Taiwan’s first national-level museum of Aborigines is to be built next to Chengching Lake (澄清湖) in Kaohsiung’s Niaosong District (鳥松). After the announcement on July 6 last year that authorities would repeat the process of choosing where to build the museum, eight local governments — New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Kaohsiung and Hsinchu, Miaoli, Pingtung, Yilan and Hualien counties — eagerly bid to host the museum, but now the matter has been settled.
The five main functions of museums — collection, research, exhibition, education and leisure — should be established right from the start in planning the national Aboriginal museum. Only after getting these basic functions right will the museum have a chance to thrive and engage in dialogue with first-class museums around the world.
There are already quite a few parks, cultural centers and museums based on Taiwanese Aborigines — so what should the new national Aboriginal museum be like? How should it differentiate itself from the existing spaces and buildings and how should it connect with them?
These questions require careful thought before work gets under way.
When developing any kind of enterprise in the face of global competition, it is important to identify products’ unique features and to determine how they differ from competing products on the market.
The museum should be No. 1, not No. 2 — so how does it win first place?
The theory that Taiwan is the original homeland of Austronesian peoples has been consistently proposed and substantiated by international experts.
As President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) government looks for ways to take its New Southbound Policy forward, it would do well to think about cultural connections and exchanges, which are the easiest way to cross national boundaries.
There are about 270 million Austronesian language speakers worldwide, with the Austronesian language group including more than 1,000 languages, which is nearly one-sixth of all human tongues. This diverse set of languages and cultures is an excellent theme to be exhibited and experienced in a museum.
A lot of emphasis is placed on the knowledge, experience, creative and aesthetic economies, as well as on equality between communities. Given this atmosphere, operating a museum of this type is clearly justified, but bound to be competitive. The best-qualified and most capable place in the entire Austronesian region to achieve such a museum is surely the “original homeland” — Taiwan.
However, it should be kept in mind that several of Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic partner countries are in the Austronesian region.
The national Aboriginal museum could broaden its concept of what a collection should be by exhibiting and connecting the diverse and distinctive materials of the nation’s Aboriginal peoples, including the many Pingpu communities, and those of Austronesian people in other nations.
Facing Taiwan’s economic strength and cultural depth toward the broad southern seas may discover a new “blue ocean” — in the middle of which, Taiwan’s colors might stand out.
Taiwan is a nation of diverse communities and cultures, among which Aboriginal cultures are probably the most rich and colorful.
However, Taiwan’s Aborigines have been marked by the ebb and flow of history. Through migrations, wars and assimilation by other ethnic groups and through a lack of interaction with nearby Austronesian peoples, most Aborigines have gradually forgotten their history of self-settlement and their cultures.
There have always been discrepancies and contradictions among the various peoples who arrived earlier or later in Taiwan as to how they identify with this land.
Perhaps now is the time to seek out a neutral and truthful space in which to tell people from Taiwan and abroad about our historical and cultural connections with all Austronesian peoples, and one in which we can talk about differences and similarities between Taiwan and China.
The painstaking task of defining the museum’s role is critical and urgent. Museum operations require massive amounts of human and financial backing. The physical edifice alone will not bring prosperity to the local area.
The Council of Indigenous Peoples must start by doing the groundwork. Once that is completed, the museum will be ready for its voyage into the future.
Voyu Poiconu is deputy director-general of the Indigenous Peoples’ Cultural Development Center at the Council of Indigenous Peoples.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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