Indigenous Activists Tell Cultural Survival What The Decade Meant To Them

For the roughly 400,000 indigenous Austronesian minorities of Taiwan, whose population comprises two percent of the island’s population, the last decade has been one of cautious optimism. Encouraging is that the view of the aboriginals by the dominant Han society has shifted in the past decade. Ten years ago, indigenous people were most commonly referred to as “Mountain People” (san-tee’-ren) or other slurs in the Mandarin Chinese dialect.