Aboriginal Peoples—Taiwan | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

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Aboriginal Peoples—Taiwan

The aboriginal people of Taiwan are the island's non-Chinese indigenous inhabitants. Their cultures and languages are Austronesian and include the oldest languages of the Austronesian family. Archaeological evidence suggests that their ancestors came from the Asian mainland at least 6,000 years ago and then became the source of the migrations south into the Pacific and insular Southeast Asia. It appears that later migration northward from the Philippines brought new groups back to southern Taiwan. The twenty-two aboriginal languages and cultures in Taiwan, of which ten are still living, are a major anthropological source for research into Austronesian origins.

History

Aboriginal peoples were the only inhabitants of Taiwan until 1624, when the Dutch established a colony and Chinese migration began. Today, the remaining ten aboriginal "tribes" number some 400,000 people, or 1.8 percent of Taiwan's population. By the early twentieth century, almost all the plains aborigines (Pingpuzu) were sinicized and had intermarried into Chinese settler society. While there is a Pingpu ethnic revival today, their real descendents are the Hokkien-speaking Taiwanese, most of whom have Pingpu as well as Chinese ancestors. The ten groups inhabiting the mountains and eastern coast survived in part because of geograph, and in part because they were feared as "savages" and headhunters. Aboriginal people were called Mountain People (Shandiren, Shanbao) until the "Return our Name" movement resulted in the official adoption of the term "Taiwan Aboriginal People" (Yuanzhuminzu) in 1994.

Relations between the settler society and mountain aborigines were shaped by trade and a Chinese defensive line along the mountain fringe until the 1860s, when export demand for tea and camphor led the settlers to push into the mountains, especially in northern Taiwan. Aboriginal resistance and settler reprisals characterized a generation of sporadic warfare in the north, which ended only with the imposition after 1895 of a strong defense line by the new Japanese rulers of Taiwan. They separated mountain aboriginal areas from the rest of Taiwan, forbidding Chinese settlement and any non-Japanese cultural influence on them. Ultimately, this colonial control strategy contributed to the preservation of aboriginal territory and culture. The imposition of harsh Japanese police administration was resisted most strongly by the Tayal tribe. It took a five-year military campaign (1910–1914) in which thousands of lives were lost before the Tayal were conquered. In 1930 there was a final uprising, the Wushe Incident, in central Taiwan. The Japanese moved villages out of the deep mountains, introduced rice agriculture and cash economy, and educated a generation of aboriginal elite, while destroying much traditional aboriginal social structure. Aboriginal culture today is deeply marked by Japanese custom and language.

Importance of Churches in Modern Period

After 1945, the Republic of Taiwan (under the Chinese Nationalists) continued most Japanese policies, but the government opened the mountains to Chinese settlement and Christian evangelism. Policies of agricultural development, enforcement of Mandarin Chinese education, suppression of aboriginal languages, and politicized sinicization in the 1950s were aimed at assimilating the aboriginal people. Attempts by some among the aboriginal elite to oppose these policies were quickly crushed, notably with the execution of several leaders of the "Formosan National Salvation Alliance" in 1954. Most local leaders joined the Guomindang Nationalist Party (GMD) and learned how to win elections in the thirty Mountain Townships, low-level units of self-government that serve as conduits for patronage and corruption. Much aboriginal reserve land, held in trust since Japanese days by the state for aboriginal users, fell into Chinese hands. Aboriginal society became tormented by poverty, alcoholism, suicide, and family breakdown. The aboriginal people became sources of cheap labor in construction, mining, factories, and fishing. These problems persist despite improvements in the aboriginal people's situation.

The churches became the basis of aboriginal cultural persistence and ethnic revival. Presbyterian and Catholic evangelism resulted in about 70 percent of the aboriginal people becoming Christian by 1960. Christianity is often seen in Taiwan as a mark of aboriginal identity. Especially among Presbyterians, leadership by aboriginal clergy, use of aboriginal language in worship, and inclusion of traditional forms of social cooperation in church organization meant that the churches became the only autonomous aboriginal people's organizations outside state control that affirmed and perpetuated aboriginal identity.

From the mid-1970s on, a charismatic movement revitalized the aboriginal Presbyterian churches, and human-rights ideas combined with biblical images of the chosen people and the promised land, bringing elements of aboriginal nationalism into everyday religious practice. Politically, most aboriginal politicians remained loyal members of the Guomindang. In the early 1980s, widespread opposition to authoritarian GMD rule began to gather strength in Taiwan. A few educated youths began to challenge GMD control of the aboriginal people and in 1984 founded the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines (ATA), with support from the Presbyterian Church. Aboriginal churches were already engaged in a campaign to gain land rights from the state, and, with the ATA, began to be overtly critical of state policies. In 1987 several highly publicized local protests ensued over land issues, in which Presbyterian clergy played leading roles. In 1988 these coalesced into the "Return our Land" movement and a mass aboriginal demonstration in Taipei on 25 August 1988.

Aboriginal Rights Movements and Contemporary Policies

The Return our Land movement resulted in only about 13,000 hectares of land being released, but it raised the profile of aboriginal issues in the media and among Taiwan's political elite. Aboriginal politicians, formerly GMD party hacks, sought to outdo one another in fighting for long-denied rights. Native language and self-government became popular social causes. These were enshrined in constitutional revisions between 1992 and 1997:

The State affirms cultural pluralism and shall actively preserve and foster the development of aboriginal languages and culture.

The state shall, in accordance with the will of the ethnic groups, safeguard the status and political participation of the aborigines. The state shall also guarantee and provide assistance and encouragement for aboriginal education, culture, medical care, economic activity, land and social welfare, measures for which . . . shall be established by law.

(Republic of China Constitution, Additional Article 10)

A cabinet-level Council of Aboriginal Affairs was established in 1996, but it has no administrative authority. Nonetheless, the large funding and policy consultation role it has been given has contributed to an aboriginal renaissance as well as to the development of many local and national nongovernmental initiatives. In the 1990s aboriginal peoples became key symbols of the new multicultural Taiwan, symbolized by the major role they played in the inauguration of President Chen Shuibian (b. 1950) in May 2000. Chen appointed one of the leaders of the aboriginal rights movement, a Presbyterian minister, to head the Council of Aboriginal Affairs and made classes in native languages part of the regular school curriculum. If proposals to establish aboriginal autonomous areas are realized, Taiwan's aboriginal peoples will not only be the most economically and socially advantaged in Asia (notwithstanding many continuing social problems), but will also be a political model for transition from the ethnic margins to the political center.