As previously mentioned, at an early stage, Taiwanese indigenous people and Austronesian culture have been considered major exhibition topics of the Museum.65 Since the founding of the Museum of Prehistory were closely connected with the discovery of the Peinan site, it is worth considering what role Taiwanese indigenous people played for the organizers in the museum planning and in the design of the permanent exhibition. The question whether Taiwanese prehistoric culture and indigenous people were connected, has been the subject of discussion by researchers since the Japanese occupation period in the first half of the twentieth century.66 While from an archeological standpoint, the two issues might, to a certain extent, be related to each other, the relationship between Taiwanese prehistoric culture and indigenous people cannot definitely be proved. According to the latest research results, at least
65 See note 63 in my chap. 3, concerning the Museum of Prehistory as an institution.
66 Yi-Chang Liu, “Prehistory and Austronesians in Taiwan–An Archeological Perspective,” in:
Austronesian Taiwan: Linguistics, History, Ethnology, Prehistory, Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 2009, pp. 368–371.
until the establishment of the museum, there is no definitive evidence whether Taiwanese prehistoric people are the ancestors of present day indigenous people.67
The term Austronesian refers to a family of languages, which are widespread from Madagascar to the Easter Islands, and particularly in insular Southeast Asia and extending southward to New Zealand; Taiwan is situated at the northernmost point of this geographical region (fig. 37).68 As an exception, the offshore island Lanyu (Chinese: 蘭嶼; Orchid Island) belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages.
Otherwise, most of the indigenous people in Taiwan speak Formosan languages. The Malayo-Polynesian and Formosan languages are the major branches of the Austronesian language family.69 Despite the fact that the origins of the Taiwan aborigines are debatable, from a linguistic point of view, it is uncontested that Taiwanese indigenous people belong to the Austronesian language family.70 The correlation between the two, thus, explains the reason why the National Museum of Prehistory has associated the subject matters of the local indigenous people with Austronesian studies as neighboring exhibition topics.
With a total of 565,561 people by the end of 2018, the sixteen officially recognized native tribes of Taiwan represented 2.4% of the island’s total population.71 Compared to the Han Chinese, Taiwanese indigenous peoples have always been a minority as well as a relatively underprivileged group, even though they inhabited the island long before the Han immigrants arrived. In Taiwan, the indigenous rights movement began in the early 1980s, when the country was still under martial law.72 From a chronological viewpoint, it can be observed that the indigenous rights movements and the Museum of Prehistory had developed almost simultaneously.
Core objectives of the movement were land claims, rectification of their designation,
67 Liu (as note 66), in: Ibid., pp. 373–381.
68 David Blundell, “A Century of Research: Austronesian Taiwan, 1897–1997,” in: Ibid., p. 9.
69 Ibid.; Paul Jen-Kuei Li, “Formosan Language: The State of the Art,” in: Austronesian Taiwan:
Linguistics, History, Ethnology, Prehistory, Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 2009, pp. 46–47.
70 Li (as note 69), p. 47; Paul Jen-Kuei Li, “tai wan tu zhuo zhu min zu de lai yuan–cong yu yan zheng ju tui lun,” in: tai wan nan dao min zu de zu qun yu qian xi, rev. ed., Taipei: Avanguard, 2011, pp. 17–
51. 李壬癸，〈台灣土著民族的來源—從語言的證據推論〉，《台灣南島民族的族群與遷徙》，
台北：前衛出版社，2011，頁 17–51。The article was first published in the Continent Magazine 59, No. 1, 1979, pp. 1–14 after having been presented at a linguistic conference in April 9, 1979.
71 Department of Statistics, Ministry of the Interior, retrieved from:
https://www.moi.gov.tw/chi/chi_site/stat/news_detail.aspx?sn=15632 (accessed on May 19, 2019).
72 The lifting of the martial law was announced in July 14, 1987 as becoming effective from the following day. Information retrieved from the Laws & Regulations Database of the Republic of China:
https://law.moj.gov.tw/LawClass/LawHistory.aspx?pcode=A0000016 (accessed on November 23, 2018).
and self-government. Since the museum uses the term “indigenous” people regarding its permanent exhibition, the historical background of the term will briefly be reviewed in the following paragraph.
Taiwanese indigenous people were classified as either shengfan (Chinese: 生番), which means “off the reservation” or shoufan (Chinese: 熟番), meaning “tamed” or, to put it more precisely, “Sinicized barbarians” during the rule of the Qing Dynasty.73 When Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule, indigenous people were at the beginning also called fan (Chinese: 蕃) and later renamed Takasagun (Japanese: タカ サグン; Chinese: 高砂族).74 After the National Government had retreated from the mainland to Taiwan, indigenous people were called shanbao (Chinese: 山胞), meaning “mountain compatriots.”75 Many of these terms were coined in a Han parochial attitude toward the native people of the island. The increase of the indigenous people’s self-awareness and cultural identity prompted the rectification of their designation to correct the term to “Indigenous People.”
In 1991, the first amendment of the Constitution of the Republic of China was promulgated. This was also the time when indigenous groups tried to enact the law of the name rectification.76 Although they did not succeed at the first time, it was officially promulgated in the ROC Constitution of 1994.77 The Museum of Prehistory was being redesigned at that time. Moreover, the planning exhibition design was also processing at that time, and as mentioned, it was intimately associated with regionalism. Consequently, Taiwanese Indigenous people not only became an exhibition topic; the design of the museum, according to the architect, too, was inspired by aboriginal culture at a certain point. In this respect, it can be observed that the indigenous rights movement was not only flourishing parallel to the development of the museum, but the political results might have also exercised an influence on the design of the museum.
73 Sheng-Hsiu Chiu and Wen-Yu Chiang, “Representations of the Name Rectification Movement of Taiwan Indigenous People: Through Whose Historical Lens?,” in: Language and Linguistics 13, No. 3, 2012, p. 530.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., p. 531.
76 Siu-Theh Lim, et al. (eds.), tai wan yuan zhu min zu zheng ming yun dong zheng fu ti zhi wen xian shi liao hui bian, Taipei: Council of Indigenous Peoples, 2016, pp. 5–6. 林修澈等編，《臺灣原住民 族正名運動政府體制文獻史料彙編》，台北：原住民委員會，2016，頁 5–6。
77 Ibid., pp. 5, 6, 8.