ROC founder father Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), who had advocated planting forests across northern China.
While Arbor Day, which the nation marks today, originally coincided with the Tomb Sweeping Festival, it was later moved to the March 12 anniversary of Sun’s death, he said.
Taiwan should observe the International Day of Forests on March 31 instead, Liu said.
The protesters also complained that the Forestry Bureau disrespects traditional Aboriginal cultural practices because it bars Aborigines from gathering traditional building material from Taiwan’s forests.
While the restriction might make sense for others in the nation, Aborigines have traditionally relied on the forests for sustenance and only take what they need, the protesters said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS