To Our Readers; Introduction: Indigenous Asias

Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender

“…An Asian colonizer is still a colonizer: after all, "from the ancestral memory perspective of the original inhabitants of territories that have been overrun and dominated by settler populations, the question of whether a colonizer was Euro-American or from yet another empire is largely immaterial." 51 The violence of the Hundred Year War is manifold. The Air Nomad genocide left Air Temples abandoned; the war against the Water Tribes includes the insidious violence of cultural genocide through the deliberate project of killing all waterbenders, the keepers of traditional knowledge; in the Earth Kingdom the heroes encounter examples of franchise colonialism for the extraction of natural resources, but also the logic of elimination since villages are murdered and repopulated with Fire Nation civilians.…”

‘We’re Not Indigenous. We’re Just, We’re Us’: Pacific Perspectives on Taiwan’s Austronesian Diplomacy

“…Because Taiwan's indigenous languages are included in and the potential source of the Austronesian language group, in the 1990s, the term Austronesia(n) was adopted in Taiwan. Austronesian linguistic connections were first mobilised by indigenous peoples to contest the erasure of their languages and cultures by the Kuomintang (KMT), a ruling party that moved from mainland China to Taiwan in the 1940s, imposed martial law and saw Taiwan as the legitimate seat of the Chinese Government and nothing more (see Dvorak and Tanji 2015;Munsterhjelm 2014:28 ). Yet, Mona's use of the phrase Austronesian ethnicity diplomacy suggests tension in how the term Austronesia(n) has been adopted to conceptualise relations with the Pacific.…”