Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to explore how indigenous peoples in Taiwan negotiate claims to land and autonomy within the nation-state by analyzing the Bunun's movement to reclaim their traditional territory through embodied engagement with ancestral entities.

Paper long abstract:

The delineation of Indigenous Peoples' traditional territory is a highly contested political issue in Taiwan. On February 18, 2017, the Council of Indigenous Peoples decided to exclude all private lands from being designated indigenous territories. The exclusion has sparked heated debate, and a group of indigenous activists have staged a "sleepout" protest for several months on Ketagalan Boulevard down the street from the Presidential Office Building since February 23, 2017. According to the demonstrators, the policy is tantamount to letting large corporations arbitrarily develop lands that would otherwise be protected as traditional indigenous territories. The notions that indigenous peoples have natural sovereignty over their traditional territories, and they are the best custodians of land who can resist the encroachment of capitalist invasion, are central to their rhetoric of protest. The somewhat romanticized notion that indigenous peoples are the moral guardians of land is inspired by global indigenism. However, under the larger trend of indigenism and identity politics, differences between various indigenous peoples' concepts of land and land tenure system have been ignored, and socio-cultural contexts unattended, thus producing a simplified and essentialized indigeneity. This paper will attempt to provide a more nuanced analysis of how the indigenous peoples in Taiwan negotiate claims to land, livelihood, and autonomy within the nation-state by investigating the Bunun's movement to reclaim their traditional territory through embodied engagement with ancestral entities. By attending to land as a cosmopolitic axis of sociality, we can move beyond a reified construction of indigeneity.