Ethnic rights activists yesterday urged President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to better understand what the Aboriginal and Hakka movements were aiming for.
“Ma talked a lot about ethnic affairs during his presidential campaign, but based on what he has said, I’m worried whether he really understands that we’re fighting for ethnic and cultural decolonization, and that the issues are not just about social welfare,” Yang Chang-chen (楊長鎮), a long-term Hakka and Aboriginal rights activist, told a forum in Taipei yesterday co-hosted by several social groups.
Yang said his worries came from an incident in which a group of Amis residents in Taipei County whose community was set for demolition petitioned Ma in January.
Ma at the time told the group that “if you come into the city, you are a Taipei resident. I see you as a human being. I see you as a citizen, and I will educate you well,” and that “when you come into the city, you have to play by our rules.”
Sun Ta-chuan (孫大川), a Puyuma activist, said: “Ma once said that ‘Aborigines don’t have any problem in their genes, but they have problems in getting opportunities.’”
“Of course there is no problem in our genes! It seems like Ma regards the Aboriginal movement as a social issue,” Sun said.
Sun said the next step was for Aborigines to establish their own perspectives on issues related to them to avoid then “being kidnapped by politicians and other outsiders.”
“For the past 400 years, Aboriginal history has been recorded only from non-Aboriginal perspectives — we need to construct an Aboriginal perspective on history,” Sun said.
Yang and Sun agree that there were some interior issues that need to be resolved and adjusted for the movements to continue.
“Among Aborigines, there is the issue of unequal distribution of resources,” Sun said. “For example, since the Amis are the most populous, they may get more resources than other smaller tribes and we should fix this.”
Yang suggested that social groups change their mentality.
“Before the first change of power, we considered the government our enemy, because it was an authoritarian regime,” he said.
But in a democracy, things aren’t so black and white, he said.
“We keep talking about ideologies without considering that political parties need votes, so we’ve become marginalized,” Yang said. “As members of a democratic society, we should adjust our mentality and try to enter into dialogue with the government, not just remain opposed to it.”
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