Is there any passive or active social discrimination or prejudice against Taiwan’s aboriginals? Such discrimination and prejudice is still highly visible in Australia towards the Aboriginals there, but I’ve not heard of it here.
hmmmm, if I just listen to responses of how lighter skin is better, I’m sure there’s some kind of discrimination.
There is a great deal of discrimination. Even the ‘invading’ Fujianese claim there Chinese dialect is ‘Native Taiwanese’ as if the aboriginals don’t exist.
There is currently a significant government effort to increase awareness and respect for this culture.
One aspect of it is that there aren’t really any educational, economic and employment opportunities in their traditional hometowns causing mass migration to the cities. In some east coast towns, you have the older, retired generation and young children only - all the working age adults live elsewhere. There are some steps to address this being taken now - Stanley Yen of the Landis hotel group is doing a lot to alleviate without overdeveloping the natural environment but it’s only small steps.
One factor that’s being kicked about as a form of ‘environmental injustice’ is the establishment of parks and nature reserves around native settlements. Sounds alright, certainly better than being saddled with a nuke dump, but that status severely limits opportunities for local economic development.
Might call that an inadvertent form of discrimination.
Yes, there is. It comes in various forms. Try telling a Taiwanese woman that you think she looks like she has Aboriginal blood (which is more than likely the case if she’s a benshengren), and gauge her reaction. Chances are it will be negative.
I don’t think that such reactions necessarily demonstrate that discrimination exists. My gut feeling is that your “yes, there is” answer is correct, but there must be better indicators.
Thanks, this is very interesting. Much like Australian Aborigines, and I suppose like aborigines in most places. Unlike in Australia however, most of this discrimination is invisible to me.
As we know, the Taiwanese education system is test-based. It is policy for schools not to teach a certain percentage of the examination material. This creates the need for private instruction, which the aboriginals don’t have, generally. To make matters worse, aboriginal schools don’t effectively prepare students for these tests (a).
The government is promoting the aboriginal languages. My university is responsible for producing the textbooks, many of which have been published. There is a class next semester on how to improve the next generation of books, too. So it seems like the government is serious about it.
(a)Our niece attended a school in Hualian for several years (her mother is aboriginal), it was so bad that she came to live with my wife in Taichung to go to school here. When she started school in Taichung, she didn’t know she was supposed to sit down for class. She kept getting up and walking around.
So students in schools of Hualien just keep walking around even during the class?
So students in schools of Hualian just keep walking around even during the class?[/quote]
Her class was like that. But the point is she didn’t know that she couldn’t stand up and walk around when she wanted to.
I think most taiwanese completely forget that they themselves have aborigine blood and think of aborigines as being good at drinking and singing songs (but talk funny) , are not super super smart but the girls are really cute !
This is very interesting. Is there ever any active discrimination in the form of physical conflict? In Australia there’s typically such a massive physical separation between the Aborigines and other people (except in some inner city areas), that such conflict doesn’t take place, but where the two groups are in close proximity physical confrontations and violence towards (and from), Aborigines is not uncommon.
Chalk and cheese I reckon. The aborigines here were treated quite well by the Japanese colonial regime and the KMT so there’s not a lot of sorry business like the stolen generations. The aborigines here maintained their strong community structure and have transfered this into government and politics.
Disparities in income and quality of life are not as great either. Reporters can always find some poor little aborigine boy with only one pair of shoes and no hot water in the house, but most Indigenous Taiwanese I know have tertiary educations and middle-class jobs.
Lots of role models in entertainment and sports too.
I’ve often heard these stereotypes bandied about. I love bringing up the fact that for the better part of 300 years (1600 - 1900) there weren’t enough Mainland women for the newly arriving immigrants, nor those already here, and like to ask folks who they think their great grand parents etc were marrying and having kids with. The looks you get are priceless. They know, mate. They just don’t like to admit it (much like “white” Afrikaner Saffas denying their African roots).
I work with an Aboriginal woman and her two brothers own a truck each and do transport work and moving etc. She’s told me that the biggest problem they face is that as soon as a new customer finds out they’re Aboriginal they’re not too keen on doing business with them because of the stereotypical idea that “Abo’s are lazy and drink too much.”
But, she says, as soon as they actually do a job for someone they always have a recurring customer who eventually only wants to deal with them because they’re hard working and trustworthy.
Thanks CP, that’s very interesting. Quite the opposite of Australia. bismarck, that’s very much like the typical stereotype of Australian Aborigines.
Except for the occasional massacre, sure.
1 Like
[quote=“Charlie Phillips”]
Chalk and cheese I reckon. The aborigines here were treated quite well by the Japanese colonial regime and the KMT so there’s not a lot of sorry business like the stolen generations. The aborigines here maintained their strong community structure and have transfered this into government and politics.
Disparities in income and quality of life are not as great either. Reporters can always find some poor little aborigine boy with only one pair of shoes and no hot water in the house, but most Indigenous Taiwanese I know have tertiary educations and middle-class jobs. [/quote]
This is patent nonsense.
You can’t always tell the Taiwanese aborigine from the normal Taiwanese, until they speak because they do speak Mandarin and Taiwanese a bit different (except for the younger set who speak it just the same).
I used to think the “aborigine” girls all dressed up in Wulai were just normal Taiwanese girls dressed like that to handle the tourists. But I guess they were “real” aborigine. But it’s actually hard to tell them apart for the most part.
There is a stigma because a lot of aborigine have been poorer. There is a big stigma against being poor in Taiwan I think. That’s the problem. And also the fact that so many aborigine girls in times past were trafficked into slavery as the lowest denominator whore. That didn’t help their reputation a whole lot.
Certainly where I live, there doesn’t seem to be discrimination, though it’s hard to tell. A lot of people working in government positions in my town are aboriginal. Several of the teachers at my school are aboriginal, and they actively promote aboriginal culture for those who want to study it (and enter dance or speech competitions).
I’m not sure whether this was affirmative action specifically for aboriginals, but there were a lot of jobs my wife was unable to even apply for when we moved here because she wasn’t a local.
That said, in most cases, my better students (both academically and in terms of behaviour) are the non-aboriginal students. I suspect it basically comes down to what’s going on at home, and the adults I see driving around without helmets, drunk or spitting binlang tend to more commonly be aboriginal.