Tourists and Indigenes: What I Learned in Taiwan

And now some more pleasant travel memories.

Qianlong-era polychrome vase, ca. 1760-80

Last December, my partner Susan and I took a long-planned trip to Taiwan, partly to visit our friend Anne and partly because we’d heard the country had much to offer visitors. We heard correctly. During our week- and-a-half stay we admired northern Taiwan’s lush green hills and precipitate coastal cliffs, walked around the picturesque old coal-mining town of Jioufen, and toured the National Palace Museum, beloved of tourists from mainland China. (I assume they want to see all the treasures the Kuomintang absconded with in the 1940s.) I discovered an unexpected fondness for the beautiful, delicate polychrome porcelain of the Qianlong era (1735-95); perhaps I took to heart John Adams’ remark that he studied war and politics so that his descendants could study porcelain. Anne and her parents treated us to two outstanding meals, including such delicacies as chicken feet, black eggs, tree fungus (better than it sounds), soup dumplings, and kumquat tea.

On our own, Susi and I visited Longshan Temple, a three-century-old wooden compound packed with tourists and worshipers.* The devotees filled the central temple with incense and piled long tables with flowers, fruit, biscuits, and other offerings. And why not? Prayers are well and good, but seem more sincere when accompanied by cookies. In the realm of the secular, we visited Taipei 101, one of the world’s tallest buildings, and admired the city from 91 stories up. The view impressed us but was blurred by pollution, which Anne’s father told us had blown in from the mainland. If we had stayed in Taiwan a day longer we could have enjoyed watching the skyscraper lit up in rainbow colors, a gesture of support from its proprietors to the supporters of marriage equality. The Taiwanese parliament was then debating a same-sex marriage bill, a momentous issue given the country’s cultural conservatism. Between that debate and some saber-rattling by the People’s Republic, there was no room in the country’s newspapers, at least not in its English-language press, for Donald Trump. This pleased us.

Taipei 101, late December 2016

Like most cities, Taipei primarily exists for the sake of commerce, and I did my fair share. Anne and Susan and I went to the famous Shilin Night Market and several other open-air emporia, and to several old factories that investors had converted into art and craft markets. We stocked up on souvenirs and gifts, indulged a new-found obsession with miniature wooden toy sets, and overindulged (in Susan’s case) in crane games and vending-machine baubles. I didn’t spend much time on the latter, until I discovered that some Taipei vending machines dispense off-brand Lego-like figures of SS officers. Including a faithful Nazi dog. These I found in such bad taste I had to buy some.

Yes, this is a real thing.

They will make good fodder for my off-brand Lego-type Xenomorph figures.

My favorite find was Taipei’s Museum of Formosan Aborigines, whose exhibits and artifacts celebrated the lives of the indigenous Taiwanese. I knew that Taiwan had an indigenous population before the Han Chinese and Japanese colonized the island - the 2016 NAISA conference had a panel or two devoted to their culture - but I did not realize that the island’s sixteen nations belonged to the same ethnic family that colonized Indonesia, Hawaii, Easter Island, and Madagascar. Indeed, given the longevity of Formosa’s aboriginal peoples, their homeland was probably the “culture hearth” from which all of the far-flung Austronesian peoples originated. We admired the displays of stone and (early-modern) metal tools, fishing gear, and bright clothing, and the photos and early films of Taiwanese lifeways. I was surprised to learn that several of the island’s First Nations, such as the Saisiyat, have their own versions of the jingle-dress dance, something I thought confined to the Ojibwas of North America.

Friezes of some of Taiwan's First Peoples

The Aboriginal Museum aimed to entertain, given that it expected an audience of casual visitors and tourists. Tourists, of course, rarely scratch the surface of a nation’s culture or history. As I subsequently learned, Taiwan’s indigenes possess a distinct but endangered culture, and a history fraught with exploitation and misery. The yuanchuminchu (First Peoples) first colonized Taiwan about 5,000 years ago, sustained themselves through a mixture of hunting (especially deer), fishing, and millet cultivation, and gradually grew their population to about 100,000. In the early-modern era they held their own against Dutch and Han colonists, with whom they traded and intermarried; some even worked as ethnic soldiers for the Qing Dynasty. In the late nineteenth century, however, the Qing and the Japanese began a long military campaign against the Taiyan, Taroko, and Bunun nations, whose homelands produced valuable supplies of camphor. Japanese offensives killed 15-20,000 Tarokos in 1914 and 1930, and the Imperial Army confined other First Peoples within a constricting ring of land mines and electric fences. During the Second World War, the Japanese regime began exploiting indigenous Taiwanese directly, conscripting men into the army and forcing women into sexual slavery.

Japan proved the most vicious of Taiwanese indigenes’ exploiters, but after 1945 Chinese settlers and Kuomintang emigres tried to efface the indigenous Taiwanese people’s culture. The national government relocated First Peoples to the lowlands, and pressured them to adopt the Chinese language and abandon their “superstitions.” Racial discrimination against aboriginal Taiwanese remained widespread. (As Mark Munsterhjelm notes, fewer than half of Chinese parents in a 2000 survey said they would allow their children to marry an aboriginal spouse.) Since the 1990s, the national government has tried to reverse its campaign of cultural imperialism, encouraging First-Peoples language instruction in schools and promoting musical performances, cultural festivals and museums like the one Susi and Anne (and Anne’s father) and I visited. The Taiwanese elite have tried to make indigenous identity “cool,” perhaps less out of a desire to redress past wrongs than because the First Peoples make good symbols of an independent Taiwanese identity. The cultural revival the government promotes tends to emphasize performances and displays that please non-indigenous audiences, rather than preserve and deepen older traditions. 

Bunun woman sifting millet

The mechanics of settler-colonialism - exploiting indigenous peoples’ labor, destroying their settlements, taking their land, and co-opting their identities - seem to follow a universal progression. The actual Saisiyat, Taroko, Bunun, and other First Peoples aren’t going away, however. Their current population of 400-500,000 represents a greater percentage of the national total than does the American Indian population of the United States, and as with other indigenous peoples in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and North America, they appear determined to defend their land rights and make their own history.   

Sources: M. Munsterhjelm, “The First Nations of Taiwan: A Special Report on Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, June 2002, online at https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/first-nations-taiwan-special-report-taiwans-indigenous. See also Andrew Abalahin, “Sino-Pacifica: Conceptualizing Greater Southeast Asia as a Sub-Arena of World History,” Journal of World History 22 (Dec. 2011): 659-91, esp.675-77; Shu-Yuan Yang, “Cultural Performance and the Reconstruction of Tradition among the Bunun of Taiwan,” Oceania 81 (Nov. 2011): 316-330.

(Above image of Taipei 101 via Pinterest.com. Photo of Bunun woman from the Digital Museum of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples. All other photos by the author.)

  

* We visited Longshan on Christmas Day, which in Taipei was attended by clear skies, bright sunshine, and 80-degree temperatures. One should plan to visit Taiwan in the late fall or winter.

The Hostage Situation

Those familiar with U.S. Indian policy know that few elements of it have generated as much controversy as education. Until recently, schools for Native Americans were almost exclusively run by whites, who sought to turn Indian children into Anglo children. Boarding schools like Carlisle Indian School, with their uniforms and short haircuts, their military-style drill and ban on Native languages, sought, in the words of Carlisle's founder, to “kill the Indian and save the man" - the normative man being, in this case, a white one. Earlier missionary-run academies had similar goals, though they pursued them without the same level of military discipline. Only a few Indian nations, like the Cherokees, maintained control over their own educational system prior to the late twentieth century.

The early years of American Indian educational policy have received less attention from scholars, though Margaret Szasz has written thoughtful monographs on colonial Indian education, Bernard Sheehan and William McLoughlin have noted the obvious cultural imperialism in early nineteenth-century “civilization” policy, and Christina Snyder is completing what will surely be an exciting and thought-provoking study of Richard Johnson's Choctaw Academy. Here I want to add just a small observation on the earliest years of U.S. Indian schooling, more specifically the era of the American Revolution and the quarter-century following it: even before it began paying missionaries to set up Indian schools, the federal government had been placing Native American leaders' sons with white families who took charge of their education. During the Revolutionary War Congress paid Indian agent George Morgan to board and train the sons of prominent Delaware chief White Eyes, and in the early 1790s Secretary of War Henry Knox placed about twenty Iroquois, Creek, and Cherokee children with Pennsylvanian Quaker families, who agreed to train the boys as farmers and the girls in home economics. While I have not been able to determine if all of these children came from prominent families, at least a few of them, including the nephews of Creek "Beloved Man" Alexander McGillivray, did. Knox's successors continued the practice into the early nineteenth century, when Secretary Henry Dearborn, for instance, took charge of educating the sons of Chickasaw magnates William and George Colbert.

I want to suggest here that this policy grew not out of cultural imperialism (though there was some of that), nor benevolence, but rather out of an old imperial custom: taking the children of conquered peoples' leaders as hostages. Education allowed empires to impress their customs and values on those who would eventually grow up to govern subordinate nations, and it also gave them an excuse to hold children whose vulnerability would deter their parents from rebelling. Twenty-seven hundred years ago, the Assyrians took “aristocratic children” from conquered provinces to Ninevah for schooling, and the Romans and Byzantines educated elite youths, like Herod Agrippa (well known to fans of I, Claudius) and the Gothic princeling Theodoric*, in their capitals. I suspect medieval courts followed the Roman example, and when the English began colonizing Ireland in earnest, they on at least one occasion (1615) took hostages from the children of northern Irish landowners and brought them to England for indoctrination. The American Revolutionaries recognized the political value of the practice, and when the United States' demands for adult hostages from the Great Lakes Indians (1784-86) generated hostility, officials like Henry Knox switched to a subtler approach. The War Department never acknowledged it was essentially holding chiefs' children as hostages, but a Spanish observer in New York City suggested Knox was doing something of the kind when he took custody of Alexander McGillivray's nephews.

By the early nineteenth century missionaries were beginning to establish schools in Indian communities – at Spring Place in the Cherokee nation, for example – and the War Department provided these schools with subsidies, at first sporadically and then to the amount of $10,000 a year under the Civilization Act (1819). Prominent Native American parents supported these schools because they taught some skills, like textile-making and English literacy, that they considered valuable. They also gave them more control over their children, whom they could more easily bring home than if they had moved to Pennsylvania. I also suspect many had come to recognize the implicit danger in allowing federal officials to take their children away, however willingly, for education and training, though some allowed their older children to attend boarding schools like Choctaw Academy and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions' school in Cornwall, Connecticut. If the War Department no longer placed Indian children with white families in the east, it was because officials recognized the United States' growing power lessened the need for hostage taking, and because they now primarily valued the cultural-imperialist aspect of education. The militarized boarding-school era lay several decades in the future, but one could by the 1820s begin to perceive its outlines.     

Sources: On Assyrian, Byzantine, and English education of hostages, see Simo Parpola, “Assyria's Expansion in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries and Its Long-Term Repercussion in the West,” in William Dever and Seymour Gitlin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past (Eisenbrauns, 2003), 99-111, esp. 101-102**; Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders (Oxford UP, 2014), 471-475 of 9215 (Kindle); Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567-1642 (Oxford, 2014), p. 163. I discuss Knox's placement of Indian children with Quaker families in Red Gentlemen and White Savages (Virginia, 2008), pp. 122-123, 178. For the War Department's education of the Colbert brothers' children see Henry Dearborn to William Claiborne, 6 Dec. 1802, and Dearborn to George Colbert of 24 Sept. 1805 and 17 Sept. 1807, all in War Department, Letters Sent, Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Natl. Archives Microfilm M-15), 1: 297, 2:110-111, and 2:307. Rowena McClinton has translated and published two volumes of diaries on the Moravian mission and school at Spring Place: The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees (Nebraska, 2007).

* Theodoric's case also suggests one of the dangers of educating potential enemies: they might acquire skills that make them a potent threat in the future. As an adult Theodoric returned to Constantinople with an army and threatened the city's aqueducts, whose importance he had learned during his “internship.” The emperor became so eager to get rid of him that the Byzantines cleared the way for Theodoric to invade Italy and establish his kingdom there. (Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome, 985 of 9215.)

** My thanks to Corinna Nichols for this source.

Better Living through Ethnic Cleansing (Better Know a President, Series II, Part 2)

American presidents, as I've said before, have generally been a dull lot, but some still inspire genuine passion. Andrew Jackson was certainly one of these. Historians like Arthur Schlesinger and Sean Wilentz have characterized Prez Seven as a populist hero who slew the aristocratic Bank of the U.S. and stood up to South Carolina nabobs during the Nullification Crisis. Others have noted that Jackson spent much of his life scrambling into the planter aristocracy, and that his most significant accomplishment as president, Indian Removal, killed perhaps 20,000 people and drove 100,000 more from their homes. I tend to side with the latter group, but when I talk about Removal with my students I argue that that what drove this shameful episode was not only hatred for Indians but also a desire for economic development.

Jackson believed that most eastern Indians remained hunters, and occupied lands that white farmers should take and make productive. "What good man would prefer a country covered with forest and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic...embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute?” he asked in his 1830 State of the Union message. The president unfairly characterized the eastern Indians, nearly all of whom practiced agriculture and many of whom raised livestock and cotton. But Jackson and his partisans, like Lewis Cass (his secretary of war), identified agriculture with capitalism, and classified land itself as a marketable resource that one could and should sell to the most productive commercial farmers. Most eastern Indians practiced subsistence rather than commercial agriculture, and carefully restricted the ownership and sale of land by individuals, so Jackson and many of his contemporaries did not consider them “proper” farmers. In many Native American communities women rather than men did the farming, and to the Jacksonians women's activities mattered less. Moreover, as Mary Young and Ginette Aley have noted, eastern Indians remained politically autonomous in the 1830s, and thus they were a giant null to local politicians counting their states' resources: they didn't pay taxes, they weren't counted in the Census, and their lands lay athwart rights-of-way for internal improvements. Removing them would promote political and economic growth: railroads and canals could stretch across former Indian lands, states' measured populations and tax bases would grow, and commercial farms would replace Indian “hunting grounds.” Indian Removal was, in short, a giant development program, which explains why Jackson and his successors spent upwards of $90 million and fought three wars on its behalf.

This is not to say that the proponents of Indian Removal weren't racists. That they clearly were, as demonstrated by their belief that Indians could not adapt to change and would surely succumb to hunger and alcoholism – or attack their new white neighbors – if not removed. “Existing for two centuries in contact with a civilized people,” Lewis Cass charged in 1830, “they have resisted, and successfully too, every effort to...introduce among them the most common arts of life.” Mary Young and Thomas Ingersoll have noted another important racist motive for Removal: like supporters of African-American colonization, proponents of Indian Removal wanted to prevent racial intermarriage, which they believed would degrade the white race. As early as the 1810s, southern newspaper editors argued that “the disgusting habits and vices of the Indians” made intermarriage unthinkable, and characterized “half-breed” children as innately crafty, shifty, and morally dissipated. Biracial Indians also allegedly endangered their own Native American kinsmen, in that they tended to oppose Removal – a policy Jacksonians thought would benefit “full-blooded” Indian hunters – in order to protect the property they had inherited or finagled from whites. (This also provided Removal supporters with a ready reply to anyone arguing that many eastern Indians were becoming more “civilized:” only the “mixed-bloods” were doing so. In other words, “These fellers is miscegenated!”) Separate the races, and ultimately both would benefit.

I've moved some distance away from the putative subject of this essay, Andrew Jackson, but I hope my readers will understand why. Increasingly, modern Americans associate Jackson with Indian Removal, and I think it important to stress that this was a huge undertaking, requiring as much money and organization, and generating as many fatalities, as a war. No one person can rightly shoulder all of the blame for so massive an enterprise. Jackson championed the Indian Removal Act, but Indian Removal itself was a national, not a personal crime.

Sources: Mary Young, “Racism in Red and Black,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 73 (1989): 492-518, “disgusting habits” at 493; idem, “The Exercise of Sovereignty in Cherokee Georgia,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 43-63; Nichols, “Land, Republicanism, and Indians,” Georgia Hist. Quarterly 85 (2001): 199-226; Thomas Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers (University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Theda Perdue and Michael Green, eds., The Cherokee Removal (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005), “Existing for two” at 118, “What good man” at 127; Ginette Aley, “Bringing about the Dawn,” in Daniel Barr, ed., The Boundaries Between Us (Kent State University Press, 2006), 196-218. “These fellers is miscegenated” is adapted from O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Joel and Ethan Coen (2001).

Such Were the Joys, 1834 Edition

A brief anecdote from my current research on the Midwest Indians:

In the 1820s the Episcopal Church set up a mission station and school for the Indians residing near Green Bay, Wisconsin. At the time the local Native American population consisted of a few Menominee communities, a colony of Stockbridge Indians (Munsees and Mahicans) from western New York, and (after 1832) a settlement of Oneida immigrants. The school, under the direction of Reverend Fish Cadle – really, you can't make these names up – offered instruction in the 3 Rs, grammar, and geography, but it attracted few students, and I get the impression that the church drew few converts. Part of the reason for this lies in the religious history of the eastern Wisconsin Indians: some of the Menominees were already Christian (Catholic), as were many of the Oneidas, and the Stockbridges had already founded their own Presbyterian church. A larger problems, I think, was the willingness of the missionary teachers to use corporal punishment on children not used to such treatment at home, and the difficulty the missionaries had feeding their students. Food was expensive in Green Bay and the Anglican missionary society was very parsimonious, so the few dozen pupils at the school were underfed and “sickly,” according to the report of a church inspector. This stood in contrast to the abundance that one could find at some local Indians' tables: when ministers visited local Oneida families in 1834 their hosts treated them to “pork and beans...chicken pies, squashes, potatoes, peas and rice pudding.” I do not get the impression that the missionaries learned very much from this experience, but there are clear messages for modern readers less invested in Rev. Cadle's ideology: the Indians of eastern Wisconsin were not “blank-slate” pagans awaiting the Episcopalian Gospel, and neither were they starving savages – indeed, they could better feed their guests than the missionaries could provide for their students. (David R.M. Beck, Siege and Survival: History of the Menominee Indians (2002), 125-127; Jackson Kemper, "Journal of an Episcopalian Missionary's Tour to Green Bay, 1834," Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 14 (1898): 394-449, quotes pp. 426, 433.)

Perhaps, in the manner of many missionaries, Cadle and his co-workers believed they were offering students more important treasures than mere material sustenance, but it's hard to appreciate geography or Christian theology on an empty stomach.This was a lesson that did not escape other missionaries: Franciscans in New Mexico and Texas often drew in potential converts by accumulating large food supplies, or at least grain crops and herds of beef cattle, in their missions, and observers of the Baptist mission to the Kansas Shawnees opined that many families had placed their children with the boarding school in order to feed them, which (given the hardships the Shawnees experienced during Removal) may well have been the case. If one believes that one cannot turn Indians into Christians without completely isolating them from their community and old lifeways, one has to make some effort to feed and shelter the converts, unless one wants them to become dead converts.* “Grub first, then morals,” as the playwright said. (Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (1995); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman (2007); Kevin Abing, "A Holy Battleground: Methodist, Baptist, & Quaker Missionaries among Shawnee Indians," Kansas History 21 (1998): 118-37.)

 

* That missions and boarding schools often had very high rates of epidemic disease was something missionaries deplored but attributed to God's will. Until the nineteenth century missionaries' medicinal toolkit was generally no more effective than that of their Native American converts, a point Andrew Knaut makes in his book on the Pueblo Revolt.

What I Saw of the 2011 Ethnohistory Conference, Part Two

Continued from my previous post, here are summaries of or excerpts from nine more papers I attended last month at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory:

Evan Nooe argued that violence, as employed by the Red Stick Creeks in 1812-13, was part of the Creeks' judicial system, and that their targets in the Fort Mims attack of 1813 tended to be white women and children because Creek men were attacking lineages, not individuals.

Elena Vega Olivera revealed that the children's novel Island of the Blue Dolphins was based on the story of a real person – a California Indian woman stranded on San Nicolas Island, who was "rescued" in 1853 and died of illness almost immediately thereafter.

Kristalynn Shefveland reminded her audience that the Chesapeake colonies were major players in the seventeenth-century Indian slave trade, and observed that the enslavement of Native Americans, particularly children and those convicted of crimes, continued in Virginia well after a 1691 statute banned the practice.

David Silverman argued that if the New England Algonquians had maintained their access to the trading center of Albany, they might have been able to prevail in King Philip's War, but their exclusion therefrom by the Mohawks cut off their supply of powder and ammunition.

Christina Snyder observed that elite Choctaw students at Richard Johnson's Choctaw Academy behaved rather like the sons of white planters, breaking into Johnson's house and holding "drunken orgies" with the (perhaps not-entirely-willing) daughters of Johnson's slave "concubine" Julia Chinn.

Jessica Stern explained something I'd been wondering about for ages – why British trade regulations stipulated that traders in the southeast had do business in Indian towns (answer: so that chiefs could supervise the trade) – and then noted that Indian hunters routinely ignored these regulations.

Carl Strong gave an ill-considered paper about John Collier's efforts to disprove the "Indian-ness" of the Unkechaug and Shinnecock Indians of Long Island and the Lumbees of North Carolina.

John Troutman told the story of Neal "Pappy" McCormick, an Creek musician who led a Hawaiian/hillbilly/gospel band (one of whose performers was Hank Williams, Sr.), and later became an activist for federal recognition of the remaining Georgia Creeks.

And Susan Wade talked about the evolution of maple sugar into a valuable commodity in the Great Lakes Indian trade; the Ojibwe sold this former "starvation food" (Larry Nesper's words) to the American Fur Company, which in turn shipped it by the ton and marketed it in Cleveland, Detroit, and other Great Lakes towns where cane and beet sugar were expensive.

Thanks to all for their presentations, and for making this a stimulating conference.