Abstract
Since the advent of the vernacular Bibles for the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples (TIP), the TIP Christians are privileged to read and hear the Word of God in their ‘ancestral tones’ with familiarity and attachment. Sediq people, the nation the author belongs to, have also been privileged from the publication of the vernacular Bible. Most Sediq people are welcoming this vernacular Bible and feel blessed to use their ancestor’s language to communicate with God. However, the scarcely discussed issues are that the biblical reading and interpretive approaches employed by the Sediq people are distinctive. Namely, Sediq people’s vernacular involves Sediq’s cultural resources-philology, traditional narratives, traditional stories, cultural meanings, traditional philosophies and worldviews-into the interaction with the contents and stories of the vernacular Bible. This paper argues the significance of embracing vernacular as a foundation for biblical reading, how this acceptance shifts the role of the vernacular Bible and how this approach contributes to the contextual, decolonial and postcolonial reflections on the TIP’s land issues by reading 1 Kings 21:3, one of the verses that resonating TIP’s ancestral and cultural wisdom. Keywords: Sediq People, Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, land issues, ancestral philosophies
Highlights
Since the vernacular Bible in Sediq1 was published and has been used in the Sediq church as of 2012, Sediq people have been empowered and encouraged to read the Bible with the mother tongue.2 Most Sediq people are welcoming this vernacular Bible for they feel blessed to use their ancestor’s dialects to communicate with God
The scarcely discussed issues are that the biblical reading and interpretive approaches employed by the Sediq people are distinctive
This paper argues the significance of embracing vernacular as a foundation for biblical reading, how this acceptance shifts the role of the vernacular Bible and how this approach contributes to the contextual, decolonial and postcolonial reflections on the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples (TIP)’s land issues by reading 1 Kings 21:3, one of the verses that resonating TIP’s ancestral and cultural wisdom
Summary
Since the vernacular Bible in Sediq was published and has been used in the Sediq church as of 2012, Sediq people have been empowered and encouraged to read the Bible with the mother tongue. Most Sediq people are welcoming this vernacular Bible for they feel blessed to use their ancestor’s dialects to communicate with God. He comments that Naboth’s refusal represents political meaning that is associated with people’s rights and land theologies that are based on awe toward God.. Yuhaw ponders the indigenous(mostly Tayal tribe) land ethics and argues several theological and ethical insights: reading Old Testament stories as a means to appreciate the relationship between TIP and the land, forest environments as the area where indigenous peoples hunters embody the “hunting ethics”, the cycles of four seasons sustain indigenous fellow’s notion and ethics of respecting the land and the heaven, the wisdom of mutualistic symbiosis that supports indigenous intense land identity and the taking land theologies drawn from Naboth’s story as a testimony and witness of indigenous people’s land suffering and environmental exploitation. It is the step that the Sediq mother tongue rereading approach will be employed to further destabilize the interpretative lenses and hope to produce new contextual and postcolonial reflections
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