片 and 爿 on their own reads differently as well.
Well… 爿 was the original character for bed, and used to be written like Π rotated 90 degrees clockwise (for the trig fans, that would be 3π/2).
片 on the other hand is half of the character 木 (back when it was written like
and it means chopped wood.
Aboriginals in Canada tend to blame a lot of their shortcomings on residential schools, and there’s a whole industry put in place to support these claims.
Is there something equivalent in Taiwan? The grievance industrial complex tends to be directed at the KMT for things like 228, but are their similar issues that expand beyond the traditional KMT-DPP / China-Taiwan divide?
Aborigines were repeatedly forcibly removed from their traditional area since the Dutch era. The Japanese loved doing this, and forcibly removed Aboriginal villages down closer to the plains so that they are more easily accessible for Japanese artillery. Aboriginal villages already in the plains were forced to move into the mountains and often forced to live among other forcibly moved tribes and lose their identities after the traditional tribal structure being striped away.
Also, privatization of land means traditional areas are often sold to people with resources, and that meant to the Japanese or Han Chinese.
Colonial governments also denied tribal vilalges the right to own traditional areas, so if the land is not own privately, they suddenly belonged to the government.
I think New Zealand and the rights afforded to the Maori Iwis are the examples for Taiwan to model after. Give tribal villages the right to govern its own traditional area, and decide how to develop within their borders, and collect money from corporations making money off their land.
Imagine if all the hotels around Sun Moon Lake are merely renting from the Ita Thao, and had to get permissions from the village government to build and operate, how well the Ita Thao would be doing financially and and redistribute the money to cultural revival.
You know what’s funny? They were from the same piece of wood. Left peice is called 爿 while the right piece is called 片, and together they’re wood🤗
Who knows why people only use the left piece of wood to build a wall!!!
I’d use both pieces of them for the sake of the earth🌏
Btw I do not know how to spell piece or believe or anything with ie/ei in them
I write ie and ei and erase the weird ones too 
Just found out that ie reads ee and ei reads ei like in eight, is that correct?
I do that too. Also, having live in Germany and learned a little bit of German doesn’t help with telling ei and ie apart in English at all.
Good to know other people suffer too
But the problem with that model is you hold the descendants responsible for the sins of the Father.
My approach to the issue in North America is, that while previous actions may have been considered reprehensible I, circa 2020, had no say in them and thus have no connection to the atrocities.
The aboriginals have different cultures from us. They hunt they farm they drink (of course not all of them, can’t eeally list everything here, can I?). The government forces everyone to speak mandarin and learn in mandarin and study history about mandarin cultures. I just don’t see why it has to be like that. If we have tests about how to find animal tracks, how to tell what plants are poisonous, how to skin a flying squirrel, and how to make dilicious 小米酒, I bet Han Taiwanese would suck at that too. It’s not fair to judge peopl by your own culture. Many Han Taiwanese ( every time I typed han it’s autocorrected to ham…) thought the aboriginals are lazy and clueless. They’re not. They just have different culture. Han Taiwanese believed that 萬般皆下品 惟有讀書高, that means studying is the only decent thing to do. But it’s not true. Mozart is respectful, Monet is respectful, Albert Einstein’s respectful and yet I recall that he didn’t do well at school too.
Sometimes Aborigines don’t do well at school, perhaps they got frustrated, perhaps they’re just bored. It’s probably more difficult for them to get straight As at school because their parents don’t tell them old chinese stories when they were kids. I had all these story books about Chinese history when I was little, but this is my culture not theirs. They’re probably used to different stories from mine. This also applies to all the poems and stuff. I really don’t think it’s fair to judge them by their academic performance. Why do they have to sit in the classroom and listen to a pretty much forieign teacher, why is it not that we go into the mountains at teach them with the stuff they’re familiar with? Teach them about their world not ours? Teach them about something that is related to their future lives?
All these stereotypes and cultural conflicts contribute to the result of those problems. It’s just not fair to think it’s all because of their nature.
All it would require is for the current population to collectively acknowledge that force relocation and government seizure of tribal lands are wrong, and rectify that wrong by returning at least a portion of the land to the villages, while giving tribal villages the power to plan its own deveopement and manage a budget.
I don’t see what part of it involves the sin of the ancestors.
Then they would have to acknowledge this first. Considering that the government hasn’t even acknowledged every piece of history to the han Taiwanese, this is gonna take a while.
There is a strong but dying support for the KMT, as there previously was for the Japanese and the Imperial Chinese government, on the grounds that they at least occasionally supported aboriginal rights against the ethnic Taiwanese. You see it in places like Canada and Australia where aboriginal people favour British or federal government, at least over locals.
I hear those silly Jews have a ‘grievance industrial complex’ against Nazis, too.
Here, here. I’m interested in your experience in Canada @Kingdomparadise. And I am interested in native Taiwanese cultures–not sure about that term “aborigine”, but anyway… I have not taught on a “reservation”, but it’s blindingly obvious that in a deeply racist and violent white settler colony, which is what Canada as I see it, then you are bound to get social problems when you corral people who are used to a lot of space into what amounts to a zoo enclosure.
Had a few native Taiwanese students over the years. I just treated them the same as everyone else. No big deal. I remember one Bunan kid who struggled in class. Mind you, English was his fourth language after Bunan, Taiwanese and Mandarin. Imagine the poor guys confusion. A little empathy goes a long way.
My only experience in Canada is when I rode on horseback along the Rocky Mountains with my family and our American friends. When I said aboriginals I referred to aboriginal Taiwanese, or indigenous Taiwanese, since native might cause some confusion here in a foreign forum, meaning ones’s local. I know nothing about Canada or any other indigenous people from out side of Taiwan.
Aborigine is probably just autocorrect… I have really bad typing manners. I don’t type the whole word and I spell them wrong and I have fat fingers so even I spell them write I type them wrong… Here, I just spelled “spell” with soell and let it autocorrected to spell… sometimes I typed ” of” instead of “in” and I don’t even know how that happened. and when I don’t know how to spell it I use voice input. I suck at spelling. Just suck at it.
I’ve taught an indigenous kid before in class, but only for a short period. He never put his shoes on right. wears them like Sandals and never tie the shoe laces. I was mad at him because it’s dangerous. He never followed my instructions to put on his shoes. One day he finally told me that his shoes were too small. I’ve never get to peak into this part of world before and was embarrassed by my ignorance. I finally told him that it’s okay to were his shoes like sandals but he has to put them on right when getting on/off the school bus and walking the stairs ( we got really narrow and uneven stairs at the school). He never listened. Well, to be fair, I’ve never seen him fall, so… why not just let him be.
Otherwise he’s just like every other kid. Cute, Naïve, and clueless as any other students I’ve got there. I got han Taiwanese with much more problems than this kid. So I don’t see them as different. I just don’t like it when some people dislike them and assume they’ll just suck at school and getting a job.
There’s some good (?) stereotypeing here. Most people don’t think aboriginals are dumb. They think those kids are smarter than han people, they just don’t study. My indigenous classmates from my school times were all pretty smart. Of course I can’t speak for all of them. ( there, I just typed “soeak if”, and I have to manually correct them myself) sometimes I myself wonder why I go to school. This is probably just more confusing to them, since they’ve got a different culture.
And what I feel about them also applies to special education or any form of education. I don’t feel like education has to be what it is right now. You know, Why is it that kids have to adjust to school, not schools adjusting to them? I think more human factors should be considered in education. Things we got here in Taiwan doesn’t feel so educating to me. It’s more like, I don’t know, worker training centers? They don’t encourage thinking here. If my students don’t like school I’d be just fine, as long as their parents leave us alone, of course I’d be fine with that if my students could tell me why they don’t like it, or how we can do better? If they can make some sense outta it we’re good. IMO, education should encourage thinking, not memorizing and ass kissing.
Residential schools in Canada ended in the 1990s. This is not ancient history (though judging from your posts you don’t seem especially curious about any form of history, ancient or otherwise).
Plus what hansioux said above. There’s lots of work to be done right now.
Guy
“Why is it that kids have to adjust to school, not schools adjusting to them? I think more human factors should be considered in education. Things we got here in Taiwan doesn’t feel so educating to me. It’s more like, I don’t know, worker training centers? They don’t encourage thinking here.”
That statement really struck me. The schools here are not adjusting to them. This is what indicates how education in Taiwan and the rest of Northeast Asia is most based on teacher centered learning and not student centered learning. How do you expect students to learn to develop their own minds to think for themselves when they are not learning to be critical thinkers? Not to mention the how this effects the Indigenous students integrated into a mainly Han-Taiwanese school system. How can you engage these students when the public school system is not adjusting to the learning needs for Indigenous students?
Read anything by Maria Montessori and you will notice that there’s at least a hundred years of educational reformers telling the world that schools in their current state suck. Yet we continue to things how they’ve been done for centuries.
I grew up in the US being taught that “we’re all one human race” and “race doesn’t matter”. Yikes did that come back to bite the ed system. My “world history” class in high school would have literally made you believe that the world began in 1492, Africa’s sole history was Europeans taking over, and that Japan and China didn’t exist until 1937, Vietnam came into existence in 1954. And I went to a school that’s ranked in the top 10 of the state for decades.
Come to Taiwan and they just learn “facts” to spit back out on their tests. While our social studies curriculum sucked from a “broad perspective” standpoint, at least I had teachers who would force us to question 100% of what we were taught and what came out of our own mouths. “If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention” was a pretty common quote on the wall in a lot of those classrooms.
I do wish Taiwanese kids could learn more about the actual history of their actual geographical land instead of the “Middle Kingdom’s empire”. Would give them perspective. Also supporting the indigenous cultures instead of making a tourist attraction out of them.
Exactly. And even in the 90’s, most Canadians were completely clueless about them. Iirc religious sex abuse scandals did enter mainstream consciousness by the end of that decade or at least sometime in the next one, but the first ones to get attention were in urban areas, not faraway places where kids were beaten for speaking their mother tongues and all that.
As for an “industry”, it’s true that some lawyers have made money from the residential schools fallout, but beyond that, what industry would you be talking about?
As for land ownership, that’s an ongoing issue in NA because aboriginal title does, in some cases, still exist, i.e. it was never extinguished or sold, but it was barely recognized until recently, and figuring out who owns exactly which pieces of land is complicated.
To put it otherwise: this past is not past.
Guy
I want more elaboration about teaching EFL to Indigenous Taiwanese.
Frankly, I strongly doubt that the Mandarin-English bilingual program
would work for Indigenous students. But how about EFL? How is their level of basic conversational English in comparison to the average Taiwanese student?
For students who have learned through the Taiwanese educational system, fairly low, as its taught as an academic subject, and aboriginal kids do comparatively poorly in school. As for outside teaching, it’s okay, being aware that anybody who can send their kids to a buxiban is already doing fairly well financially.
I’ve taught mostly National high school kids in Taitung, where the city population is 30% Aboriginal, county 40%, and I’d say very few classes are 10%. Because of (horrors) affirmative action, it’s a little higher in the academic high schools.