This article argues that colonialism needs to be explicitly foregrounded in analyses of urban processes in settler colonial cities. Urban settler colonialism is an ongoing process that affects urban indigenous subjects, a force that builds on the longue durée of settler colonialism that has dispossessed them for centuries.
My article draws on ethnographic research conducted with a group of indigenous Pangcah/Amis people who have migrated to the Taipei region in Taiwan over the last forty years. While paying attention to the long history of settler colonialism on the island and specifically in the Taipei region-the erasure of indigenous Ketagalan heritage in northern Taiwan, indigenous land dispossession in rural villages, and a consequent post-WWII influx of indigenous people into Taipei, and the displacement of urban indigenous squattersettlements since the 1990s-I will ethnographically focus on a group of indigenous public housing residents who have continued to face urban settler colonialism. I discuss how they have negotiated with surveillance and policing from their on-site housing management team, charges of incivility from Han state agents and neighbors, and displacement from urban redevelopment.
The city is often understood as the antithesis of Indigeneity. In Taiwan, a settler colony where the Han Chinese have colonized Austronesian Indigenous peoples, dominant understandings and representations situate Indigenous vibrancy outside large cities such as Taipei and Kaohsiung, despite the large-scale urbanization of Indigenous peoples over the past several decades. This essay is based on long-term ethnographic research in Taipei and explores how urbanized Indigenous people in the Taiwanese metropolis persist in claiming the city's space, land and ecology despite both cartographic and physical displacements of their presence. It maps out emerging Indigenous and decolonial urbanisms in Taiwan, discussing the work of Indigenous artists and the spatial and ecological practices of urban Indigenous community residents.Many thanks to the people in Taiwan who inspired me to write this essay. I couldn't have completed this without the warm welcome I received from the residents of the three niyaros I discuss in this essay: Icep, Kilang, and Riyar. Although I cannot name each one of them individually, I am deeply indebted to all of them. I thank Chang En-man and Panai Runie Wang for allowing me to write about their great artwork. I thank Stanford University's Anthropology Department and Center for East Asian Studies, the National Science Foundation (Grant #1526940), the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Toyota Foundation (Grant #D14-R-017) for funding my fieldwork in Taiwan between 2014 and 2018. Two fellowships, the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship (2018-2019) and the CEAS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Environmental Humanities at Yale (2019-2020), gave me time to reflect and focus on writing. At Yale, I thank Paul Sabin and Shivi Sivaramakrishnan for their support and encouragement. I presented an earlier version of this essay at Rutgers University's Center for Chinese Studies in 2020. I thank Louisa Schein for the invitation to share my work. Finally, I thank the anonymous IJURR reviewers and other contributors to this collection for strengthening this piece over multiple iterations.
In recent years, Taiwan has seen a surge of interest in the foodways of indigenous Austronesian people. Public and scholarly discourse tends to focus on either indigenous foodways' cultural significance or the healthiness of food items eaten by indigenous people. These two dominant perspectives, however, have obfuscated the issue of labor. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban indigenous community in the Taipei region, this article addresses what I call risky labor behind the maintenance of indigenous foodways today, especially in urban contexts where many indigenous people have settled over the last forty years. It discusses two forms of risky labor: (1) the gendered labor of urban indigenous women who acquire food items by encroaching upon state and private properties and (2) the intellectual labor of urban indigenous people who share knowledge about indigenous foodways with nonindigenous Han Chinese urbanites.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.