4 - Coming to Terms with Indigeneity: The Politics of Positioning in Indigenous Youth Communities in Taiwan

The Indigenous resurgence in Taiwan, which started to join the global Indigenous movement in the 1980s, led to the introduction of the concepts of “Indigenous people” and “Indigeneity” to Indigenous Taiwanese activists. Subsequently, these activists integrated these political agendas into the Taiwanese democratization discourse, utilizing the language of human rights. The post-authoritarian Taiwanese government skillfully built on such foundations, establishing a national ideology that Taiwan is a multicultural, liberal sovereign nation vis-à-vis its constant threat of an ideologically monolithic Chinese state. The question of “who are Indigenous people in Taiwan” thus leads to a clear-cut answer: the non-Chinese Austronesian speaking peoples. However, another question emerges: “So you are Indigenous. But how Indigenous you are?” This question is particularly disturbing to “Indigenous youths” born after the 1980s, since cross-ethnic/racial marriages, urbanization, and the deprivation of native languages posed serious identity challenges. Various struggles of “being Indigenous” were therefore incubated within these disruptions of experience. This paper asks: how do “Indigenous youths” come to terms with their “atypical” form of indigeneity, and how do they negotiate with their Indigenous counterparts? The UN-sanctioned concept of “youth” doesn’t apply here; rather, “Indigenous youths” is a colloquial term in Taiwan Indigenous activism, and it leads to a heterogenous, contested field of identity projects. I follow anthropologist Tania Li’s (2000) proposal on “positioning” to examine how these identity projects draw upon “historically sedimented practices and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle,” including imbrications of contested Chineseness, settler-colonial urbanism, and national identity politics in Taiwan.