4 - Reviving Taiwan Indigenous Culture: Empowering the Marginalized Youth Ketagalan through New Media Narratives

Ketagalan, is the indigenous people residing in the capital of Taiwan, Taipei. Since the 17th century, the Ketagalan People have been conducting frequent international trade with Western countries. However, due to the historical impacts of colonial regimes and their superimposed cultural practices, this group of People who were named by Japanese anthropologists in the early 20^th century, had seemingly disappeared, leaving only ancient cultural relics and documents preserved in museums.

This paper aims to explore how the new generation, who identify themselves as the Ketagalan of the 21st century, comprehends their own traditional culture and creates new media scripts for podcasts that portray contemporary fast-food love. They embark on the innovative task of empowering their cultural identity, aiming to showcase and reconstruct the agency of their ethnic culture.
This study examines the related issues of how marginalized youths in the context of cultural power imbalances reconsider their own appearance and characteristics within the societal structure. In facing the tragic suffering of forgetting history and the mainstream media's populism, they resist and negotiate the space between these dynamics. They further employ the autonomy of new media and the power of social connections to actively voice their perspectives through social media. In doing so, they seek to redefine their connection with their traditional ethnic identity, breaking free from and resisting the cultural interpretations constructed by colonizers in the past.