| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 地理學系 === 104 === The mountain areas of northern Taiwan belong to the traditional territory for living of the Tayal people. Since the invasion by the modern state forces, it has been included within the boundary of the national state governance. The autonomous spaces of the Tayal people have gradually declined. Their traditional environmental and geographical knowledge about their living surroundings have gradually been excluded and replaced by modern scientific knowledge and power that the state and society rely on. The Tayal people maintain traditional environmental knowledge and conduct their inheritance, adaptation and transformation for needs of contemporary daily life including modern ecological economic development. Guarding knowledge and its spatiality of indigenous traditional territory beyond the foreign national conservation/development, they move in time-space slits of national governance and continue to exercise traditional environmental knowledge and territory rights such as hunting and gathering while relying on traditional environmental knowledge.
In this paper, I will take the Tayal peoples’ struggle for the inheritance of environmental knowledge and the reconstruction of autonomous spaces in the basin of River Papak Waqa as an example, to explore how to practice decolonizing knowledge, rights and spatialities, and do reflect on how national state, society and indigenous peoples could construct decolonizing spaces, as well as their correspondent knowledge transformations. xample, to ethe nation state governance is attempt to integrate environmental knowledge of fixed spatiality that conservation and development distinct by functional zoning, and to incorporate and erase indigenous diversified and dynamic spatialities of traditional territory, Tayal people have been engaging in re-adapting local sustainable knowledgies generated from long-term human-land interactions. Thus the decolonizing environmental knowledge and its spacialities have been created.
Between the national governance of forests and mountains, and the daily life practice of Tayal traditional territory, many conflicts occur. When this happens, the oppressed knowledge and rights appear, shaping the spaces of resistance for Tayal people. The universality of modern scientific knowledge and the exclusivity of the powers of nation-state governance have been constructing the colonizing knowledge and powers are used to rationalize the bullying of indigenous knowledge and rights.
Since indigenous peoples have been assimilated into nation state governance, they are often forced to recognize their own living spaces from maps made from the perspective of the colonial powers. They are also forced to place and represent themselves using the perspective of the invaders. Thus has the configuration of colonial cultural landscape been shaped. In the context of contemporary indigenous movements about land and cultural restoration, indigenous peoples realize that, they must make their own maps in order to redefine and relocate their own living spaces. In recent years, indigenous community mapping has been prevalent. Indigenous community mapping is not only a way to appeal the land rights, but also a way to decolonize cultural landscapes. As mapping having been a tool of landscape representation, how to do that, not only related to the political power struggle, but also include struggling of cultural differences and competition. This paper will also take a Tayal people’s traditional territory mapping action as an example that are committed to the Tayal traditional way of mapping by chanting, to explore the decolonization implications of cultural landscape construction by indigenous mapping.
In the era of the democratic nation state transformation and increasingly frequent social contact, colonial ethnic inequalities gradually fade. From cultural thinking to understand the concept of colonization and decolonization, the Tayal people recognize the ethnic meaning of social and cultural oppression have transformed into differences and conflicts on governance and its associated human-land relationship. But rather refers to indigenous living space governance practices be overridden and substitution by foreign state governance. This situation must return to autonomous indigenous governance. Contemporary Tayal people are looking for the solutions for the way toward decolonization using traditional cultural resources. The ritual practice called sbalay (reconciliation) could find a way to regain power through the process of education/healing/reconciliation, performed with a subjective constructed symbolic action to accumulating energy for the actual decolonizing action at the nation state colonial governance. And its contents shall include within the meaning of truth seeking, responbility clarification, compensation, reconciliation, equality restoration and mutual benefit relationship. That is about repairing the unequal power relationships between state and indigenous peoples, the practices of transformative justice about the issues of spatiality, historicity, and sociality.
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