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Taiwan

Resurrection

In 1996, the village of Lalaulan on Taiwan’s east coast was an example of the worst-case scenario for Indigenous Peoples. The Paiwan people of the village had lost almost all of their traditional land, their language was not being transmitted, they did not perform or even remember their own ceremonies or spiritual practices, and they had abandoned their distinctive clothing. They had begun dressing, talking, and acting like the island’s dominant Han Chinese people, but they were not fully accepted by that society.

Stories From Home:<br>In Taiwan, Indigenous Peoples Redefined Their Image

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.

The Underside of a Miracle: Industrialization, Land, and Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples

Taiwan’s rapid economic development of the 1970s and 1980s inspired an entire development discourse on the "Taiwanese miracle." It was hoped that other developing countries, from Mauritius to Bolivia, could learn from development policies of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Taiwan and bring prosperity to their own peoples.

The First Nations of Taiwan: A Special Report on Taiwan's indigenous peoples

Taiwanese history has been shaped by its geography. In the shape of a tobacco leaf, the island is about 85 miles across at its widest point and 260 miles long, with an area of just under 22,500 square miles. The terrain varies widely between the relatively flat west and the mountainous and heavily forested east. The island’s position just more than 100 miles off the southeast coast of China and astride major sea lanes has long given it key strategic importance.

Presbyterians and the Aboriginal Revitalization Movement in Taiwan

When the new Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration in Taiwan appointed Yohani Isqaqavut, a Presbyterian minister, to Chair of the Council on Aboriginal Affairs in May 2000, many wondered why the first non-KMT president of the Republic of China/Taiwan made such a choice. The relationship between Presbyterians and Aboriginal people in Taiwan is rarely examined beyond noting that most Aboriginal people are Christian, and that Presbyterians have been active in Taiwan’s Aboriginal movements.

In the Name of Progress

In 1990, 30 houses in Tungmen Village of Hsiulin Township, Hualien County, disappeared under an avalanche of mud and gravel. On the slopes above the village, marble boulders had been mined to sell for landscape decoration, and much of the natural vegetation had been replaced by cultivated betel nut palm. At least a dozen lives were extinguished in those few moments—lives of the Tayal (Atayal) tribe of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

A Minority within a Minority: Cultural Survival on Taiwan's Orchid Island

The indigenous people of Orchid Island, an island off the southeast coast of Taiwan, are a small but distinct group—cut off from their closest relatives in the Philippines—among Taiwan’s remaining two percent Austronesians in a sea of Han Chinese.

The Diversity of Taiwan’s Indigenous Minority

The Mental Health of Indigenous Peoples: An International Overview

Relatively little research has examined directly the mental health status and treatment needs of the indigenous peoples of the world. This is both unsurprising and remarkable. Unsurprising in that the needs and rights of indigenous peoples have been historically of little concern to those larger and more powerful nations that moved across the globe in pursuit of wealth; remarkable in that during that same period of colonialism there has been no lack of knowledge of the brutalities to which indigenous peoples have been and continue to be subjected.

Fishers Among the Mangroves

The inhabitants of the small villages of Thailand's mangrove swamps, who have fished for thousands of years, have recently initiated several efforts to restore their environment and safeguard their fish supply. However, since the early 1970s a seemingly innocuous creature - the black tiger prawn - has threatened their way of life.

As the prawn industry has expanded through Asia and Latin America,d it has destroyed large tracts of mangrove forests, which are ideal sites for prawn farms.

Orchid Island - Nuclear Waste and the Yami

Orchid Island's high peaks are densely forested and covered with the flower that gives it its name. The island is only 15 km². The Yami tribe, less than 3,000 in number, live on Orchid Island, harvesting sweet potatoes and taro, raising pigs and goats and fishing the waters of the Pacific.

During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, anthropologists from Japan purposely isolated Orchid Island's Yami from any modern influences, setting up a kind of living museum of stone-age culture. But for the past few decades contemporary problems have come to the island.

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