The Indigenous Land Rights Movement and Embodied Knowledge in Taiwan

Abstract

Since the 1980s, riding on the tide of Taiwan’s democratic opening, the indigenous peoples in Taiwan waged waves of social movements to fight against Han domination, land loss, and cultural marginalization. These movements successfully achieved the goals of name correction, political reform, and a change of state policy from assimilation to multiculturalism. However, indigenous social movements also inadvertently widened class gaps between different sectors of the indigenous communities due to their urban elitism and lack of grass-root work. This article will examine a problem less discussed before, namely indigenous land rights movement’s tendency to draw discourses from global indigenism at the expense of a form of embodied, place-based knowledge that figures significantly in local indigenous cultures. Tracing the development of the so-called “root-searching activities” and how they gained a new relevance when indigenous communities attempt to make land claims over their traditional territory through counter mapping practices, this article suggests that more efforts should be made to incorporate embodied knowledge into indigenous peoples’ fight for restorative justice.