EATS Young Scholar Awards – Ipiq Matay

About my PhD project : We Are All Threads: Indigeneity, Culture and Heritage

My presentation for the Young Scholar Awards builds on my MRes dissertation, We Are All Threads: Indigeneity, Culture, and Heritage, which examines the maintenance and transmission of Truku (one of the Indigenous groups in Taiwan) identity. The metaphor of threads runs through the dissertation, suggesting that identity, memory, and heritage are not fixed but are dynamic processes, continuously woven and rewoven through relationships, time, and practice.

In the context of Indigenous cultural revitalisation in the contemporary world, the metaphor of thread also reflects how Truku identity has become woven into a broader, hybrid fabric across temporal and spatial contexts, from the recognition and increasing collective visibility of Taiwan’s sixteen Indigenous groups to the growing global Indigenous rights movement. Indigeneity, therefore, is not a question of static heritage but an ongoing, active weaving process.

Building on my MRes dissertation, my PhD project explores what happens when “heritage”—as a discourse, a knowledge system, and a set of institutions and practices—encounters Indigenous people. The focus of my research is situated at the intersection of global cultural heritage legislation and Indigenous recognition movements in Taiwan. In focuses on the Truku people.

Building on my own life experiences and prior research as an Indigenous Truku weaving practitioner, my PhD project will examine how institutional heritage discourses and practices function in contemporary Truku society, and how Truku people respond to them in the context of cultural revitalisation efforts.

I approach this topic through Truku weaving, which I use as both a focal point and an embodied research method to investigate how Truku identity and cultural practices have been affected by incorporation into global discourses of heritage and indigeneity, particularly how these discourses are interpreted, negotiated, and experienced across generations. Although its patterns have become increasingly visible in Taiwan and internationally as a symbol of Indigenous Taiwanese culture, within Truku epistemology, weaving is an embodied practice through which knowledge is transmitted, lived, and grounded in gaya. A Truku term for morals, customs, and norms rooted in ancestors’ words, gaya functions as an intergenerational knowledge system, as well as a set of regulations embedded in ritual social relations. It also functions as cultural, divine, and sacred practice, and as ancestral law negotiated and enacted within social relations and religious practice.

The Truku have endured considerable cultural upheaval under five centuries of colonial rule. They have experienced forced relocation, violent suppression, coerced assimilation, and Western missionary influence, and ongoing state-driven classification and recognition processes. Through historical displacement, colonial forced relocation, and Indigenous movement, Truku identity has been shaped by collective historical experiences. Gaya-based knowledge has thus transformed across generations, and weaving knowledge and traditions have been lost, reshaped, and adapted to changing historical and social conditions.

In recent decades, considerable efforts have been made by younger Truku people, NGOs, and government actors to protect, revive, and transmit Truku weaving as a marketable cultural resource, that is, as “heritage.” These developments are received and interpreted differently across generations of Truku people. My project asks: which Truku weaving traditions persist across generations? In what forms, languages, and contexts? Why, and with what effects? What can the case of Truku weaving tell us about indigeneity, intergenerational change, and cultural politics in the contemporary world?

The term Indigenous peoples in Taiwan is historically constructed and politically shaped by Japanese colonial and Han settler legacies. It has been reframed through processes of postcolonial Taiwanese domestic political shifts, and the influence of international Indigenous rights discourses, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Thus, indigeneity in Taiwan has emerged through the interaction between local political transformation and transnational Indigenous movements.

While Indigenous identity has emerged through political shifts and social movements, as well as Indigenous individual agency. Indigenous cultural heritage has become another important mechanism that makes Indigenous culture visible and produced. In 2016, former president Tsai Ing-wen issued an official apology to Indigenous peoples, alongside revisions to the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act drawing on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Conservation. Importantly, Indigenous cultural assets gained legal recognition, shifting Indigenous culture from marginalisation to celebration.

What constitutes Indigenous cultural heritage? How is it interpreted? How is it accepted and understood not only by Indigenous people but also by the public? This project adopts Truku weaving as both a method and a site to examine how being and becoming are negotiated and contested. Rather than seeing Indigenous weaving as a representation or heritage preservation, this project asks how weaving carries relationships, memories, and affects across generations and beyond.

Hence, this project adopts weaving as a methodology and Truku weaving as a method and analytical framework. In Truku, weaving is called tminun, a verb and an ongoing process that relates to the people who participate, to natural resources connected to the land, to the process by which body, material, and tool correspond with one another, and to social relations, kinship, and ancestral and spiritual passages. In this sense, tminun is relationality, a worldview.

Weaving is approached not merely as an object of study but also as sites and processes of knowledge production, where identity, memory, and heritage are continuously constructed through practice.