The Thao people’s last functional traditional canoes were sent back to their ancestral homeland yesterday after being picked up from a garbage collection parking lot.
Songwriter and Aboriginal rights advocate Nabu, a Bunun, lit cigarettes and sprinkled rice wine over the two canoes held at a parking lot of the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection in Neihu District (內湖), where they had been moved after police on Friday cleared out an Aboriginal protesters’ camp site on Ketagalan Boulevard on Friday.
Aboriginal demonstrators had camped along the road for more than three months demanding that newly announced demarcation guidelines for Aboriginal land be revised to include private land.
“I told the boats to bless whoever moved them here for doing a good job laying them down and not damaging them,” Nabu said, but added that police failed to uphold their promise to store the boats indoors.
They had been placed on Ketagalan Boulevard in a bid to stop the police from clearing the protesters’ camp.
“We feel very apologetic both to the boats and Thao, because we lost the battle, but we will continue to fight on,” he said.
Protesters will continue to occupy the National Taiwan University Hospital MRT station exit where they decamped following repeated clashes with police.
“They seem to be in good condition, but we will not be putting them in water until a sacrificial ceremony is hold, and then we will see if there are any problems,” said Chen Ming-ye (陳姳曄), a Thao Culture Promotion Society member who helped supervise the loading of the canoes for transport to the Thao’s ancestral homeland around Sun Moon Lake.
The two canoes are the only ones in the community’s possession that remain water-worthy, she said.
“The elders who crafted these canoes have already passed away, and there are not any young people who can make new ones,” she said, adding that the canoes are integral to a traditional ceremony where elders invite ancestral spirits to return to the community prior to the Lunar New Year celebrations.
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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