The Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) yesterday offered an apology to Pingpu Aborigines for calling them “homeless beggars” after a second protest by Pingpu activists, but the activists said the council missed the point and that they would not accept the apology because the CIP had not yet addressed the mentality behind the comment.
The CIP’s apology came after Pingpu activists protested twice against the language the CIP used last week to reject the Pingpu demand for official Aborigine status.
In last week’s statement, the CIP said that it was unlawful for the Pingpu to gain the official status, and that the Pingpu were like “the homeless beggar who kicked the clergy out of the temple” by claiming themselves to be Aborigines without first gaining agreement from the nation’s 490,000 officially recognized Aborigines.
The beggar analogy is commonly used in Taiwan to describe a situation in which an illegitimate person tries to get rid of and take the place of the legitimate owner of a place.
In yesterday’s apology, the CIP said: “The CIP only used the analogy to demonstrate that the Pingpu are showing no respect to Aborigines [by claiming themselves to be Aborigines without the consent of officially recognized Aborigines], and not to humiliate the Pingpu. If the use of the analogy has caused unpleasant feelings among Pingpu, we offer our apologies.”
Uma Talavan, chairwoman of the Siraya Culture Association and a leading Pingpu activist, said that the apology was unacceptable because “it’s not an apology at all” and did not address what made the Pingpu upset.
What upset the Pingpu was not the language, she said, but the thinking behind it. She said the CIP’s statement indicated that the council considers the Pingpu as distinct from Aborigines, when really the Pingpu are Aborigine. The Pingpu do not hold official Aborigine status because of an administrative error, not because they are not Aborigines, she said.
The Pingpu tribes lost their official Aboriginal status after they failed to register themselves as Aborigines with the government in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the fact the Pingpu held official Aboriginal status under the Japanese colonial government.
“I am an Aborigine because my father is an Aborigine and because my ancestors are Aborigines,” Talavan said. “This is an identity that I was born with and this Aborigine identity is a fact that’s been proven in historical documents and through academic research.”
In recent decades, Pingpu activists have launched a campaign to demand the government restore the status, but the CIP had been ambiguous in its responses to the Pingpu until last week.
The language used by the council last week not only upset the Pingpu — who demanded an apology from the council first at a news conference last week and then again at a demonstration outside the Executive Yuan yesterday — but also drew criticism from the Presidential Office and the Cabinet.
The CIP urged everyone not to take the analogy out of context, and continued to condemn the Pingpu for “unilaterally claiming themselves to be Aborigines.”
“If the Pingpu want to be part of the larger Aboriginal family, they should do so through peaceful, natural and respectful means, and not voice their demands by shooting fireworks [at the CIP], an unfriendly attitude [toward the CIP] and through illegal demonstrations,” the statement said.
To support its case, the CIP cited clauses in the Aboriginal Basic Act (原住民族基本法) related to development and construction projects within Aboriginal regions. It said such projects should get consent from local Aborigines in advance and “any individual or ethnic group should not unilaterally claim to be Aborigines without getting consent from all other Aborigines in advance.”
Talavan said: “I am a member of the Talavan family because I am born one — do I need to get consent from all members of the family before claiming myself to be one?”
Also See: Aborigines attempt to turn themselves in over protest
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has