Minority, Not Minor

Publish Date: 06/01/2001 
Story Type: SOCIETY; HUMAN RIGHTS 
Byline: PAT GAO

PHOTOS BY HUANG CHUNG-HSIN 

As in countries around the world, Taiwan's indigenous peoples have endured oppression and discrimination, and they were stripped of many of their land rights. But a series of high profile protests in the 1980s have led to greater public awareness and sensitivity, and enlightened legislation. 

Taiwan's indigenous tribespeople love to sing, and many of them do so superbly. They are also gifted dancers, using their skills to breathe life into time-honored rituals and ceremonies. Their performances, as representations of a rich living tradition, appeal greatly to the modern tourist's taste for audiovisual spectacle. Indeed, the meager 1 percent of Taiwan's elementary school textbook that deals with aborigines presents a stereotyped image of tribespeople who spend most of their carefree lives singing and dancing. 

It is a pity, then, that children are not asked to spend more time considering the lyrics of these haunting songs. "I miss you the way ancient vines wind and bind themselves around giant trees on the mountain," goes an ancient lay of the Paiwan, one of Taiwan's major indigenous groupings, and the mournful words are typical of a huge canon devoted to all that the island's original inhabitants have lost. 

So how to account for the textbook's approach? Putting it at its simplest, the primer's naive representation of indigenous people is the result of Chinese authors writing for Chinese children. "Han people like to trace their lineage back to Hsuan Yuan Huang-ti, [the third of ancient China's mythological emperors], and that's exactly everything we're not," says Iban Nokan, a research assistant at Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology, who identifies with his Austronesian roots. 

The present ROC government is only the last of several administrations that have imposed their authority on Taiwan's first citizens. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch and Spanish arrived in Taiwan with colonization in mind. Then came the representatives of the late Ming and Ching dynasties, under whose rule settlers from the Chinese mainland dominated the commercial and political scenes. That lasted to the close of the nineteenth century. Five decades of Japanese colonization followed. When Japan finally gave up the island in 1945, Taiwan's aborigines found themselves once again at the mercy of Han people. The shadow of their "masters" has loomed large, yet another chapter in the age-old exploitation of indigenous peoples worldwide. 

Taiwan officially recognizes nine distinct indigenous groupings encompassing roughly 400,000 people, or less than 2 percent of the entire population. Some groups such as the Tao (formerly known as Yami) and Saisiyat now consist of fewer than 10,000 souls. But it was not always thus. For centuries before the Chinese made any significant inroads into the hinterland, about twenty peoples of Austronesian extraction were living all over Taiwan, among them the Tao on offshore Orchid Island. This runs counter to the common misconception that aboriginal tribes were mostly mountain-dwellers. Indeed, the current official recognition of aborigines extends only to the mountain peoples who are thought to exhibit cultural uniqueness such as in their tribal language. Plains-dwelling tribes, on the other hand, have lost their ethnic distinctiveness through assimilation with the island's Chinese inhabitants. But some descendants of aboriginal plains-dwellers who want to restore their ethnic identity consider the nine-tribes designation a joke. 

Ethnicity matters here. The concept of human rights pays homage to the equality of all individuals, but when it comes to the plight of Taiwan's indigenous peoples, the survival of a collective identity seems to take precedence. They must claim their human rights on a racial rather than a personal basis. "Aborigines are certainly entitled to civil rights, just like every other citizen of the country," Iban says. "But they must be protected as members of a wider ethnic category in the first place." 

Schools must offer aborigines the opportunity to study their native culture, language, and history. But the committee tasked with overseeing the program has yet to be formed.

Little was heard of the struggle for aboriginal rights until democracy began to make some headway in Taiwan during the 1980s. In 1984, two years before the Democratic Progressive Party was formed as the first major opposition party, the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines (ATA) initiated the earliest organized aboriginal movement. In its formative years the alliance concentrated on social problems such as child labor, adolescent prostitution, and unemployment, as well as handling individual cases of perceived social injustice. Iban notes that ATA's exclusive attention to personal difficulties was a result of "limited experience and budget." 

Toward the end of the decade, however, ATA began to look at issues affecting the indigenous peoples as a whole, such as the movement to resume their original family names and the drive to reclaim their ancestors' lands. (Upon their arrival to Taiwan in 1895, the Japanese colonialists pressured aborigines to adopt Japanese names on all official documents and commandeered nearly all their land. These practices were continued under the Chinese Nationalists.) In 1989 thousands gathered to demand increased land rights, and protests were also directed against the continued representation of the Chinese hero Wu Feng in their history books. 

The story originally told by the Japanese went like this. As a Han official, Wu was respected and liked by the aborigines, but he could not dissuade them from headhunting. Eventually he decided to ram the lesson home by sacrificing his own life, telling his stubborn subjects that they should watch for and kill a man wearing red clothes. He then donned red garments and suffered the inevitable fate. According to legend, the tribespeople were so ashamed when they realized what they had done that they desisted from headhunting thereafter. The story's condescending racism had long infuriated aboriginal activists, who made use of the growing climate of freedom in Taiwan to demolish statues of Wu Feng wherever they found them. 

As the indigenous peoples became increasingly conscious of their own status and rights in society, reform gradually picked up pace. The term yuan chu min (original inhabitants) replaced shan pao (mountain compatriots) as the standard expression to describe them, the result of a constitutional amendment in 1994. Now, the even more progressive yuan chu min tsu (original peoples) has come into everyday use, highlighting aboriginal ethnicity. 

In March 1996, the Taipei City Government was the first to establish an aboriginal administration. The Cabinet followed in December that year with a Council of Aboriginal Affairs (CAA) of its own, and reserved nine seats in the legislature for aboriginal representatives. Sadly, however, the councils at both the civic and central level have little jurisdiction and act primarily as coordinators of aboriginal affairs among different government departments. 

The year 1997 saw an even bolder initiative, with the revision of the Additional Articles of the ROC Constitution, which were amended to include the provision that "The State shall, in accordance with the will of the ethnic groups, safeguard the status and political participation of the aborigines." The government was also bound to guarantee and provide assistance and encouragement for aboriginal education, culture, transportation, water conservation, health and medical care, economic activity, land, and social welfare. 

In 1998, the legislature passed the Aboriginal Education Act, which obliges the government to provide aborigines with opportunities to study their native languages, history, and culture at schools of all levels, although a committee has yet to be formed to design and oversee the curriculum's contents. Last January, the promulgation of the Aboriginal Identity Act enabled those who had lost their legitimate aboriginal identity through marriage or adoption to reconstruct their lineage. Children of an aboriginal mother who take the latter's family name will henceforth be officially accepted as aborigines. Moreover, the Cabinet has proposed a law that will provide comprehensive protection for the aboriginal rights mapped out in the ROC Constitution, although currently this is languishing in the legislative queue. 

Indigenous standards of living still lag behind everyone else's. Aborigines have an unhappy reputation for being drunk and lazy, and they do not transfer well to city life. According to the Chinese Association for Human Rights, in 2000 life expectancy for this sector of society was fifty-nine years compared with the national average of seventy-five years. Income was less than one-third the national average, and unemployment among aborigines was more than double the national figure. Central and local governments offer them welfare services such as subsidized medical care, employment counseling, increased accessibility to school education, and low-interest loans for housing and setting up businesses, but administrators at all levels essentially treat aborigines as just another group of socially marginalized persons like senior citizens and the disabled. 

This is precisely the mentality that Chang Chun-chieh opposes. "Why can't the money be spent in more constructive ways?" asks the executive chief of the Red Aborigines, a tribal work team formed in the wake of the September 21 earthquake, which did enormous damage to many indigenous communities in 1999. "Politicians always favor relief welfare policies, because that way they can buy votes. They pay no regard to fundamental things." 

For Chang, a Chinese who married an aboriginal woman, one of the "fundamental things" is an education system based on ethnic integrity. He emphasizes that nowadays human rights are not concerned only with the absence of oppression, they also extend to such issues as educational opportunities and standards of living. "Aboriginal children are forced to enter an educational process alien to their own culture," he complains. "Aborigines are citizens too, and they pay taxes. Why can't they enjoy an education that continues their traditions, just as Han people do? Some officials argue that we're making a fuss about nothing, but what we want is real equality and genuine ethnic dignity." 

The fight for aboriginal human rights still has a long way to go. In addition to the problems of implementing existing laws, such as the education act, there are the extremely sensitive issues of land ownership and the ultimate autonomy of Taiwan's indigenous peoples within an established national system that ignored their ethnic legitimacy when it was formed. During the Japanese occupation, nearly all indigenous lands became the property of the state, with certain tribal reservations set aside for use by "savages" who nevertheless did not receive legal rights of possession. The ensuing ROC government continued the Japanese policy, and to this day government agencies such as the Taiwan Forestry Bureau retain ancestral aboriginal lands for state use, where tribespeople are permitted to live but not build new structures. During the unrest of the 1980s, the government increased these indigenous reservations, which today occupy some 260,000 hectares, accounting for 7 percent or so of all land in Taiwan. 

It is not enough. "Aboriginal rights over ancestral lands doesn't mean the reservation of fragmented areas, but rather the integrity of the whole aboriginal territory," says Academia Sinica's Iban Nokan. "And that must start with a thorough survey of the traditional tribal regions." He believes that restoration of tribal-land ownership will ultimately lead to autonomy for Taiwan's aborigines. "The state has to think about what kind of relation it wants to maintain with the indigenous peoples," he adds. "President Chen Shui-bian vowed to build a new partnership with them during his election campaign, and that relationship needs to be clearly defined." 

Althought activists do not take to the streets with the same level of emotion or frequency as in years past, the aboriginal movement continues.

At present, the CAA is examining a draft of an aboriginal autonomy law, which is slated for discussion in every aboriginal community. The law would allow a body, equivalent to a county government, to be established in areas where the elected chief and not less than half of the popular representatives are aborigines. The draft includes provisions for nature conservation and traditional aboriginal practices such as hunting. "The draft is too detailed," Iban says. "If everything's fixed in advance, what kind of autonomy is that?" For his part, the Red Aborigines' Chang Chun-chieh suspects that it will create something closer to local self-government than to an ethnically unified system. 

Whereas Chang suspects that the struggle for aboriginal rights will lose its edge once the existing activists have been brought into the political arena and gained some power, CAA Chairman Yohani Isqaqavut thinks otherwise. "I still embrace significant ideas and ideals," says the government's ranking official on aboriginal affairs, who was himself an activist at one time. "In the past the government would close the door to those who spoke and acted from a different standpoint. At least I won't do that." One of his most important priorities is the preservation of aboriginal mother tongues, which do more than anything else to differentiate one tribal grouping from another: he regards schools and families as equally responsible for preserving this key aspect of aboriginal life. 

For these earliest habitants of the island, a pluralistic society that tolerates different legal orders and value systems is perhaps the closest they can hope to come to the good old days when the only force they had to contend with was nature. Both Chang Chun-chieh and Iban Nokan want the various communities to maintain their integrity in the face of increasing exposure to assimilation, capitalistic exploitation, and Christianity. Iban also suggests closer international contacts, with the United Nations for example, in order to develop a more comprehensive sense of what it means to be aboriginal. "The indigenous movement will not die," he maintains. "Only its form will change, until the day when ethnic rights are fully realized." 

In the final analysis, the tribespeople's own rich heritages must and will be the source of lasting solutions. Chang Chun-chieh organizes a choir that sings aboriginal ancient melodies, and he expects their music to penetrate Han society, if not actually subvert it. He refers affectionately to the Paiwan song that began this article. "Can the Chinese find a more beautiful way of saying 'I miss you' than that image of ancient, winding vines?" he asks. "Aborigines may represent minority cultures, but they're definitely not minor."