Newly elected legislator for Taidong County Lai Kun-cheng(in black jacket) was invited to the Asia-Pacific Culture Portals Summit to share Taidong’s valuable experience gained from holding its Austronesian Cultural Festival with experts from various countries

During the “1st Asia-Pacific Cultural Portals Summit” held in Taipei on January 21, legislator Lai Kun-cheng introduced  Taidong’s valuable experience gained through the holding of its Austronesian Cultural Festival, bringing the Austronesian peoples of Taiwan and Oceania together, when he was mayor of Taidong. The survival of indigenous culture on the Internet was also the subject of lively discussion.

Under the pressure of Han centered chauvinism Taiwan’s indigenous peoples have not only lost their language space they have also been forced to change their names. In recent years mother language policies have made indigenous people’s languages more equal however when young people and children enter the digital world  they must use Hanyu (Chinese) to think and write, lacking a native language “voice” in the digital world. Consequently, quite a few cultural workers believe that at the present stage using low cost open source software to develop one or more set of language writing software for indigenous people will help indigenous people’s culture survive and develop in the Internet era.

The linguistics field has achieved some results in terms of using digitization to preserve indigenous people’s culture, however, young cultural workers from villages are worried by the fact that the older generation who have a complete grasp of these old languages are dying off and there is a digital gap between Taiwan’s native peoples and the Han which means it is very hard for many indigenous people to use these academic resources, leaving these cultural assets with academic value isolated and unable to play a significant role in the promotion of indigenous people’s culture.  One approach that can be taken is combining the remaining knowledge of village elders, linguistics and education scholars and sound archives to produce real and digital indigenous people’s native language teaching material. Dr. Lee Der-tsai, TELDAP co-director and member of Academia Sinica, believes that the Council of Indigenous Peoples can perhaps cooperate with enthusiastic technically capable people to carry out work in the fields of language study, Internet writing and passing on of culture.

TELDAP’s digital archives also caught the attention of aborigine cultural workers in attendance. Museum anthropology collections tend to focus mainly on ancient aboriginal culture. Historical materials from the 1960s and 1970s when aborigine society was undergoing great changes rarely attract the attention of scholars “because they aren’t traditional enough and not old enough”. This period, however, had a key influence on villagers, and temporal-spatial memory. During a break in proceedings when a TELDAP colleague showed some aborigine participants pictures of the Amis tribe harvest festival in the 1970s some of them could actually point out their teachers. Who knows how many such deep down memories there that haven’t been put into words. The news reports come from a time when Taiwan was a one party state and society was tightly controlled. Perhaps now is the time to return the right to remember and narrate back to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples! 

The ways of putting culture into practice are diverse and do not have to be “real,” the Internet can also be a space for passing on and developing culture and should be given attention. When we see a white (pakeha) scholar from New Zealand proudly say hello (kia ora) in Maori to everyone in attending the summit, we can see that, in terms of equality for the cultures of Taiwan’s different ethnic groups there is still a way to go.