turn on the recording. And with much joy, I would like to introduce Dr. Erna Lant as our first speaker this year for the CCN PLC. Erna has worked as we were just chatting about in the field of AAC for many years, starting in South Africa and then more coming to, not Canada, coming to the, coming to the United States and doing some work there with Indiana University. I heard Erna talk at ASHA two years ago in LA where she was talking about the work that she was doing on this book, which I love. And I was absolutely smitten by her approach to meaning making and I would say the human side of AAC, sort of the privileging of that. So I am delighted to, I should also say, Erna has a website that has lots of wonderful resources and I did send that out with the list of this. And another claim to fame that she has is she was an SLP for Martin. Pistorius, is am I saying it correctly, Erna? Yes, yes. The, the, the, the, who is the ghost boy and I think many of you have read that book and so that she's, she's done many marvelous things and will continue to do so. Not the least of which would share some of her thoughts and experiences and her perspective with us today. So welcome, Erna. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you, Kathy. It's a real privilege for me to be here and to talk to everybody today. Yes, and just to give you a little bit of an update on Martin Pistorius. I wasn't his SLP, I was his employer. But also, I just recently saw him because I visited him. He lived in the UK in London and it's just outside of London actually. You know, they've got he and Erna as well. I've got a little baby. So I went to see the baby and here are what great joy. In any case, you know, you know, I just wanted to say, you know, very nice to speak to everybody in the beginning of the school year. As some of you might know, I do a work as a consultant in the schools. So I spend my life these days basically going to schools and supporting teachers and therapists in dealing with the kind of challenges that I experience, you know, and over the years, I think before I come to realise that the group of kids that we work with in AAC in particular, really is so diverse and complicated. It is always nice to just have another set of eyes and then to have a sort of collaborative approach to help us solve our problems or at least not necessarily solve them, but find new ways of thinking about that. So that's what I do come and do. You know, really enjoy it a lot. So I really sympathise and I empathise with people who start in the beginning of the new school year with all the frantic activity and getting to know new, sorry, let me just put this off, with new students that one needs to get to know and faculty members, you know, new faculty members that one has to work within school, and not least of all the administrative issues that one needs to deal with and get to know. So it's really easy right in the beginning of the year to feel overwhelmed already in the start of a year. And this presentation that I have for you today is really about the core of what really matters. It's about the quality of our interactions with each other and with the clients that we serve. It's not the frequency of the interaction. It's not about how we communicate with the people that we work with. It's also not how much time we spend with the people that we work with. It really is focused on what happens between us when we interact with each other. You know, it's quite possible for one to go through a whole day of interactions, talking to kids, faculty, sharing very little, home and being really burnt out, even in the beginning of the year. And I think it's very important that we reflect on that and ask ourselves, why do we feel like that? Why don't we recharge during the day? And then also to put ourselves in the shoes of the kids and thinking, what does that feel like when I get home? You know, how much did they experience during the day that actually built them and that created that kind of closeness that adds to our lives? So really, if you listen to and you read my book, I think at the really core of the issue here has got to do with gain. It's got to do with how much do we gain when we're together? How much can we actually grow together? How much can we sort of really enjoy together? Because I believe that those things go very closely together. So as my summary said, you know, I'm going to focus on meaning making and really look at two aspects. The one is the importance of participation. If you can't have a main means of participation, obviously it's very difficult. But we traditionally in speech and language pathology has been very good at focusing on participation, getting people to speak, getting people to take turns, you know, and lengthening and having sort of extending our interaction with each other. So what I'm really dealing with today is not so much how do we communicate, but what happens? And a pivotal part of that is the role of engagement. In other words, how engaged are we when we actually interact with each other? The reason why this is so important is because that's the basis of friendship.  So the goal of today is only two thoughts. The one is to talk about what made this most, the quality of our interaction with our clients, our colleagues and our friends. And as I said, as an AAC therapist, obviously my primary concern here is to out, definitely to our clients who use AAC, but it really is relevant much more generally than that. I think coming to, you know, underline this is also really thinking about whether all this phonetic activity and all these, you know, repetition that we do so frequently with our kids, with all of that really helps us to achieve the goal of getting the kids interested in communicating with us and developing their skill. So doing less often times is more. I want, I just want to put it out there for you to think about because I think it's a very important part of our reflection when it comes to evaluating what we actually contributed to our children's ability to communicate at the end of each year. Mini-making obviously is a very important part, not only to bring people together and create closeness, but it's a vitally important part to encourage me, to entice me to actually get back and talk to you again.  Why would I want to go back and talk to you again? And I think we forget that even with kids, if there is nothing special happening with you and your interaction with a student, then how can we blame them for not really wanting to enter that relationship or that coming for therapy for that angle? So I'm going to talk about what is meaning-making. I'm going to talk about how is meaning-making different from a traditional way of thinking about communication, institutions, teaching here in therapy, and then I'm going to talk about the two important concepts of engagement and participation. Okay, so what is meaning-making? Meaning-making is an approach to intervention that focuses on making sense, okay, on the sense that we make an interaction between us, rather than the structure or the modes of communication that we use. So we really focus on what happens in between us. And a big part of that is uniqueness because we talk about new, nuanced meaning. It basically means it's not a radically new meaning, but it's something that developed between us that's got nuances that's new and therefore makes it special for me to have spoken to you or to interact with you. And then obviously at the bottom of this all is just the quality, the connection, the quality of our interaction and being together with each other. Okay, so to demonstrate this to you, what is new, nuanced meaning? I want you to look at this picture. And okay, so this is a lizard. You get it in South Africa. It is what we call a look-up on, but in America you talk about rock monitors. It's up to six feet long. It is not that it's silly dangerous, but it's got a vicious tail. And it normally lives in trees. It's basically mostly sort of would lie on branches, tea branches, tree branches. So you wouldn't be able to see them. Now, when I show you this picture and I talk to you about this and you walk out of the room, you're probably going to say, okay, well, what's this woman? I mean, like, okay, so fine that was a look-up on or rock monitor, but there's nothing special about it. So you'll probably forget about it the moment you leave the room. However, when I talk to you and I say to you that I recently was in South Africa and I shared three nights in a room with a look-up on like that, then you're going to go, wow, and you're going to start looking at that picture again. And you're going to say, wow, look at that town. What happened? Why would this woman stay for three nights with a look-up on or a rock monitor in a room? You know, does she actually have something to prove or what? So the truth of that story is I only did because I wasn't aware that I was doing it. And in fact, I heard during the night that there was quite a significant noise in my room, but I was so jiggled and I was so sort of set on my cousin telling me that now there's nothing that can get into this house, which I was sleeping on the top floor. There's nothing that can enter this house. And as you might think, I was perfectly willing to be persuaded that that probably is just squirms or something. But I will say it was a very pronounced noise.  And she was saying it's impossible because we cleared all, we stuck all the holes, you know, there's no way that animals could come in. So the second night, same thing, third night, same thing, but I was so jiggled that I actually did turn around and sleep. So once I arrived home, that's when my cousin told me and said, hey, but guess what? When you left, we cleaned it, you know, we had to clean the house and this is what we discovered.  Now, after I told you, I shared that with you, you know, you are much more likely when you walk out of the door and you see a little one, or you see somebody else to say, sure, come look here to show and share what I've in fact shared with you, even though you initially didn't relate to it at all, because it's not something you know. And that is, you know, the core concept of meaning making. It's about shared experience with another. That does not necessarily add a lot of new information and knowledge, but it shares a personal engagement experience because now when you look at that rock monitor, you start thinking what would it be like six feet long to sleep with something like like new room for three nights, not being near that it is there. So meaning making is about experience, the experience that you have with someone of being close to another. And it's about learning to show interest because now for the first time you're starting to look like, oh, look at that tongue. Gosh, oh, you know. And it's also the experience of the power of actually other people listening to you. So it's not just the matter of me listening to you. It's also you listening to me. And for kids, an incredibly important experiential event, because that's how friendships get created. So next time when I see you, you will most probably remember about this. They hate to do it again or whatever. And that's important because that's an impetus to draw us together to start sort of a conversation again. And so it's not just about instruction. I can instruct you about what is a visit and what is a look-up on and how it and it's how big it is. And those are sort of relevant information, but it does not really entice, you know, entice one to actually engage in interaction about it. And this really is the difference between, you know, meaning-making and interaction. Communication is about meaning. It's about shared meaning. And it's about creating that meaning between us in a situation where it didn't previously exist. So this is what we're after. You know, you've got your AAC user, the communication partner, and in the middle is meaning-making. And meaning-making is about not able, only the ability to communicate, sort of using speech, speech output device gestures, but also about engagement. And this is what was the level of personal involvement that you and I shared when we actually interacted with each other. So I'm going to show you this video of a grandfather and his grandchild. I want you to listen very carefully. It's a very short video. And I want you to think about what do you think are the main features, most important features of this interaction between this grandfather and his grandchild. Now, I also need to point out that it's taken in a natural situation at home. So there's lots of distractions similar to a classroom context. That's a normal household context with lots of competing ways. In spite of the context, though, I think for me what's most striking here is the social closeness between the father, the granddad, and his granddaughter. And the fact that they're able to have shared attention within a context is actually quite demanding and very distracting. And I think for me, that's incredibly encouraging because that's how kids learn. Very seldom do we find ourselves in quiet spaces where you can sort of focus on each other, much more likely that we need to create the interest to actually draw each other together in order to start communicating. But it's the focus interest that I think really is of great importance here is just the way in which the granddad talks to his grandchild and the little one looking away but actually being incredibly interested in what the grandfather had to say. So there's joint attention and there's triadic attention because it's between the book and the grandfather and the granddad. So it's not just this kind of interaction. It's really talking about what is in the immediate environment. The other thing I think that's really quite clear here is the slow pace of the interaction to give time to see each other. Quite a bit of time here is taken by the grandfather to actually look at his granddaughter to watch what she's doing. And a lot of watching is done also from the granddaughter in terms of watching the granddad. And for meaning making these are probably some of the most pivotal pointers for us is how keen are we to observe each other in the interaction. The final observation I want to make here is one of playfulness. The grandfather was reading this book and he was saying okay who is this? She was obviously not going to respond. I don't think she knew perhaps she didn't. But then he started throwing out ideas is this really the fish and this was not really the fish. And she responded oh yes and he went with it because there was this playfulness that was between the two of them that is very typical of meaning making. The openness of hmm what are you saying here? I know it's not really the fish but say hey yes for us it's really the fish because that is the uniqueness in the how the uniqueness in the action actually is allowed to develop. Something that did not exist before. I think sometimes we are so set on what is accurate and what isn't that we must out on but does it really matter in this interaction? Because in order to allow for the development of meaning there has to be openness in order to allow for the development of new nuance meaning. So meaning making is not just a cognitive theory. I think that's a very important point to remember. It's not about understanding. It's you cannot equate meaning making with cognitive understanding because it also includes a very important component of emotional resonance. That means the ability to just zoom in and be with someone where they are at not where you think they should be. And this is particularly important you know in all communications but particularly with IAC users because it's so easy to just impose your own position on a student who cannot speak that the art is really not to do that in order to get to know the individual in order to interest him in what you have to offer so that you can really expand visibility to communicate in a meaningful way. So this is just a meme that I thought actually that struck me that I want to see if I can get to it. Okay so that's Freud saying I draw the people feel a fool before understanding it and I think it's true for a lot of interactions when you enter interaction with a kid before you actually start interacting with a student if we can ask ourselves what does the start feel like before actually so sorry I need to get this back up. Okay so meaning making what is it? Meaning making is about sense making. It's about understanding the self and other in an interaction and as I said it's not just perspective taking you know with theory of mind with children with autism etc we become very oriented towards perspective taking taking the role of the other and quite honestly we know it's important we know that it's important for empathetic interactions but it's not all it is empathy is a lot more than that and being able to develop meaning certainly is a lot more than perspective taking. It's about an intersubjective process that involves emotional resonance effective congruence between people so that in fact it ties us together to develop something that would be unique between us. So when I talk about meaning making I'm talking about engagement but part of engagement is a very important part is not only perspective taking because it's also the personal involvement which happens the intersubjective nature of that interaction. So why is meaning making important? It's the basis of our relationship with others stability to not just share messages but construct messages together and to build something in between as that didn't exist before. The need for this in our schools is tremendous you know there's a lot of quite a few reports that came out very recently looking at the social emotional benchmarks of students and where we should focus on really looking at the isolation of children that leads to depression and all you know the different kind of behavioral issues that we have so I really think it's a really critical issue for us to look at is how do we go about facilitating meaning making and interactions between peers and it starts with making sure that we give kids the kind of experience of what meaning making really is about and it starts with our interactions with these students our interaction with the parents so that we can move towards an experiential approach rather than do this do this do this do this which is an instructive type of approach communication is not about instruction it's about experiencing being with people. Okay so there's also this you know couple of articles recently on well-being and I'm going to read this to you because I'm probably pretty touching it was about what I'm rolling through the communication professor that said victory students basically the second paragraph here pay close attention to the habits that you form because before you know it you could have organized yourself in a way that doesn't allow for the kinds of friends that you really would like to have and you really talk there about the time that you take to invest in the quality of the attention that you are prepared to invest in people so three concepts of AIC focused meaning making is then really the issue of participation engagement the fact that there needs to be personal engagement for meaning to develop otherwise you can share you can exchange you can share exchange you can you can share information but you do not develop meaning in a way that something happens between you and the third concept here that's very important is the creative interaction between participation and engagement because it's not a 50-50 you know um engagement of participation is a synthesis is a way sometimes a person can participate a lot and not communicate at all like they could talk a lot sometimes somebody can talk very little but can make some very significant non-verbal cues to keep meaning development is actually quite a high level in fact you sometimes find this in um situations with um adults that lose they like modern year on disease um ALS where people lose their ability but they still sort of really intrude with each other that they can develop quite quite a significant level of meaning between them even though you know the participation of one person could be quite limited okay so participation is something we're very familiar with it's the ability to exchange messages to share with another um and that obviously requires an expressive ability making sure that the individual has a means to communicate has a switch generating device but as I talked earlier to Kathy um it really is the beginning of it it's not it's the beginning of the process of actually getting somebody to engage in communication the real challenge is how to engage the speech generating device and helping the person develop authentic communication with other people participation very often manifests in us you know in our interaction with students is the ability to do with others and to reach goals to participate in our goals for the classroom in teaching literacy and you know all these trials that we do with students that's participation it's based on stimulant response we want to get to learn certain things and understand me well I do think there's a place for that I think what I what we becoming increasingly concerned with is that we do this 80 90 percent of the day of this child's day at school and the child actually gets very little exposure to what really matters for the rest of his life and really impact his learning quite significantly and that his ability or his or her ability to really engage in meaningful interaction with other people engagement then is the ability to be attentive to and respecting of others in interaction it's interesting others it's the ability to take perspective and its emotional resonance the ability to sort of just zoom in and be with that person to to get an idea of where that person is at today and sometimes you know you can enter classroom and immediately get some sense of what's going on in the classroom I think that's incredibly important the same we do when you actually start interacting with one of your students it is this intersubjective component that enables communication partners to listen to each other and really develop meaning between them so as I said before it's this creative synthesis between engagement participation that is really what is important and this is how we think about it so you have participation on the one sort of access and engagement on the other and then we can look at students who are very high participation but really engagement those are the few talkers people who kids who can regard to take a lot of information but actually having great difficulty actually engaging with it at all you also have low participation low engagement where students would be very passive and really not do anything they're not interested but they also don't participate and on the other side you would have high participation high engagement with the students not necessarily talking all the time but he participates in a very appropriate way because he's engaged and he's able to sort of with a high level of engagement participate so his participation in that context is optimal I think what's important here is that frequency of participation is not what this is about it's part of it but the most important thing is also to look at the appropriacy of the interaction of the participation that the person actually displays and then we have low participation high engagement this is a situation where AC users could be because they might not have the ability to participate but they might be although that's not often the case very high engagement somebody like Martin Pistorius might have sort of been in this category when he actually came out of the coal mine started to be actually very aware of what happens you know around him so this is really how we look at it from an assessment point of view and then the issue obviously and and just helping us to understand where on the spectrum can we start sort of placing this job or this person in terms of meaning making so we have engagement participation and in the in the middle there the development of no one's meaning how do the participation the participation of this individual and he's able to do her ability to engage work together to actually sort of entice the development of meaning making between people okay so when you're asking me about no one's meaning i'm saying that's what's unique in an interaction and that doesn't mean to say that in every interaction that you have with somebody you're going to talk about elizabeth or you know anything that extreme no it can be something very short and very sort of common but it's just a different nuance to it you interact with somebody and they put a spin on something that make you smile and that's the beginning of it because that's something that didn't exist when you walked in before and in very impoverished version of that is me coming in saying hello how are you oh i'm fine thank you tonight's day is it's very i mean like the ritual type of interactions that has that's devoid of any personal um of any level of engagement really so this is just to show you that there is depth to this approach because the idea really is that you have different levels of meaning and that these levels are not just cognitive although obviously the cognitive place a significant role but there's a very significant awareness of the level of emotional resonance and being with an individual and it becomes increasing a very important win with young kids like for example the video you saw where the children don't necessarily have the ability to express themselves and we find the same also with aac users okay so the first level is formalistic meaning where everything is formalistic it's the rituals we're very good it's very it is possible to go through a day's work at school really never moving beyond formalistic level one and two the downside of that is you get home incredibly tired because nothing really might seems to you i mean there was never nothing really that to you during the day so level two is literal meaning as we be here now focused um we have exchanges but the exchanges are basically information sharing mostly nothing really anymore you know much more depth in terms of personal involvement level three level four start with extended meaning where you can see these also a more definite understanding on emotive level when in fact these resonance they look at each other uh and then also they are able to to take that understanding that they get from the attention and bring it into the interaction so that the meaning that is developed is actually quite unique and you know engaging for both people and the last level four is versatile meaning which is a very deep level of meaning that could be um reached regardless it's not easy to but you can reach that level of interpersonal meaning when you even though you don't have a lot of expressibility and this very important because for me the basis of looking at the different levels of meaning is to sensitize us to the fact that the ability to not speak or to not express yourself in any whatever the reason might be should be an impetus for us to delve into engagement with that individual in order to sort of really get a reliable uh impression of what that person can do and this really is what the field of AAC is all about so you can mean you can live you can measure the level of meaning making um i'm not going to go into any level of detail on this some of it's in my book those of you are interested are welcome to contact me but this i think is a topic for another day um and there's a scale uh meaning making scale will we start looking at how do you really uh describe participation and engagement in order to plot it on that you know to plot it and get some better idea of how we're progressing but finally i just wanted to talk a little bit about what does this add what does a meaning making approach add to existing intervention efforts you know first of all it's a move away from focus on strategies uh it's not just about strategies we have to know about strategies but really what is important is how do we infuse the strategies that we use into into the existing sort of um experience of meaning making the problem with and not doing it that way is that we use strategies we teach skills we come back we teach them again every time when there's a break there's no carry over this very little sustainability and i think we really need to understand that if we keep on imposing structures in the teaching way on people it really does not encourage them to become to personally get involved and actually use what we're teaching so meaning making is a start a little bit from a different angle it starts with personal involvement and how do i draw that in to start sort of showing interest it's a focus on interface in the subjective process of meaning making some other awareness which we haven't spoken about it's critical importance of observation and listening to the other being present to the other you know they need to be an openness to each other in order to allow for that growth like that grandfather did you know that it wasn't the response that he wanted or that he thought was accurate but you know he was able to take that response from the little one and build on it to expand this experience of togetherness which is so important for that kid to actually experience because that is what's going to bring the little grandmother back to the grandfather the fact that she had fun with him and as i said the the importance of effective the effective dimension it's not just about cognition okay so there's a couple of references i mean basically the references that are used but you're welcome to go on to my website there there might be some more stuff there that might be of interest to those who really related to what i have to say so thank you very much this lovely talking to you oh erna um thank you i um i i can't help but oh there's so many things i but i i can't help to bring it to an experience that i had today when someone was saying how do i help this child who clearly can understand but who doesn't want to use the system and i think the whole emphasis has been on shall i put it this way the accents on the wrong syllable instead of being open to what the child wants to say to be listening to all of the beautiful things that you've said today we have been so intent on um output output as opposed to outcomes and an outcome which could be truly coming into um engagement and coming to a place of meaning making with children who may or may not have devices is i think the the essence of our work and i am so grateful for your talk today to start us off um this this term and this year and um i also can't help but think um and i i'm i'm cautious here because one of the things that came to me is if we could use if we could put your levels in our ipps instead of some of the ways that we think about measuring outcomes um what a potential what potential difference we would have for children and actually and something that you said is really important i think to the level of um so that we wouldn't come home exhausted because we haven't engaged in meaning making with our our students we have been doing something else that is not giving us more energy yeah yeah so um yes i i'm so glad i'm so glad that i asked you to see and you know what the kind of things that you're saying about your experience today is incredibly important i wasn't a class the other day we were starting with an you know including a little one in a classroom and i was struck by charlotte's autism and he is non-verbal but he was interested you know and he wasn't going to tell the teacher that because now he's busy here doing his thing but she was talking and every so often i saw him looking and i was elated because i thought he isn't exactly the right class so afterwards when i was talking to the teacher she was saying to me doesn't want to participate he doesn't this he shouldn't be he looks bad and i said hey hey you know let's relook this i know how do we miss this even right um just to sort of exactly you know accentuate what you're saying our prejudice in only wanting to see one way of his participation you know and it's such a pity because we kill it we kill it there it is i think that's exactly it we kill it we make it into work we make it into something that is the antithesis of what we want it to be um and and i certainly meaning make i wrote writing notes meaning making kids with autism i've had the opportunity to observe in some classrooms lately where kids um had autism and you know they had all these devices but not that was not what was hooking them but they this one child came up to the teacher and did something that i couldn't i i wasn't in their relationship well enough to see what happened or to understand but the next thing you know the teacher was getting something to rub on this child's back that's meaning making that but you know um that's not going to hit on anyone's checklist now although although when the child if the child responded from that with a very challenging b8 or sort of response that would have made it it would have made it yeah honestly goodness that darn kid just didn't react strongly enough yes um anyway so there's just been so many instances in my brain as i have heard you talk today of the critical importance of us um finding out who these children are and taking the taking the time and the and it's it's i i to talk about your idea of either draining or or seek it's not it's not work to do that it doesn't take energy to do that it actually gives you up when you can can do it i think so i'm talking a lot i want to open it up now are there any other folks that have comments or questions or thoughts for urna and the last couple of minutes you can say them on on live or you can put them in the chat well it's also the end of the day one understands that people are tired yeah um oh so so from wendy so here we go um i love the meaning making our system i think our that our system makes it so the focus is on output yes absolutely and and i think i mean for me um this approach this thinking hat dare i say has the opportunity to revolutionize the way we come into being with um our our children students people who communicate in in a multitude of different ways and maybe i'm a little bit more attuned because i too have a grandson and i love you know but but this is it who um there's a lovely quote by michael um williams who talks about his grandfather putting him on his knee and trying to figure out who is this child and i think that's the essence of what you've tried to say let's who is this child and how can i get to know this child rather than get this child to perform for me which is another thing that one of my lovely um not so unopinionated aac uh user says i'm not a trained monkey yeah all right so there's more things coming in um we need to oh we need to make insurance companies in the us and the administrators get on board it's about the money and the numbers i love that so but you know it's also about the challenge here is to develop measuring strategies for what is not observable and i think that that's possible i think we should just pick up the challenge you know um small baby steps we can't start you know but i think i think we're moving in that direction because i think the frustration that we've had for instance with us we have to cure autism and the recent tendency you know the recent realization that i've seen in the literature that people start realizing we you know it's it's not about curing autism it's actually how to sort of help individuals to cope with it you know that we need to start doing yeah i love it for sure again baby steps for sure and i really i'm i'm i really am thinking it's it's interesting i'm doing a workshop on friday and i wanted to go and redo it but i'm thinking how can we yes gather the information that we well and i don't even know that we typically gather but i love your levels and how can we think about being intentional about thinking about that and should that kind of intentional um that should we not attend actively and um in a in a real way to that kind of data as well as the kind of data that we we typically do so you've given me much to think about and i knew you would and i hope everyone else feels the same so so here's another comment coming in focus on performance at all cost is anxiety provoking for everyone involved not just the student yeah and i think that this approach has got a very different message for professionals too because it it allows you to also be gentle on yourself as a professional and it's critical because that's what you're imposing on the people you work with right so by starting at home and realizing you know that personal engagement is what life is about and what living really is about you know um and actually investing in being able to record it better and sort of um measure the kind of things we feel should be measured i think it's for the tool i totally totally totally agree well thank you ever so much for this wonderful talk too as i say launch us for the this year um i did hear um maybe that this was beginning of a conversation so i may well take you up on that we may invite you back um and and i think one of the things that would be lovely for people in Alberta and and is to take your book and do a do a little book study i mean i think that would be a a lovely thing to do and that'd be great and you know if i can have a couple of ideas and questions coming in before the time i would be very very open to that that would be wonderful that would be wonderful um i think we will we shall we shall um return and continue with this type of thinking and with this um focus on meaning making and um i hope to hear from you that you you know i'll start a book club that'd be great let's do it and um and we'll invite Erna back to continue the dialogue with us so again thank you ever so much and again coming in from the the chat thank you so much very motivating and inspiring and i couldn't agree more so thank you thank you okay so good night everyone if there's other things that you want to say this is your uh chance and uh if not um i look forward to hearing from those of you who want to do the book club and we will um see you in October and for this evening go out and have a lovely a lovely evening and Erna again thank you so very much thank you good night


Okay, so welcome everyone to this book launch of Taiwan's Contemporary Indigenous Peoples. The book was published in July of 2021, and it was edited by one of my colleagues, former colleagues, Wang Jiayun, who's now at Academia Sinica, together with our former MA student, Daniel Davis, who's now at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, together with myself. The plan of today's session is that I'll talk a little bit about the background and the origins of the book before I pass on to introduce our speakers, and then each of our chapter authors. We have four chapter authors speaking today. We'll speak briefly about 15 minutes on each of their chapters, and they should have something like maybe about 30 to 40 minutes for discussion and Q&A. So how did this book come about? The book was made possible by a research grant from the Shunyi Museum in Taipei in Taiwan. This was the third time that we've worked with the Shunyi Museum. Previously, we'd had two more historical archival projects, but on this occasion we wanted to do something a little bit more contemporary. We felt that there was some really amazing work going on about modern Taiwan indigenous peoples, but it seemed that it was very widely dispersed. So we wanted to try to do something that brought these amazing research together. But we wanted to do something that was doing this, but from quite different academic disciplinary perspectives. Previously, we published a book on migration to and from Taiwan, and we'd also found how that many of the scholars that were working on migration didn't actually know each other and each other's work. So this was one of the ideas behind this book. We also were aware of the quite rapid expansion in indigenous studies programs in Taiwan itself, and we hope that there was some way that we could kind of contribute to this expansion, particularly in terms of an English language publication. So we're hoping that this book could also be something that could be useful for teaching Taiwan studies. One of the key things that we've been trying to do at SOAS, but also in the Taiwan Studies book series. Now, often, edited books are published on the basis of a workshop or a conference, but we took a slightly different approach to this book, maybe a more challenging approach. What we did instead was to hold a lecture series over about, I think, about 18 months. And in each case, we invited scholars to talk about, to give two lectures at SOAS, on their research on contemporary Taiwan indigenous issues. And then we asked the scholars to produce chapters based on one of their two SOAS lectures. So this way, we felt that it was a, had a much broader reach. It could not only enhance Taiwan Studies at SOAS, but also it was able to enhance Taiwan Studies at other European universities. So many of our speakers also went to other UK or European universities to share their research. And many of the lectures were also extremely popular and allowed us to engage with audiences that we hadn't really engaged with in the past. Putting together the book was quite a complicated process, as is often the case with edited books. We submitted the first manuscript in September of 2019, and we received the reviews in March of 2020. We had actually the longest ever reviews I've ever had for an edited book. One of the reviews came to 13 pages of almost 6,000 words, so almost as long as a chapter. But that meant that our chapter authors had a lot to go on in their revision. And in addition, together with my two co-editors, we also came up with some suggestions. And we managed to submit the final manuscript in autumn of 2020 with the book coming out in July of this year. I'm really delighted the book is out now, and we can actually use it in teaching at SOAS. And it is definitely a project where I've learned so much. It's really been like going back to schools.  Let me then just say a couple of words about our panel. Today, what we have is four of the giants of Taiwan Studies speaking to us. All four of them are also frequent speakers at SOAS, so they should be very familiar to many of you. I'm going to follow the order of the chapters when I introduce our four outstanding speakers. First of all, we have Professor Nikki Osford from the University of Central Lancashire. Nikki is a, got his PhD from SOAS in history, and during those four years at SOAS, he was the one who led our first two Shrinni research projects, which led to two important books. Since graduating, he's done amazing work in developing Asian studies in the University of Central Lancashire. Of course, he's also published his first monograph, Transition to Modernity in Taiwan, also in this series. And he's really been kind of making breakthroughs in Northern England Asia Studies. For example, he's created the Center for Austronesian Studies and he's also created the Northern Institute of Taiwan Studies. So we're really always happy to welcome Nikki back. The same goes for our second speaker, Scott Simon, from the Professor Scott Simon from the University of Ottawa, where he teaches in anthropology, but he's also the co-chair of the research chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of Ottawa. Again, Scott has been a frequent visitor to SOAS. I reckon he must have given about five or six, maybe even more talks at SOAS. For example, he contributed to our book project on social movements in Taiwan, when he gave a really outstanding chapter, which again we use for teaching on indigenous social movements, a book that came out in 2017. He's an extremely productive author. He's already published that three books on Taiwan, and he's working on a new book on the Siddique and Truku. So again, I'm really delighted to welcome you back and I really appreciate the way that you bring your really great in-depth fieldwork into your publications. I think that really adds something very special. I know our students really love your work as well. Our third giant is Kerry Professor Kerryn Friedman from National Doha University in Hualien, where he teaches in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures. And we're lucky that he, like actually all our speakers, are over in Europe at the moment. He's currently the Taiwan Studies visiting chair at Leiden University. And if it hadn't been for Covid, we definitely would have invited actually all of you over to London. Kerryn is also very productive academically, but he also goes beyond regular academic work, like so many of the Taiwan speakers that we love to host at SOAS. He's a prize winning documentary filmmaker and he's also been the programmer of the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, which features so much in his chapter in this book. And finally, our fourth giant is Jumbie Yu, who's the co-director of the Center of Taiwan Studies. She's someone who's been a leading figure in the European Taiwan Study field. For example, she helped to establish the European Association of Taiwan Studies. And since rejoining SOAS in 2013, she's had a transformative impact on the Center. She's also a remarkable teacher, winning the SOAS Director's Teaching Prize a couple of years ago. She's published two books in the Taiwan book series. Her monograph, which is widely praised and used text for many Taiwan Studies courses, is Place, Identity and National Imagination in Post-War Taiwan, that was published in 2015. Let me now hand over to the first of our giants, Nicky Orford. So Nicky, over to you. Welcome back. Thank you very dear. I haven't spoken for a bit. You only find out when you start. Thank you very much, Daphide. It's such a pleasure to always come back, whether it's virtually or in person, but definitely look forward to coming down. Or for you coming up, maybe that's something we can think about in the new year, is somehow having a launch up in the north of England, when it's a bit warmer and a little bit less dark, right? So I should be sharing my screen now. Hopefully everyone can see it. Do let me know. This is the moment where we just talk into a void. We don't see other speakers, just the PowerPoint. So hello, everybody, and thank you very much for coming. So yeah, lovely introduction that Daphide had gave me. I did my PhD at SOAS. I worked closely with both Daphide, BU and Jor. These were happy years, different years to the years that we have now and the way in which that we can put on our events. So those times are truly missed. I would think, perhaps I kind of just start talking a bit about the kind of my chapter and my contribution to this wonderful volume, which equally we also use in our teaching here at the University of Central Lancashire. But I thought I'd start first with a photograph. So as Daphide had mentioned, we were invited as speakers to come down. So this was a photograph come down when the paper was still very much in its infancy and the conversations that we had during the talk, but also afterwards in our little get together that we have in the foyer were drinking wine and eating crisps that actually helped to really kind of inform the idea of the paper itself. My chapter six is the second chapter within the book that follows the introduction. And so I'm very honored that it has that place within the book. And I hope that my chapter kind of offers an almost an extended introduction into the field of Taiwan Indigenous Studies. So I look at my chapter as a population movements in the construction of modern tradition within contemporary Taiwan Indigenous societies. And I place quite center at the importance of this is that word migration, which Daphide alluded to earlier, where we do see a number of different authors who work in migration and migration studies bring up not just conversations surrounding Taiwan Indigenous peoples, but Indigenous peoples on a more global context or in a more global context. So I see the migration as having significant influence on the constructions of tradition. And within within the book itself, I look at two forms or two types of migration, the voluntary migration, which which is quite self explanatory. This is a moment where people make the decision to move. And then there's involuntary migration. And here is a bit different. And my chapter seeks to kind of look at this in a little bit more detail and this idea of involuntary movement, one where people don't make preparation, right, people maintain to a certain extent greater commitment to their point of origin. They're more likely to be in states of stress. So it's more likely to impact them in different kinds of ways. They are less likely to bring assets. So when we look at this historically in the history of migration, there's where we start to see absence of material culture, right? They are also less likely to have connections to that point of origin. And so when we look at this again, historically, we can start to see that these are the impacts of how we see language loss. So I I look at dividing up the chapter into more accessible bites really by looking at three phases that have competing push and pull factors. So reasons why people are making these decisions to move, but people as in a singular as in individuals, but also groups of people families, much wider communities. And so I look at this in three in three phases. The first is the Pacific expansion. So here I engage with the debates surrounding the Australian language family and the migration of that language family from Taiwan. And then I look at colonization. And so here is where we start to see the beginnings of discussions of and by Indigenous people themselves and then into the contemporary society of which makes up the bulk of the chapter, because that's the most relevant part to the book itself. So within the chapter, I start with a map. And that map might be familiar to many of you. It is the map that looks at the distribution of the language family. And it's here that this map provides the heart really of the contribution that I seek when we start to look at early migration. But it's also a part, it is also a map that helps to kind of centre my actual research and how I go about looking at Taiwan. And my main aim in the studies and research that I do is one where we start to recenter or shift the way in which that we view Taiwan. So rather than looking at Taiwan as an island on the edge of the continent, I propose the idea of looking at Taiwan on the edge of an ocean. And so here by framing Taiwan in this way we see Taiwan as the only Chinese speaking Pacific island. And that layer of coloniality we see shared across all Pacific islands where there is this particular kind of layer. And so from here I kind of moved to this idea that Taiwan indigenous migration was largely environmentally determined. So in all phases we see the role of which that the environment plays and the role in which the environment continues to play. As many of you know we are coming to the end of COP26 being hosted here in the UK. And we can start to see how the environment is now determining a continued movement of these Austronesian speaking peoples within the Pacific. And how the structures of colonial layering is impacting the way in which that people can move. And so really that kind of want to keep it quite short because I know we've got a number of speakers but I don't want to give too much away because it encourages people getting hold of the book or reading the chapter. But rather I think I would just kind of stop there, say thank you but I am here to answer any questions that you might have at the end of the series of talks. So anyway thank you. Fantastic thanks Nikki for staying within time. And let's move on to our second speaker Scott Simon. Okay so thank you very much Daphine for putting this together and it's very nice to see everybody here on the screen. Like everybody else I wish we were at SOAS again. I think that when we get back together we're going to appreciate how very special it always has been. And you know you always say it's only a five and a half hour flight from Montreal which is shorter than going to Vancouver but now it seems very far away. So thank you very much. I wanted to say that the chapter has evolved so much and all of the careful editing and peer review has been good. It's taken another life of its own. It's going to be transformed into a chapter in my upcoming book but very different still. It's not quite as phenomenological in that one but I wanted to talk about what I've done in this particular book chapter. And so I begin it by saying Christianity is an inescapable part of social reality in indigenous Taiwan. Every village is dominated by the presence of one or more churches. Some are modest one-story buildings adorned with red crosses. Others have steeples that draw one's attention skywards. In any case the presence of churches rather than Buddhist and Taoist temples is a visible sign that one has arrived in an indigenous village. So it's really about the ubiquitous nature of the churches there which make it into God's country when you go into the indigenous world. But Christianity is a very difficult subject for anthropologists to study and I think especially nowadays in Canada. On May 27th, 2021 the remains of 215 children were found in a mass grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Because of that Canada is still going through very much of a period of collective grief about this. And in September 30th there's even now called Orange Shirt Day in which people remember the tragedy of the residential schools and wear shirts that say you know every child matters. And at the University of Ottawa in particular we're looking at our own history as an oblate school, a Roman Catholic oblate school which had a very important role as an incubator of residential schools. So I think that because of this it's very difficult for anthropologists to look at Christianity which we tend to think of as a colonial institution. And so anthropologists have been trying to turn their eyes away from that. But then when I went to Taiwan and started visiting indigenous communities it was very obvious from day one if not before that the churches are very important to people. I think it's also true in Canada I think that hasn't really been looked at. But I wanted to deal with that paradox of how can it be that these are colonial institutions but people still find them very meaningful to their life. And so I put that together in what I call a phenomenological approach. Again like Nicky I don't want to give away too much. I also do some self-reflexivity which is something that anthropologists have been doing since the 1980s. And so I try to take a look at Christianity in a new way. I don't really look at Christianity as you know this big religion that's too far abstract or even colonialism is too abstract. I don't want to look at faith which is too personal. But instead what I do is as a phenomenological approach I highlight the physical and the sensorial dimensions of what I observe. And so that means really taking seriously the physical presence of churches. And in the chapter I talk about three different churches. I talk about the Roman Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church and the true Jesus Church and the way that they smell and the way that we aid there and so forth. But I'm going to focus more on the Presbyterians here. I think that this phenomenological approach to religion is summarized well by Thomas Tweed who said in a quote as clusters of dwelling practices, religions orient individuals and groups in time and space, transform the natural environment and allow devotees to inhabit the world they construct. And so I do this through three different concepts and phenomenology. There's way faring, the idea that we're making pathways through space. That's true of me as an ethnographer. It's true of the people in these churches that I meet. I talk about the mesh work and that's how we're related to all of the other lives around us human and non-human and then life worlds. And those are the thoughts, the ways of being, feelings, the embodiment through which individuals come to inhabit certain niches in the mesh work of life in relationship to others. And so it draws attention to the social space where people are together. And so the first church that brought me to indigenous Taiwan in fact was the Jiwong Presbyterian Church in Fuxiun, which I call Beseungan by the Drugun name. And it was actually a church that I visited before I even started doing indigenous research. So in the 1990s when I was at Taipei at the Institute of Sociology doing work on women entrepreneurs, I had gone down to Hualien, interested because I started meeting Drugu people in Taipei. And Michael Stanton, which I think many of you know actually introduced me to the church there. And so I went to the Jiwong Presbyterian Church and the pastor there, Jiro became one of my first mentors about Drugu life and language. And so I kept in touch with him and I got to know other people from that particular village because of Yigong Shippan who was involved in the Asia Cement movements. That was the social movement chapter. And when I got finally to the church to this village in 2004 and then 2005, the Jiwong Presbyterian Church became in a way the center of my life there with how I found housing. I stayed in the home of a church elder for my first six month project there. It's also where I became aware of the politics of churches as the pastor himself was an outspoken proponent of Drugu autonomy. That was a big deal in 2004 when they got recognized and afterwards when they were wanting to create an autonomous zone. He was also a proponent of Taiwan independence. The people called him the DPP pastor. And the elder that I got housing from was a Tao Akao for the KMT and one of the organizers for the elections, an owner of a small grocery shop. And there were actually shouting matches between them because their political views were so different. The church was also an important place of eating, social feasting, and some of the men would bring their game animals down after they've been hunting. And so it was a place where I got to discover a lot of the cuisine of the Drugu. And hunting and politics became two important themes of my research agenda. And those were social processes that happened without Christianity, but I learned about them because I was at this church. And so the church is a place where all of these things come together. I wanted to show two photos. So, Jules, if you can show the first one. Does that... Yeah, here we go. So this first one here, this is the exterior of the church. I talked about the Ji Wang Presbyterian Church. And I think it's kind of important here to look at not the car in the front, but actually start by looking at the mountains behind it. And it's almost a vertical wall of green. And I wanted to show that just to remind us that the church is there in the village. There was an old religion in the forest. And in the pre-colonial religion, they called the rule Gaia, the rules of life. And the church actually borrows that. And for example, talks about the Ten Commandments as being the Ten Gaia. But in colonial times, Japanese anthropologists, Frono Kyoto, referred to the ritual sites in the mountains as invisible churches. It was after the colonial period, it was during the colonial period when this particular community became Christian in the Japanese period. And there's a cave up there by the church where Ji Wang and her congregation used to hide from the Japanese. And so there's this church, which is really the first Presbyterian indigenous church in Taiwan. And it's an imposing structure with that steeple and the cross. So it draws attention to itself. After the RLC came, then Christianity really spread throughout the island. But it really kind of came to here. We'll take a look at the inside of the church now. And I draw attention to the physicality of the churches and saw how the religious is no longer happening in the forest outside, but it's actually happening inside. And so we can see this with the four walls and the people in the front singing. And if you look in the front, there are words on the wall. So it draws attention not only to the cross, but to certain slogans which change from time to time. And at this time, gentong. So identity was very important because it was the idea that people should be identifying with being drogo instead of being with a tile. So these are some of the issues that I go with. Thank you, thank you, Joel, for showing us. We can go back to me now. But I think that in conclusion conversion to Christianity is a major change in lifestyles. The big thing is that they're settled now in a village and having services inside rather than being people that are going through large areas of the mountains and having rituals outside. I don't think that I think that the change would have happened. I think that it's not a coincidence that conversion happened after the Japanese forced indigenous people to settle in villages. And so as people became more sedentary, they needed something else in their life and Christianity gave them a new way of what we call worlding practices, creating new lives for themselves and something that's autonomous from the larger Buddhist Taoist majority society. And so nowadays over 90% of the indigenous people on Taiwan claim to be Christian, but I think it's important also to note that only a minority actually attend church all the time and do the work involved in keeping them running. Most of them go for funerals and weddings and so forth. These people who are active in churches are leaders in their communities, but people also have the option of ignoring them. And I think this is very different from the more ancient ways of Gaia, which still infuses everyone's lives no matter which church they attend or even if they don't attend church because in the past nobody could escape Gaia, like they can escape church nowadays. So that's why I end the chapter with saying Christian churches may be ubiquitous in indigenous communities, but not everyone's pathway leads to church. And so it's a I think there's a mixture of traditional religion and three denominations and some people who are not interested at all. But that's what goes on. And I don't want to reveal too much, but they think that kind of summarizes the chapter without going into the other denominations, which are also very, very interesting. Fantastic. Thanks, Scott, for being succinct, but also appreciate the way you kind of told us your kind of personal side of the story of how you kind of got there and how it kind of led in different directions, which I think is really fascinating. So now let me hand over to our third speaker, Karim Friedman. Hi, thanks for having me here.  And, you know, I cut a try to get it down to like under 15 minutes, I'm going to just give the theoretical schemata that I use and mention just a couple of films so you can understand how I incorporate them into this schema. And I'm going to share a PowerPoint presentation so you won't be seeing me, but hopefully this will work. Okay. So the book title, I mean, my chapter title is called The Shifting Chronotopes of Indigeneity in Taiwanese Documentary Film. And, you know, when I was tasked by the editors of this volume to write a chapter in documentary films, I turned to the material that was most readily available to me at the time. As programmer at that time for the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, I had access to the festival archives, which included over 60 films on Indigenous issues by Indigenous and Han directors alike. The festival started in 2001, but the films go back nearly 30 years to their early 90s to right after the lifting of martial law. The post-martial law period was a very exciting period for Taiwanese documentary film. For decades, the state had only allowed stories which parroted official rhetoric, according to which the Republic of China was the true government of all of China. And so local narratives were suppressed and people who told them were possibly disappeared or killed. And so when martial law was lifted, there was over 40 years where the pent-up desire for local narratives and a flourishing of documentary film in Taiwan was one of the results. Faced with such a large body of data, there were a number of ways I could have organized it chronologically, by ethnic group, by subject matter. But my recent work on the development of Taiwanese multiculturalism sensitized me to the various chronotypes at work in Taiwanese identity politics. I realized that almost all the films in the archive could easily be organized into one of three dominant chronotopes. As put forth by the literary scholar Bakhtin, a chronotope refers to a virtual space-time construct in a novel by which people, places, and things that would otherwise be understood as spatially distant or not co-evil to another are made to be proximate and contemporaneous to each other. Often used to describe the tropes of various literary genres. In linguistic anthropology, the concept has been broadened to include different frames within which identities are constructed. For instance, Jonathan Rosa has persuasively talked about how the chronotopes associated with speaking Spanish in America frequently constrain the scope of Spanish to a specific neighborhood and position it as linking to the past. While English is seen as positioned as the language of Latinx futures and is not geographically confined in the same way that Spanish is seen as being. In Taiwan, the Chinese chronotope has long been promoted by the nationalists, the point of violently suppressing any competing chronotopes during the martial law era. Spatially, the Chinese chronotope places Taiwan at the periphery of an imagined geography with the ancient capital of Nanjing at the true center. Temporally, it traces the nationalist party rule back through thousands of years of Chinese history seeing them as the true heirs of the Yellow Emperor. As recently as 2012, Taiwanese President Ma Yingzhou presided over a memorial ceremony for the Yellow Emperor. The party is also seen as the true repository of ancient Chinese Confucian values. There was recently a failed push to try and reintroduce the practice of having schoolchildren memorize classic Confucian texts. That these efforts failed shows how much things have changed in the last 30 years. Students no longer have to memorize the location of train stations in China and local Taiwanese history and culture have become integrated into the school curriculum. Because the films in this collection all date from after the martial law period and because the Venn diagram of those interests in promoting Chineseness and those interests in indigenous culture don't overlap at all, the Chinese chronotope is largely absent from any of the 60 odd films I looked at. But its presence is still felt because the three dominant chronotopes I do identify all exist in relation to Chineseness as the foundational chronotope of Taiwanese society, post-war society in some way or another. The first two, the Japanese chronotope and the Austronesian chronotope both serve to displace this Chineseness. While the third, the development chronotope posits Chinese modernity as the unstated goal of indigenous development. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that there's a simple one-to-one mapping of Taiwanese identity politics onto the chronotopes deployed in each of these films. The utility of the chronotope as an analytic concept comes from the fact that it identifies sites of contestation within which multiple competing identities are negotiated. While it's true that at various points in time certain political groups have latched on to certain chronotopes, no one group or ideological stance is a monopoly on any given chronotope. Moreover, in the conclusion I discuss how a younger generation of indigenous directors are increasingly comfortable jumping between multiple chronotopes. For these younger directors these chronotopes function more as a shared cultural resource from which they can pick and choose rather than a sign of their political or ideological allegiances. The first chronotope is the Japanese one. In the films you see this ambivalence and complexity of indigenous colonial experience. You also see this in major feature films like Warriors of the Rainbow, which I put here since most of you are probably much more familiar with that than with the films in the collection. The uprising of the Wushu uprising, which is shown in that film, however, was the subject of two films in the collection. These are Bilinabu's 2012 film Wuse Alanguban and Tang Xiangchu's 2013 film Hsu Kohini. Both of these films talk to the descendants of the Wuse uprising and in some way or another in dialogue with Warriors of the Rainbow. Bilinabu's film more obviously so featuring numerous clips from the film and directly challenging the film's depiction of those of those who fought on the side of the Japanese. Tang's film on the other hand is more concerned with the act of remembering the past and focuses on those who've worked to preserve or share history. Both films however share a sense of the Japanese colonial past as being overlaid on the present. Whereas the Japanese chronotope challenges chineseness by emphasizing oral narratives of the colonial counter, the Austronesian chronotope does so by emphasizing the continued relevance of Indigenous cultural traditions. Each of these chronotopes applied to a different temporal scale to Taiwanese history. The Japanese chronotope emphasizes the pre-war modernity, while Austronesian chronotope emphasizes links to an ancient past stretching back thousands of years. Interestingly however, I found that the films in the archive did not present Indigenous culture as timeless or unchanging. The kind of Orientalist narrative one finds still in Taiwanese popular culture. Rather, many of the films highlighted in creative ways in which Indigenous people have creatively adapted their culture's two contemporary needs. For instance, Futuro Tsai's 2007 film Ami's Hip Hop offers a charming portrait of how the young people of Dulan Village playfully incorporate global dance music into the Gelumaan ritual while staying true to the traditional spirit of the ritual. And Futuro Tsai's film Returning Souls follows the story of a Banzai Ami's villagers from Dafa Long who asked the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Seneca to return a pillar that had been taken to the village after being damaged by a typhoon in 1957. After a series of negotiations, it's determined that the village cannot provide a climate controlled conditions to ensure the pillar's integrity. However, a compromise is reached. A new Katika'an house along with a new ancestral pillar is constructed in Dafa Long Village and then the villagers slaughter a pig and conduct a ritual at the Institute of Ethnology in order to transport the spirits of the old pillar back home to the new one. Thus, even though the pillar is never repatriated, the spirits are. The development chronotope is a little different and it also denies the can often, you know, when used by the government or the state is often used to deny the co-evilness of indigenous cultures that are who are encouraged to civilize and modernize. However, presented as critique, it does something very different, challenging those narratives. And that's what we find in many of the films, especially focusing on the spatial dimensions of the development chronotope, where we see rural poverty and urban migration as themes of many of the films. Price out of cities and tired of the bustle of city life, a large number of indigenous Taiwanese young and old are looking for ways to make a living back home. Thanks to increased tourism and better transportation, the internet, this can now be an option for some. Tang Chiang Chu is how deep is the ocean is about the director's double friend whose world is split between Orchid Island, where he's building a home, and the Taiwan mainland where he must live and work to pay for a house. And Pan Jue's 2017 dialogue among tribes looks back on such lives from the perspective of a generation that had largely left behind dangerous work in the cities or at sea, and are now living back in their own village. By way of conclusion, my chapter looks at the works of two younger indigenous filmmakers. What makes Salon Ishaavut's Alice's Dreams and Su Hongan's The Mountain especially interesting is that they self-consciously deploy all three chronotopes discussed in the paper. So I argue that this constitutes a kind of general shift in Taiwanese identity politics for indigenous youth, whereas an earlier generation saw themselves locked in a battle for against chineseness. The younger generation of indigenous artists, intellectual and activists is more concerned with questions of indigenous sovereignty within Taiwan. Thank you. So that's my presentation. Fantastic. Thanks, Kerry. So we do really well for time now. So we should have a lot of time for discussions. So let me hand over to our final speaker, Tom Lee from SOAS. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. That is an amazing introduction. I have to say you arrived. There are four giants there, but not me. I'm dwarfed by youthful. As an outsider of the indigenous studies, it is really my pleasure to be involved in this interesting project. My chapter really focuses on the changing representation of indigenous people in textbooks, especially social studies textbooks. So let me explain a little bit about my involvement in this project. When the center started the indigenous project with Shunyi Museum a few years ago, I noticed that how the indigenous people were under as well as myth represented in the post-war textbooks and education. So this chapter really comes out of my long-term research interest, exploring the relationships between power and identity. Therefore, this chapter really explores how the indigenous people have been portrayed and what kind of prejudice is embedded in education over the decades. Okay, so I hope you all can see this. Okay, today's introduction really will be divided into three parts. I will explain, first of all, the original ideas, the methodology used, and also my findings. Not like previous speakers, I'm going to tell you what I found, okay? Okay, so as I said, I have always been interested in the power relations between the top-down knowledge transmission in education and identity formation. So without a doubt, of family, the media, political and social changes, they have all greatly influenced identity formation. However, it is worth noting that the cultivation of identity, values and ideology during children's formative years has been closely linked to their early education. Both the selection of official knowledge transmitted through schools and the design of the national curriculum are never value-free. So my investigation allows me to really consider whose knowledge is privileged and what values are selected and reproduced in schools. So in my past research on tower social studies textbooks, I focused mainly on the construction of children's sense of self and sense of home. Because of this indigenous project, I started to notice the absence of indigenous peoples in early textbooks. You can see a few images here taken from textbooks that are related to indigenous people. The one on the left is taken from the early textbooks and the one in the middle from the 1990s and the picture on the right is taken from the 2011 textbook. So taking a post-colonial approach, this chapter explores deep-rooted misrepresentation of the indigenous peoples in education during the period between 1945 and 2000, containing six different versions of national curriculum from the early post-war curriculum to 1952, 1962, 1968, 1975 and later 1993 versions. So I examined 72 volumes of social studies textbooks and they were published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation NICT. During this period, this 55-year period, most textbooks were standardized under strict designed curricula. In other words, all knowledge transmitted in the textbooks during this period was identical and conveyed a similar and standardized ideology. So halfway through my research, however, I realized that this was not enough. I was interested to see how much has changed since the education reform that started in 2001. Yes, to investigate whether and to what extent the indigenous representation has improved. I started to study the design of the new curriculum, that is the nine-year integrated curriculum guidelines and also decided to focus on volume three of the new textbooks because that was the design that they were containing some sort of indigenous history and some introduction about indigenous people at the elementary level. So I combed through, I don't know why this is not moving. Okay, so combing through these textbooks, this research identifies six characteristics in the representation of the indigenous peoples as a kind of colonial othering. These approaches had been used consistently and had the effect of accentuating their exoticism, slotting them into this kind of Chinese national imagination, treating them as social problems and creating clear hierarchical power structure. So let's have a look at these six commonly found characteristics in textbooks. The first, the textbooks presented a worldview from a hand-centric perspective. Anything different would be seen as irregular and abnormal. So in the first two early curricula, the indigenous peoples were completely absent in the social studies textbooks, as if they never exist. Starting from the 1960s, limited content started to appear, usually relating to their lifestyle with a negative implication, either describing their backwardness, poverty, or their superstitious rituals. Of course, the most well-known example is the story of Wu Feng, a Chinese merchant and interpreter in the central mountain area. The textbooks interpret his death as a sacrifice to help the indigenous peoples stop their head-hunting rituals. The story was retold many times and interpreted differently by Qing dynasty, by the Japanese, by the KMT regime to serve their own purpose. So in the post-war textbooks, it was said that the goal was to discourage superstition. On another level, Wu Feng was used to represent the Han Chinese as benevolent and selflessness. The story became the first to be challenged in Taiwan's indigenous movement, and the lesson was removed from textbooks in 1989 following angry protests by indigenous activists. The second characteristic was their incorporation into the discourse and imagination of Zhonghua Mingzu, Chinese nation. This rhetoric is one of the most commonly found topics throughout all curricula in Taiwan before 2020 and forms this kind of foundation of national narrative during the period examined. To sustain ROC legitimacy in post-war Taiwan, Zhonghua Mingzu discourse was introduced to maintain the rhetoric that all ethnic groups in the Chinese region being part of the Chinese or the Zhonghua family. The third is a tendency to portray them as the outsider of normality. This is also a kind of othering strategy to exclude them from the idea of us and demarcated a clear division between the cultivated Han and the uncultured savage. Moreover, the island was often described as undeveloped virgin land until the arrival of the Han Chinese. For example, the lesson opening up Wasteland introduces the development of the east of the island by Han settlers and their leader Wu Sha in the 18th century. In this lesson, Wu Sha was described as a hero and who was the first explorer to lead the Han Chinese settler into the wild opening of the eastern wasteland and establish Han settlement in Yilan area. In reality, the arrival of the Han settler had led to long and bloody conflicts with the local plains indigenous people who resided there for a long time. The conflicts between the two sides were deliberately ignored in the text. Instead, this lesson transformed ethnic conflicts into an adventure story that emphasized only Han contribution. The fourth characteristic was to label them with a specific facial temple identity marker. In the pre-2000 textbooks, the indigenous people's place in the textbook was fixed in two ways, both being confined in the deep mountains and being locked in the distant past. The label mountain compatriots bound them to the remote mountain area as their rightful place, which implied backwardness and a lack of potential. Moreover, their place in Taiwanese society was always connected to the island's pre-history and treated as a kind of background. In other words, their place in the national discourse is not only marginal but also static. The fifth is the tendency to depict them as a kind of social problem. Among the limited portrayals of the indigenous peoples, some of the lessons suggested that they had low productivity, were unskilled to take part in the modern economy, had drinking problems and thus imply their unfitness for modern life. The last characteristic is still prominent today, that is the growing tendency to visualize the indigenous people as exotica. Starting from the 1993 curriculum, it is clear that the visual visibility and the portrayal of the indigenous peoples have improved alongside our democratization. Although the negative representation has been removed, it is now replaced by a stereotype with colorful costumes and seemingly curious ancient traditions. These images were only used as decorations. So finally, since the education reform in 2001, their representation in textbooks has improved. The new curriculum guidelines aim to preserve indigenous languages and cultures, increase their visibilities and improve their representation. However, the indigenous related content in social studies remain the same, focusing on festivals, costumes and traditions and still positioning them in the 17th century when the outsider arrived. The most relevant topic at the elementary level can be found in this Volume 3. One of the themes of this Volume is hometown or homeland, and according to the guidelines, it aims to connect the students with their own environment and introduce Thomas' history. To find out to what extent the new textbooks approach indigenous issues differently, I look at the three versions of this Volume by Kang Xuan, Nanyi and Han Ling, the three major textbooks publishers. I found it very interesting, the increasing visibility of the indigenous peoples can be found over the different volumes, but this increasing visibility has paradoxically highlighted their exoticism in the construction of a multicultural Taiwan. Consequently, the emphasis on visualization has in effect dehumanized them and splotted them conveniently into one homogeneous group. So as you can see here, what is this picture? We can see this introducing your hometown, and I will leave you to this, why we can ask the question, that why is this child presented as an indigenous child to talk about a haka town in Miao Li? I will leave the question to you, and thank you for listening. Thank you. Fantastic, thanks Beiyu and all the other speakers for being so concise in terms of your kind of time management and the way you shared your research.


How good life is right now on planet Earth? It's never been better. And he's absolutely right. Life expectancy, poverty rates, a hunger, all of these things. We're in a better situation today than we ever been before. And he identifies the cause of that. And the cause, he says, is basically human ingenuity, ideas, the application of human reason in solving problems. Now, how is this related to the whole of government? Because you ask yourself, what kind of environment allows for the thriving of human reason? What kind of environment allows for ideas not just to be thought of, but then implemented in reality and brought into existence? And what you realize quickly, and if you study the history, this is exactly what happened, is that for ideas, for people to come up with ideas, for people to implement ideas, to make them a reality, they need to be free. They need to be free.  The sun goes around the Earth. It doesn't work the other way around. You can't have it when some autocrat tells you what to think, or what to do, or what business you can open, or what business you can't open. You need to be free, free to think sometimes ridiculous ideas that fail, but then you fail. That's OK. But for the successful ideas to work, people have to have the freedom to try them and to go out and do them. And then, so freedom of what? Freedom is a word everybody loves. Nobody's against freedom. But freedom from what? Well, freedom means freedom from coercion, freedom for force, freedom from authority. And if you think about what that means, it really is the concept that the founding fathers described as individual rights. Rights really are the recognition that each individual should be free, free from coercion, free to live their life as they see fit, free to think, and to speak, and to act as they see fit, as long as they're not harming other people. They have the right to pursue the rational values necessary for their own existence in their life. And therefore, the only role of government, as I see it, is to make that freedom a reality. And to make that freedom a reality, what we need is to extract force when we get together to make sure that you guys, this is why we have the police here, right? Don't attack me because of what I'm saying. That's it. So we need freedom from force. So the role of government is basically that. It's to guarantee that we can say what we want to say, do what we want to do, and otherwise leave us alone. So police, a military, and a judiciary. And that kind of environment is what fosters the kind of creativity that has made this world such an amazing world.


Leech Lake Tribal College has been awarded $100,000 to increase capacity to prepare students for environmental careers and to inspire community engagement with environmental issues in the Leech Lake area. The grant money comes from the American Indian College Fund, Scholarly Emergence for Environmental Design and Steward Program, LLTC President Dr. Patricia Broker says the grant will help the college meet its broad mission of serving the Leech Lake Nation as they work to develop leadership in the area of environmental stewardship. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.