Chenhuang Jinju

語言:
English /// 中文
Photo Credit:原住民族青年陣線/Facebook
Translator: Brian Hioe

BEINAN TOWNSHIP, Taitung resident Lin Jin-di–a participant in the movement against the Miramar Resort–as well as her mother Lin Shu-ling, suddenly received a notice from the Taitung county government that construction cranes would demolish her home on October 21st at 8 AM. Why was the illegal Miramar Resort not demolished and a home with protected residential rights on Indigenous land demolished?

Taking the perspective of Indigenous justice, this is not the only time that colonialism has again shown its face. This also reflects that in Taiwan, there has not yet been reparations or accountability for colonialism.

We can trace issues regarding Indigenous land to at least the Japanese colonial period. As everyone knows, Indigenous communities did not operate according to the logic of the modern nation-state, whether in terms of the division between private and public property. Land was collectively used for various means. But this was violently overturned with the modern nation-state.

During the first year of Japanese colonialism, in 1895, Japan already issued notices for the expropriation of wood and camphor. Mountains and forests were nationalized as state property. Shortly after that, Indigenous activities were confined to forests, using the law. Lastly, in order to accommodate colonial conglomerates, fixed farming and other means were used to develop the forest. An incredibly uncivilized means–the “Aiyū sen ” (隘勇線) was set up by so-called civilized people.

Tadao Yanaihara had already described this as a process of primitive accumulation in his seminal work Taiwan under Imperialism (1929). When Marx described primitive accumulation of capital as the state forcibly extracting land, and then nationalizing and privatizing the land extracted, he was focusing on the condition of possibility of a capitalist accumulation. This is called “primitive” accumulation because this expropriation of land is the basis of capitalism. Yanaihara also points out that this use of forests and mountains is a form of primitive accumulation achieved through the power of government.

Economic protections or legal protections do not come before the protections of land rights. On the contrary, it comes after using extra-legal force to appropriate land. It is only in such a way that capital encroaches on the mountains and forests. This is why Marx when discussing primitive accumulation points out that violence itself is an economic force. This is also why Yanaihara says “Power is the midwife of primitive accumulation of capital.”

After the war, Indigenous were labeled “mountain compatriots”. The KMT claimed to be anti-colonial when it came to Taiwan, but used colonial means to appropriate colonial wartime industries as part of its vain attempt to take back the Chinese mainland. At the same time, colonial policies of extraction were maintained for the mountains and forests. When it came to protected land policies, the KMT took on mountains and forests nationalized during the Japanese colonial period, as well as other nationalized industries, just the name was changed. With land planning that began in 1958 for land reform, this was completed in 1966, continuing this process of privatization, with land rights given to conglomerates that destroyed the land.

In the process of the democratization movement in the 1980s, Indigenous groups launched at least three movements calling for the return of the land. The first two movements called for the return of land held by state-sponsored institutions such as the National Taiwan University, the third movement in 1993 included calls for Indigenous sovereignty. However, the KMT avoided the issue of sovereignty by claiming that the land reform had nationalized and then privatized the land. Then the government follows the logic of private property, claiming that the Indigenous peoples should “apply” for the return to their own land.

But what do we see today? Colonial policies continue, with Indigenous required to apply for the return of their own land. In this process, the government still demolishes homes. The Miramar Resort is just one case which makes explicit the capitalist-colonialist logic underlying contemporary indigenous struggles. Colonialism is not a thing of the past.It continues to recur. If the transitional justice movements could not identify and resist both colonialism and capitalism, its achievements, if any at all, would be rather limited.

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