An exhibition of artifacts cleared from an Aboriginal protest camp on Taipei’s Ketagalan Boulevard opened yesterday at the city’s Treasure Hill Artist Village (寶藏巖), as attention turns to a meeting on Friday of the Presidential Office’s Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee.
About a dozen Aboriginal Transitional Justice Classroom protesters waving banners that read “no one is a bystander” gathered outside the exhibition, laying painted rocks submitted by people around the nation in a circle on the ground.
They had previously used hundreds of the rocks along Ketagalan Boulevard before they were forcibly cleared out by police, and retreated to an MRT entrance beside the nearby 228 Peace Memorial Park.
The “occupy”-style camp remains standing and is meant to protest delineation guidelines for Aboriginal traditional areas announced by the Council of Indigenous Peoples in February.
Protesters object to the failure of the guidelines to include private land, raising the prospect that indigenous tribes might be denied “inform and consent” rights for private development projects.
“From today, these pieces of art can be seen again, even though they disappeared for some time,” Amis Classroom member Mayaw Biho said, adding that yesterday marked the 120th day of the protest.
“Even though there are only a few of us, we need to learn to be as determined and solid as these rocks,” he said. “Even if we do not have any political influence, we hope to use the power of culture and art to encourage as many people as possible to participate.”
The protesters said the exhibition is to continue until Aug. 1, which is National Aboriginal Day and also the one-year anniversary of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) official apology to the nation’s Aboriginal peoples.
They said they hoped an upcoming meeting of the transitional justice committee on Friday would hear their voices and consider the issue.
The committee’s first meeting in March failed to reach a consensus on whether to implement the delineation guidelines.
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