CHAPTER 1- INTRODUCTION
1.2 PURPOSE
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Land does not just matter in Taiwan but in all nations because lands traditionally owned by local communities are a common resource. Respect for the land's traditional stewards has inspired me to advocate in international indigenous legal issues,
indigenous politics, and public policy initiatives. Issues of development are of common concern to all because they put humankind at risk. How societies choose to understand the struggles of indigenous people will be the foundation for the future.
1.2 PURPOSE
The primary purposes in this research are very simple. First of all, this thesis aspires to reveal the results of a collective voice by the community members who contribute to, sacrifice for, protest against decades of the mining development in the Nan’ao river basin. From the published and unpublished data, face-to-face interviews, all the information proved their unshakable commitment, relentless dedication and persistent struggle, facing with the mega development. This struggle should have been seen, and uncovered to the public. Secondly, this research would like to increase the possibility of greater engagement, deliberative dialogue, and wide-ranging
collaboration between indigenous people and the public because I always believe that through those mechanism and forum, we can improve the bleak situation brighter together!
INTRODUCTION
“We (Atayal people) didn't pay too much attention when the bulldozer came into our land because we think he's just tidying up the land. We didn't expect them (miner) to dig harder and wider. They even blew up the mountains at
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night. That's time when we found the problem is significant. At first we didn't care, because we didn't know anyone would destroy the land like this”.1
In Taiwan, the number of social movements related to political-environmental impacts linked to the extractive activities has increased remarkably in recent decades.
At the international level, the International Council on Minerals and Metals (ICMM) view these conflicts as problems of governance: emerging as a result of ill-designed policies in place for the distribution of revenues, formal political participation,
transparency, and employment rate. In the other words, the international organizations consider the conflict originates because few communities benefit economically from resource extraction, few are consulted in decision-making processes and most are under-represented in employment in the industries that exploit their traditional territory.
The governance approach, however, does not take into account the history of marginalization and resistance, and the permanence of colonial patterns of
domination. They attribute their marginalization to their colonial and postcolonial experiences of being forcibly and coercively assimilated into the colonial and postcolonial state. The succeeding regimes shared the same policies with regard to indigenous peoples: to assimilate and to integrate them into the national body politics.
As a consequence, most policy proposals are biased, reinforcing the current extractive governance by assuming that all conflicts can be managed and solved within the boundaries of the political economy of extraction. However, the collective voice of
1 Interview conducted by the author with YK on July 09, 2017.
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Nan’ao villages perceive large-scale mining as detrimental to their indigenous way of life and environment.
Extractive governance indicates the institutional configuration that justify and legitimize extractivism2. Actors in the system are political actors involved in making decisions that affect the collective social and environmental value. (Coumans, 2011) Extractivism is connected to important development projects. But most profoundly, this political economy expresses the permanence of a colonial model of accumulation based on dispossession, exploitation, and discrimination. Forest, water, and mineral resources continue to be the primary target of rapidly expanding investments and
‘development’ projects that leads to the dispossession of the local communities. “The reckless pursuit of progress are the basic cause of the continuing destruction of indigenous peoples” (Bodley, 1975).
The long term effects of colonialism have been not just lead to the land dispossession; it rather encompasses the dispossession of self-sufficient economy, egalitarian societies, diet, education, high level of unemployment rate. In addition, the imposition of identities which the state enforces on the people. This is the state makes an identity which attach them to major developmental goals. By conducting this strategy, the state not just denies indigenous ontologies but also creates the local faction and conflict within the communities. Indigenous peoples express a different political ontology because their worldviews or cosmologies contain a different
2 Extractivism is the process of extracting natural resources from the Earth to sell on the world market.
It exists in an economy that depends primarily on the extraction or removal of natural resources that are considered valuable for exportation worldwide.
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conceptualization of the relation between human beings and the natural environment.
For the Atayal people of Nan’ao, land itself embodies culture, relationships,
ecosystem, social organization and law. People lived in a reciprocal relationship with the land: they nurtured the land through following the words of ancestors and through proper observance to the nature. The land in return through healthy reproduction of natural species essential for survival. In addition to bearing the imprint of ancestral norms: gaga, Atayal identity is marked by their sense of place.
This paper responds to these issues, broadening understanding of the dynamics and the foundations of indigenous peoples’ resistance to extractive activities. It suggests that many political-environmental conflict that involve indigenous peoples do not derive from problems of ‘governance’, but more profoundly, the deviation that transcend the current governance approaches and express different political
ontologies. As the conceptual differences over land partly revealed, the two parties operate within institutional parameters and socio-cultural systems which have nothing in common. “The contention between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rests in fact on paradigmatic contradictions of which the poles are, priori, logically irreconcilable”
(Salee, 1995). The premises of extractivism model undermines and marginalizes indigenous identities, socioeconomic organization and political practices.
This argument is developed firstly by analyzing through the literature review.
The study looks into extractive governance discourse and the increase in political-environmental discontent, and the probe into the Model of Social and Environmental Value Governance Ecosystem and the Sustainable Juruti Model that explain these
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conflicts as problem of ‘governance.’ In the third and fourth chapter, the study is to trace the nexus between states, mining corporations and communities during the development of mega extractive projects under the framework of contested
development and internal colonization. Looking into the colonialist theory, we know that the internal colonialism places the critical role to understand the conundrum. I begin by briefly describing indigenous societies that encounter to colonization, providing a background to the overall situation of Atayal peoples. The article subsequently focuses on the case of the Taiwan, Nan’ao and the Atayal territorial struggles in the Nan’ao River basin in order to explain how important political-environmental struggles are located beyond the extractive governance.
In the fifth chapter, the evolution of resistance to large-scale mining in Nan’ao, Taiwan manifests increased local-level opposition to mining. Fifty years ago,
communities were more likely to be receptive. Now, potentially affected community members are increasingly opposing mining activity before it starts to continue.
However, even as community members and locally elected officials urgently articulate reasons for opposing mining activity that include protection of local-level security and future economic development. Mining industry associations,
governments and mining companies increasingly assert positive local development outcomes associated with mining, while emphasizing the need for increased local-level benefit sharing.
Finally, the article critically assesses the governance perspective and explores the meaning and potential of indigenous political ontologies. As important as it is to
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understand how modern state, especially liberal political theory is implicated in the jurisdiction of colonialism, it is even more important to determine whether this complex tradition of thought might provide space for the contemporary aspirations of indigenous peoples. Typically, these have included claims for the return of traditional lands, the preservation of culture, and the right as well as the means to exercise effective self-government. Indigenous peoples’ claim to prior and continued
sovereignty over their territories question the source and legitimacy of state authority.