Is Affirmative Action for Indigenous Taiwanese Fair?

This is a translation from the original 原住民好好喔幾分就能上大學？誤會大了，其實我們也希望有天能幫漢人考試加分 by Yudaw Buya, a member of the Truku Students Association, of the Bsngan tribe of the Truku people. Originally published by Mata Taiwan. Translation by Tim Smith.

***

Some time ago I was looking through Facebook and saw that a friend’s family member was made by a teacher to stand in front of the entire class. The teacher said, “Indigenous Taiwanese seems to have many benefits and quotas from affirmative action! All they have to do is score a few points on the entrance exam and then they can go to university.”

These sorts of comment are very frustrating. I want to give my view on the historical context of affirmative action for Indigenous Taiwanese students’ entrance exam scores.

Serial colonization and destruction of identity

Taiwan’s Austronesian indigenous peoples have experienced various periods of colonization from foreign invaders, including by the Dutch, the Spanish, Ming remnants under Zheng Chenggong, the Manchurian Qing empire, Imperial Japan, and the KMT’s Republic of China up to the present. Each colonial regime continued policies that exploit our lands, dismantle our traditions and assimilate our cultures through all manners of contexts.

During Japanese rule (1895-1945), as indigenous tribes surrendered to the Japanese colonial  government our people were pushed to slowly change their names into Japanese names; they also started to change their lifestyles, and with that their language and culture were lost over time.

After 1915, indigenous Taiwanese tribes suffered Japan’s “interior expansion” and “Kominka” policies of the Japanese-rule period, which sought to turn Taiwan into an integral part of Japan proper. Moreover, after the Japanese left Taiwan following the end of WWII in 1945, the Chinese Nationalist government fled to Taiwan and the indigenous Taiwanese were once more forced to change their names to suit a Chinese identity.

They started to adopt Confucian thoughts and education, and was banned from speaking their own native languages during the Martial Law Period. These are the current social and cultural changes that the indigenous Taiwanese people had to go through in the past several hundreds of years.

Currently, tribal members who have full command of their mother tongue and use it as their main language are mostly our parents’ age or older, elderly peoples, some of which can only communicate using their indigenous languages or Japanese. These tribal peoples are often seen by the mainstream “Taiwanese” society as exotic foreigners.

Maybe it’s because the language we speak is unintelligible to most of the public, or we speak mainstream Sinic languages with an accent. Maybe it’s because our facial features or skin colors are different. Maybe it’s because of our ways of thinking, our worldviews, are different. All these things which the mainstream Han-based population differs from us brings our people all kinds of discrimination and prejudice. We need to continue to survive in this environment, but we need to stop thinking of ourselves as inferior and start looking at ourselves with pride, and show other people that our character is optimistic.

From preschools to post-graduate level education, we sit through “national” language, history, and culture classes that are not our own, and national holidays are not established with our indigenous rites and ceremonies in mind. Until recently, the legal names of many places, and even our own personal names, do not come from our own tribes.

Are we still being colonized?

Up until 30 years ago, indigenous Taiwanese peoples started to form a conscious identity, and the government started to notice us. A new generation of youth started to return to their ancestral tribal lands to discover their own culture, study their own languages, and began to focus on their own rights. But they encountered derisive comments like “why do you want to study traditional culture? It’s useless.” “The only thing aborigines do is take welfare,” “Aborigines never work and take money, they’re just so lazy,” and so on.

These sentiments still exists widely today, which casts the governmental policies for “adding points to aboriginal students’ entrance exam scores” in a negative light for students, who experience verbal harassment, discrimination, and condescension by the mainstream society.

I’m still looking for a reason. Maybe it’s right or maybe it’s wrong. I’m working hard to find a way to abandon my “indigenous sin.” Why must we continue to bear derision, be despised, have stereotypes about our “singing and dancing talents” mocked, as if we are still colonized?

If one day when we don’t have to return to our ancestral lands to study our languages, cultures, or other subjects our schools teach us, and all of the classes in schools all over this nation focused on Austronesian knowledge, cultures and languages, wouldn’t all you Han migrants to our land consider taking extra points on your exams?

(Feature image by Y_C_LO)