Claiming Taipei's land, nature, and housing : indigeneity and the state in a settler colonial city
Keywords: Anthropology.

Taiwan is a settler colonial society built on the continuous displacement of natives by settlers. Since the end of Kuomintang authoritarianism in 1987, the Taiwanese state has begun to embrace multiculturalism and to pursue reconciliation with Austronesian indigenous peoples (yuanzhumin), after centuries of successive colonializations by the Spanish, Koxinga, the Dutch, the Qing Dynasty, Japan, and the Kuomintang and two waves of settlement by people from China. However, even after the government has reimagined yuanzhumin as important, recognized members of Taiwanese society, contestations over land, nature, resources, and infrastructure between the settler state and natives have not ceased. This dissertation ethnographically examines indigenous-state relations in the Taipei region since the 1990s. While Taipei was built by displacing the native Ketagalan tribe, the massive post-WWII influx of yuanzhumin from other parts of Taiwan has again turned this settler colonial city into a site of intense conflicts between urbanized natives and the now supposedly multicultural state. Settlements built on public land by indigenous Pangcah/'Amis (ameizu) migrants from eastern Taiwan have been especially such sites of disputes, since claims made by their residents span the realms of land, nature, and shelter. Based on long-term ethnographic research in two such indigenous communities in the Taipei region, I follow how Pangcah/'Amis people have built huts, houses, and large-scale settlements on riverbanks and hillsides; how they have persistently appropriated urban public land so that they can engage in gardening and foraging; and how they have claimed urban rivers, which they use for fishing and cultural rituals. Despite officially embracing multiculturalism and indigenous rights since the 1990s, the state has regulated such indigenous claims made to Taipei and violently relocated many urban native settlements to public housing complexes. Even at these relocated sites, however, urbanized yuanzhumin continue to contest the state's attempts to police and displace them, asserting their autonomy and demanding the right to stay in state housing permanently. While the politics of urban space and displacement have been largely analyzed through a Marxist, class-focused lens in urban studies, I argue that the historical and ongoing dominance of the Han Chinese population in Taiwan behooves us to understand the state-led displacement and dispossession of yuanzhumin in Taipei as also shaped by the settler colonial dynamic. I also suggest that these contestations in the Taipei region reveal ongoing debates about what kind of role the still largely Han-dominated state should have in the lives of yuanzhumin in the age of multiculturalism and reconciliation. While urban indigenous people constantly criticize state power, the state also weathers critiques and remains as a site of affective investment among indigenous people in Taiwan, challenging the recent tendency in indigenous and settler colonial studies to analyze indigenous relations to the state as always characterized by "refusal." Through ongoing conflicts, both state agents and native people constantly imagine and re-imagine what kind of relationship between them is just, reasonable, and legitimate.