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Whispers Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Writing the Histories of the Taiwanese Aborigines

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Whispers Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Writing the Histories of the Taiwanese Aborigines WHISPERS BEYOND THE RAINBOW BRIDGE: WRITING THE HISTORIES OF THE TAIWANESE ABORIGINES by Jamie Peng John Williams and Carol Neel, Advisors A senior essay submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in History COLORADO COLLEGE Colorado Springs, Colorado May 2016 1 The historiography of the Taiwanese aborigines is complicated because it attempts to trace histories that do not exist—to represent long-silent voices. Lacking a script, the aborigines did not write their own histories and the histories that have been written about them are in the languages of their oppressors and exploiters. Aborigines’ oral tradition is dismissed as simple creation stories and myths. Broader questions then arise: how do we study the histories of the silenced? Where can we find and begin to make space for the voices that may or may not be recovered? Furthermore, who other than the aborigines themselves is authorized to speak on behalf of these people, and more importantly, in what ways? In 1945, the Kuomintang (KMT), or the Nationalist Party of China, established sovereignty in Taiwan.1 While the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) ended Japanese colonization in Taiwan on paper, it did little in reality to alleviate the aborigines’ experience as a colonized society. The fledgling Kuomintang State ruled with a heavy hand, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, and its oppressive treatment of its people extended beyond the Han Chinese already living in Taiwan to include the Taiwanese aborigines as well. Therefore, the identity and the history of the Taiwanese aborigines is important to Taiwan’s present-day political situation. In the debate between supporters of Taiwan independence and those advocating unification with China, the study of the origin of the Taiwanese aborigines has the power to grant legitimacy to the claims of one side or the other. The Taiwan independence movement, which has polarized many in Taiwan as well as in mainland China, has been gaining traction, as the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of Taiwan successfully elected its presidential candidate 1 I chose to use the older, Wade-Giles transliteration, rather than the Pinyin transliteration of “Guomindang (GMD),” as the former is still more widely known and used in Taiwanese translated sources. 2 Tsai Ing-wen this year. President-elect Tsai is slated to issue an apology to the Taiwanese aborigines when she officially takes office, and this prospect is no accident.2 The Taiwanese aborigines have extensive political clout, despite making up less than two percent of the Taiwanese population, since their voting support and the revelation of their genetic origins can either affirm China’s claim that the Taiwanese and Chinese are one people and that Taiwan has always been a part of China, or conversely, affirm the pro-independence faction’s assertion that Taiwan has always had an identity and sovereignty separate from China. As historian Emma Jinhua Teng summarizes, “The ‘Taiwan issue’ (and U.S. arms sales to Taiwan) is the prickliest thorn in U.S.-China relations and has the potential to bring the two powers into armed conflict. The geopolitical importance of Taiwan combined with Taiwan’s emergence since 1987 as a ‘Chinese democracy’ have contributed to the growth of Taiwan Studies as an important new field in Asia and the United States.”3 The history of the Taiwanese aborigines, however, has importance far beyond its ability to legitimize the claims of political parties. It is important because an apolitical, self-told, unmediated history of the Taiwanese aborigines does not exist—or at least is not known to exist. Historians possess only the histories that others have written for and about aborigines. The challenge and difficulty, then, lies in the quest for histories of a people who did not write— histories free from mediation and knowledge fraught with political and social implication, unsullied histories. Some say that apolitical, unsullied histories never exist and that they are 2 Chen Hui-ping and Jonathan Chin, “Tsai vows to issue apology to Aborigines,” Taipei Times, September 15, 2015, accessed April 17, 2016, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/09/16/2003627831. 3 Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683- 1895 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2004), 6- 7. 3 mere ideals toward which one strives but does not expect to reach. I agree with this assertion. What I seek when I speak of unsullied histories are responsible histories—honest, transparent, and free of self-serving intentions or agendas. Responsible historians are those who aim to clearly lay out what they know and who acknowledge both the advances in and the limits of their scholarship and arguments, all the while keeping the well-being and the integrity of their subjects in mind. Histories of people who did not write are fraught with ambiguity. How historians address these ambiguities is what identifies them as responsible. As Teng points out, Taiwan’s geopolitical importance has sparked academic interest in and writing on the Taiwanese aborigines, who have played an undoubtedly significant role in the creation of Taiwan’s collective identity. Another less political concern has also contributed to the resurgence of study of the Taiwanese aborigines: the sobering fact that Taiwanese aboriginal languages, cultures, and histories are dying along with tribal elders.4 Unfortunately, scholarship on the Taiwanese aborigines remains thin and fragmentary. No comprehensive body of scholarship in any related field, let alone a comprehensive history of the Taiwanese aborigines, exists. Granted, it would be difficult to write a comprehensive history of the Taiwanese aborigines, as there are over twenty various tribes and subgroups, each with their own language, customs, practices, needs and wants (as evidenced by their frequent intertribal warfare), and experiences. This paper does not attempt to tackle the question of whether or not a comprehensive history can be recovered and written, but rather examines the voids that currently exist in history and historiography, where there are no aboriginal voices speaking 4 Lin Hsin-han, “Last male ‘national treasure’ dies,” Taipei Times (Taipei, Taiwan), Jul. 21, 2013. 4 without translation, without outside interpretation, without mediation. How should one attempt to make space for—and if possible, write—Taiwanese aboriginal histories? Theories and Methodologies Edward Said’s Orientalism is an indispensable theoretical support for any work that attempts to challenge hegemonic narratives in history and other disciplines and to recover lost or silenced voices. Said asserts that a phenomenon he terms “Orientalism” arose out of the West’s need to both react to the “Orient,” or the East, and to establish its own identity in relation to it. He writes: ... the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.5 As Said points out, the West has created a dichotomy, placing a monolithic and stagnant “Orient” across from itself as the “Other.” This “Orient” does not correspond with the reality of the East, which is actually multi-faceted and dynamic. Said goes on to assert that it is “because of Orientalism [that] the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.”6 So, not only does this dichotomy help the West construct its own identity, it also serves to create a hierarchy in which the West wields power as the observer and the actor, and the East is subjugated as the observed and the acted-upon. In this way, the distinction between East and 5 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1-2. 6 Said, Orientalism, 3. 5 West becomes more than just an acknowledgement of differences, but rather a statement of power and agency.7 The West becomes the producer of knowledge about the East and deploys Orientalism, this process of gathering and producing knowledge of a constructed “Orient,” as a justification for governance and a gateway to more authority and power for itself. Defining Orientalism as “knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing,” Said points to the insidiousness inherent in knowledge of this kind.8 Such knowledge for the sake of scholarship or even of curiosity is not harmless, but rather a knowledge that is manipulated, a knowledge that instead of illuminating what is being studied, instead takes away from the subject its agency and its right to itself. Therefore, Orientalism is, at its core, a self-serving perspective. Although Said is referring specifically to the West as represented by the French and the British and to the East (or “Orient”) as represented by the Middle East, his framework fits many postcolonial contexts because it is truly about power dynamics and ideological warfare—how we negotiate our place amongst those we perceive as “Other” and how we gather and use our knowledge to gain leverage against them. The human fear of the unknown translates into a desire to establish familiarity and ease the anxiety of not knowing. By creating a corpus that relies on tropes and stereotypes, the “Other,” while still a threat, can be tamed, controlled, and manipulated.
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