Brief
The project brief was to find a document and explore the portrayals of indigenous and First Nation peoples in your chosen locale, and provide a reflection of how Indigeneity and Indigenous people represented in these documents make up our knowledge and understanding of the history of education.
Preface
Having grown-up and spent most of my adolescent life in Taiwan and its education system, we naturally learned about Taiwanese history and culture in our elementary to high school curriculum. The long history of colonization by Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese, as well as the settlement of Chinese immigrants resulted in much tension and conflict amongst the diverse groups of people inhabiting the small island.
It wasn’t until coming to Vancouver and learning more about the Indigenous history and the overall activism surrounding reconciliation did I have the lens to reflect back on the ways I have learnt about Taiwanese history, specifically re-thinking the narrative of the curriculum and portrayals of Indigenous peoples, colonizers and settlers in relation with each other.
Project
The “document” I decided to choose for this project is the Taiwanese 2011 film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale directed by Taiwanese director Wei Te-sheng.
This film portrays the historical 1930 Musha Incident (霧社事件) of the Seediq (賽德克) people against the colonial Japanese forces in response to the long-term oppression. Due to the nature of the subject matter, it does have explicit depictions of violence, forced assimilation policies, dispossession of land and natural resources, armed conflict, etc. which was a reality for many of the indigenous communities under Japanese colonialization.
This film was shown in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival. I chose this film as it was seminal in terms of bringing Taiwanese colonial history and “representation” of Indigenous peoples of Taiwan onto the international stage, creating an entry point when it comes to learning and understanding more of history of Taiwan.
Throughout the film, I am constantly confronted with this question:
What are the underlying themes being driven in this narrative and what is assumed of the positionality of that perspective?
As a film involving conflict amongst many different groups — Japanese colonizers, Han Chinese settlers, and the indigenous Seediq people — understanding the historical and cultural context from each group is necessary.
Below is a brief glance at the historical context of Japanese colonial rules and assimilation policies imposed onto the indigenous peoples, including:
Status and categorization – varying degrees of “barbarians” 番 (fan)
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- 生番 (sheng fan) : non-acculturated indigenous people; lived outside of administrative units
- 化番 (hua fan) : semi-acculturated indigenous people; lived outside administrative units
- 熟番 (shu fan) : acculturated indigenous people; treated with status en-par with Han Chinese as “natives of Taiwan”
Settler-Aboriginal Boundary 隘勇(yi yong)
The Japanese claimed all unreclaimed forest and mountain land in Taiwan as government property, denying the rights of indigenous people to their property, land and anything on the land. The Japanese colonizers reinforced the “settler-aboriginal boundary” that further restricted indigenous people’s living space.
Japanization “kominka” Era （皇民化運動）
After the Musha Incident, many new policies were put into place to control indigenous people and their resources, including assimilation through education, language and prohibition of indigenous cultural practices.
Naturally, the film garnered both praise and criticism. That being said, I believe the controversy is what creates an abundance of topics for critical conversation and discussion.
What are the underlying themes being driven in this narrative and what is assumed of the positionality of that perspective?
This rather broad/general/nebulous question not only generates discussion on the surface-level of media portrayal, historical narrative, but also in a self-referential way in terms of the critic needing to reckon with their own positionality and perspective through the act of critiquing.
As a student back then, we did not have the time nor space in the elementary, middle and high school curriculum to have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of historical events in general, not to mention having in-depth discussion on topics related to indigenous communities at all.
Living in Taiwan, there are traces of colonialism in everyday life. It is ingrained in the architecture, in the transportation system, historical documentation that is available to the rest of the world, and even the educational system itself. There is still a big gap in terms of restorative justice and the overall dissemination of the concept of truth and reconciliation and efforts of decolonization, and I believe the first step and front lines of this dissemination is starting within the classrooms in education.
Hi Sophy,
Thank you so much for your submission of the Truth and Reconciliation assignment and for the link to your blog. As this task is not graded, I simply offered my feedback to this piece as a response to your submission to get you accustomed to how I might offer feedback in this course, to understand the expectations of the task, and to help propel your learning and academic understanding forward.
Further, as this task is so important to the truth and reconciliation process, I hope it has provided insight to the perpetuated wrongdoings that have plagued Indigenous people at the hands of colonists and the Canadian Government and the profound and harsh impact of colonialism.
You do a brilliant job at situating yourself within this assignment and creating a personalized rendering of your own discovery of the truths of wrongdoings and the systemic racism that were placed on Indigenous peoples at the hands of colonialism. I appreciate the importance you place on this work while recognizing how deep you have to go and how hard this work is to uncover the truths about Canada’s dark and violent colonial-dominated past in order to move through the process of reconciliation by unlearning, relearning, and writing the wrongdoings of the past. You have created a channel to move past the mere tokenism of a land acknowledgment to something that stands for truth and reconciliation in its truest sense. You have extended the learning and conversation and pushed towards action by addressing the long-term oppression resulting in violence, forced assimilation and dispossession of land/natural resources to the Indigenous peoples. I very much appreciate the overview that you give of this video and the detail you go into about the specifics of this text as you tackle themes of positionality and perspective.
You do an excellent job at providing a historical content of Japanese colonialism which resulted in imposed assimilation policies. This was very helpful to inform the context for this assignment. You have chosen a very strong resource for the purposes of this assignment and showcase your critical thinking through the justification of the purpose of its use.
I would love for you to include detail for your rationale as to why particular words were or were not included and what the results of these word searches in the video. How did that inform and extend your understanding of the legacy and impact of colonialism and dominance of European ways of learning, knowing, teaching, and doing that proliferated society?
You do explain how this domination contributes to unequal power structures, which was fantastic. Within the video that you chose for your primary corpus, I would love for you to outline how the focused assimilation and lack of Indigenous involvement, voice, perspective, representation, and ways of learning, knowing, and doing in historical renderings and teachings created an inferior importance on Indigenous people and their lives. You do a good job at demonstrating the harmful outcomes of colonization, and I want you to consider how equity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people might be achieved? What does this mean to you? How might Indigenous voices from the past final be heard? I love that you address the positive steps being done to rewrite the wrongdoings and I am interested to hear any other implications that you would suggest through education that would continue to progress society. These false narratives and the control and exclusion of Indigenous people throughout history has become a societal norm.
Through this assignment, you have demonstrated a crucial step into the process of truth and reconciliation. Amazing job, Sophy. Please let me know if you have any questions. Take care, Keri