Taiwan transitions and tribal tongues: From the language of reconciliation to the revitalisation of language?

On 1 August 2016, a few months after being sworn in as Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen accomplished another milestone: the first official apology to Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples. In her address to representatives from the various tribes, Tsai apologised for multiple forms of damage inflicted during ‘four centuries of pain and mistreatment’, and outlined actions her government proposed to take as forms of redress. 1997 Manuel López May 2021 apology to the Maya of the Yucatán peninsula covering both Spanish colonial and post-independence Mexico.


Indigenous peoples of Taiwan and their ancient export to the world
The government of Taiwan currently recognises 16 Indigenous tribes. Apart from the Yami or Tao people inhabiting Orchid Island off the southeast coast, all the tribes are on the main island. In 2020 those tribes had 559,036 members, equating to 2.37 percent of Taiwan's total population. There are also approximately 400,000 people belonging to 10 groups denied official recognition, collectively known as the Pingpu, whose traditional languages are no longer spoken. Language vitality varies among the recognised tribes, from moribund (only used by a few elders) to strong, but all have undergone significant recent language shift to Chinese. Thriving or silenced, all the languages belong to the Austronesian linguistic family, but in divergent branches. Taiwan's topography favoured linguistic diversification, as 70 percent of the terrain is mountainous, with many peaks surpassing 3,000 metres. There was also sufficient time-depth for diversity to evolve: while empires waxed and waned elsewhere in Asia, Taiwan's Indigenous peoples stayed uncolonised for millennia.
Around 4,000-5,000 years ago, some of those inhabitants sailed south. Their descendants mixed with pre-existing inhabitants in the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos, Malay peninsula, coastal New Guinea and nearby islands, and journeyed across the Indian and Pacific Oceans to unpeopled lands. The linguistic legacy of these voyages comprises over 1,200 Austronesian languages spread across a vast realm: not just Island Southeast Asia, but also Madagascar, Micronesia, Melanesia and the Polynesian triangle bounded by Hawaiʻi, Easter Island and New Zealand. Taiwan was thus the source of an extraordinary series of migrations and cultural diffusions that reached its full extent just a century or so before the European colonial expansion that would engulf all the Austronesian territories.

Colonial regimes and colonial wrongs in Taiwan: brief historical context
Tsai's speech referred to wrongdoings by 'every regime that has come to Taiwan' over '400 years' and explicitly named, in addition to invaders from distant Europe, arrivals from nearer Asian shores: Japan and, in three separate impositions, China.
Although Chinese and Japanese fishers, smugglers and traders were familiar with Taiwan  The ROC retained Japan's tribal classifications as well as its refusal to give Indigenous status to the Pingpu, regarded as assimilated into the Han. However, the recognised tribes were given reserved seats in local government bodies (these levels had elected councils through the martial law period, but within the framework of KMT one-party rule), and in the ROC parliamentary assembly from 1972 onwards.
Western missionaries, whose work began in the late Qing period, now had great success converting Indigenous populations; sometimes this created spaces for native language use, such as bible translations and hymns. The economic development Taiwan achieved as one of the 'four Asian tigers' from the 1960s onwards created industrial jobs that drew rural dwellers to the cities, many Indigenous citizens amongst them. Urbanisation served to weaken use of Indigenous languages, as did the increased reach of schooling and electronic media in Mandarin (matching comparable transformations in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas).

Democratic transition and the call for Indigenous rights
In the 1980s there were reformist steps and society became freer, with burgeoning The Indigenous rights cause gained public attention during this transformative time.
The first activist organisation formed in 1984 and 'Give Back Our Land' protests were prominent in the late 1980s. Indigenous campaigning achieved constitutional amendments that changed their official designation from an outdated term meaning 'mountain compatriots' to wording equivalent to 'Indigenous people' in 1994, andto 'peoples' in 1997. That 1994 amendment took effect on 1 August, a date later adopted as Indigenous Peoples Day-and therefore as the date for Tsai Ing-wen's 2016 apology.
In 1995, Lee's government permitted registration of personal names in Indigenous languages. The following year it acceded to insistence by legislators from the reserved Indigenous seats (less quiescent than in the past) that it establish the body now called the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP). The Chairman of the CIP has a ministerial level position so, in effect, the cabinet automatically includes an Indigenous person, and it is she/he who has responsibility for Indigenous affairs. CIP functions include recognition of Indigenous peoples, a gatekeeping role that often attracts controversy, particularly its reluctance to give formal recognition to most of the Pingpu groups.
Much more could be said about the transition to democracy, debates around Taiwanese identity, language, and multiculturalism, or Indigenous activism and political roles. I will simply note a prominent goal of the DPP: establishing a transitional justice process to enable truth-telling and reparation for the White Terror and other forms of KMT repression under martial law. Tsai's apology to Indigenous peoples was presented as fundamental to this quest, a framing apparent in her May 2016 inauguration address and in the apology, with its commitment to establish an Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee. Tsai's apology also reflects an understanding of Taiwan's Han majority-whether derived from early migrations or 1949 arrivals-as a settler society, and of China as a colonising power in all three guises, Koxinga, Qing and ROC.

Languages in and around the apology
Tsai delivered the apology in the Presidential Office Building, a grand edifice constructed as the office of the Governor-General heading Japan's colonial administration. For the first decades of its existence, the bureaucrats and military officers working in the building spoke and wrote in Japanese. After the KMT took over, governance in Taipei was conducted in Mandarin. This continued after democratisation, despite the move of Taiwanese and Hakka onto the airwaves and into classrooms, and almost every word of Tsai's speech was in Mandarin. However, the rest of the ceremony featured a linguistic diversity that would have been unheard in the prior lives of that building, although not in the lives of many thousands affected by decisions made there.
The event commenced outside the building with members of the Paiwan tribe, the third largest of Taiwan's Indigenous peoples, performing a shouting ritual in their own language. Tsai's paternal grandmother was Paiwan; her possession of Indigenous ancestry is yet another first for a Taiwanese president. As representatives of Indigenous peoples entered, each tribal name was announced twice, first in Mandarin and then in Paiwan. This Mandarin/Paiwan bilingual narration continued throughout the ceremony. Two religious interventions preceded Tsai's address: a rite administered by an elder of the Bunun people, invoking ancestral spirits in her mother tongue; then, prayers uttered in six different languages by clergymen from some of the Christian denominations to which twothirds of Taiwan's Indigenous population belong (another point of difference from the Han majority). Tsai herself, amidst all the Mandarin, used the Atayal language's words for 'truth' and 'reconciliation' to demonstrate how Indigenous wisdom connected the two concepts. Finally, a Yami elder accepted Tsai's apology, speaking in his native language about prospects for reconciliation and harmony.
Tsai's summary of historic wrongs included language prohibitions, assimilation measures and neglect that resulted in 'great losses' in relation to native languages, and complete disappearance in the case of the Pingpu. In turn, among her undertakings was one clearly directed at that cultural harm: a pledge to submit a draft Indigenous languages law to Taiwan's parliament. Since that day, Tsai's government has been criticised for a failure to deliver on some of the promises contained in the apology, notably regarding return of Indigenous lands. However, the commitment to advance enactment of Indigenous language legislation was honoured, and the Indigenous Languages Development Act (ILDA) became law in mid-2017. ILDA confers official status on Taiwan's Indigenous languages, recognises a right to use those languages in dealings with administrative agencies, and assigns a range of responsibilities to public authorities.

What the Indigenous Languages Development Act means for Taiwan and its Indigenous languages
ILDA was not a completely new creation, as drafts were devised by the CIP in the early 2000s but not advanced further. Its absence did not impede work to protect and promote Indigenous languages, because efforts were already initiated by Recent studies confirm that intra-family transmission of Indigenous languages has fallen significantly in recent decades, so children are not raised with the capacity to use their ancestral languages. This is particularly the case now that over half the Indigenous population resides in cities, rather than rural villages where cultural activities and relationships with nature, along with the monocultural character of some communities, may favour language retention. ILDA may help focus energies on creating social spaces for language learning and use in the cities, while strengthening language practices in villages. Similarly, ILDA could be a tool for linguistically assimilated Pingpu communities to procure support for recovering languages that long ago ceased to be spoken, even for groups denied CIP recognition.
What ILDA says to the rest of the world ILDA may have an additional function, likely to appeal to those seeking to cultivate a positive image for Taiwan in the international arena: another means to signal Taiwan's conformity with human rights standards, such as those enunciated in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Taiwan cannot participate in the forums that produce international law instruments, but its governments like to emphasise their respect for principles codified in human rights treaties. Since 2009 this extends to legislating to implement key human rights treaties within the ROC domestic legal system. There are even formalised processes whereby panels of independent experts assess Taiwan's compliance, accepting input from NGOs as well as government bodies-in effect, matching the review system of the United Nations bodies that monitor treaty observance.
ILDA aligns with the string of Indigenous language laws introduced over the last two decades in parts of the Americas and Oceania, thereby buttressing framings of ILDA may create more opportunities for those organisations, and for Taiwan's human rights groups, universities, and research centres, to build relationships with counterparts in countries with Indigenous populations, including the South and Southeast Asian states that are the focus of the New Southbound Policy that is now crucial to Taiwan's international orientations. Drawing attention to ILDA could facilitate efforts by Taiwan's leaders to enhance soft power and create favourable conditions for the people-to-people relations seen as essential, given the reality of widespread non-recognition. Awareness of ILDA, and of initiatives made under it, could strengthen global perceptions that Taiwan is distinct because of its Indigenous peoples, and that institutional observance of Indigenous rights reinforces Taiwanese claims to statehood.

Dr Brett Todd is a visiting fellow at National Taiwan Normal University, funded by a Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs fellowship. He wishes to thank Professor Joe Lo
Bianco for his support and make a special acknowledgement to his hosts in Ren'ai