Written by Ipiq Matay
Image credit: The structure of Snuruq. Provided by the author.
One evening in 2016, while I was weaving, my mother suddenly spoke.
“Sttu–tmbuy–sttu,” she murmured softly in Truku language, “more forward, backwards, forward.”
She had not spoken about weaving in decades. Yet the rhythm rising from the weaving loom brought something back before it returned to language. The sound awakened a memory she did not know she still carried. That moment raises a question: what happens when embodied Indigenous knowledge is translated into museum displays, tourism narratives, and institutional heritage frameworks?
In 2016, former president Tsai Ing-wen issued an official apology to Indigenous peoples and announced revisions to the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act. These changes gave legal recognition to Indigenous cultural assets and reflect a broader state effort to address historical justice and adopt a more Indigenous-centred view of Taiwan’s cultural heritage. Writing from the intersection of global cultural heritage policy and Indigenous recognition in Taiwan, I use Truku weaving to show that heritage is not only protected by law but also lived and transmitted through the body.
As a Truku weaving practitioner, I understand weaving not merely as textile production or visual culture represented in archives or museums. It also lives in the body: in rhythm, gesture, muscle memory, and repetition; in the relationship between hands and threads; in the coordination between body and tool; in sitting beside elders and learning through observation, practice, and the gradual recognition of “rightness,” a moment of epiphany.
In Truku, weaving is called tminun. It is a verb, an ongoing process. It refers to the people who participated, the natural resources connected to the land, and the process through which body, material, and tool correspond with one another, as well as to social relations, kinship, and ancestral and spiritual passages.
For many Truku people, weaving is tied to kinship, gendered labour, ancestral teaching, and gaya. Gaya is the Truku moral and cosmological system rooted in ancestral law and social relations. Weaving is therefore not merely a “traditional craft”; it is part of how relationships are maintained across generations.
Meanwhile, the Truku have endured considerable cultural upheaval under five centuries of colonial rule. Forced relocation, violent suppression, coerced assimilation, missionary influence, and ongoing state-driven policies have reshaped Indigenous social life. Gaya-based knowledge has thus transformed across generations, while weaving knowledge has been lost, reshaped, adapted, revitalised, and interpreted under changing historical and social conditions. Which Truku weaving tradition persists across generations? In what forms? In which languages?
In this article, “heritage” is not a neutral term. It is a mode of knowledge production that draws from the past to shape the present through exhibition, performance, and display. In recent years, museums have tried to work with Indigenous communities through the return of cultural heritage, exhibitions, co-curatorial projects, and publications. Institutions like the National Museum of Prehistory cooperate with the Indigenous communities to document and exhibit histories using oral traditions, individual narratives, and Indigenous rather than Western academic lenses, such as the co-curation between the Kamcing (a Bunun Indigenous community and the Museum. Another example of this collaborative shift is the 2019 publication, Mseusa, Mneghuway Knkla Kndsan Rudan Truku (Knowledge and Weaving Arts of the Truku People). This book was co-researched and co-edited by the National Museum of Prehistory and the Truku weaving practitioners of the Paciq/Sakura (Syuhuan), a Truku Indigenous community. These efforts point to a broader effort toward decolonisation within museums and cultural institutions.
Indigenous communities, however, are not passive participants within these processes. Indigenous traditional cultural practitioners are community organisers who actively reshape how cultural heritage is interpreted, transmitted, and lived. In Tawsay (Shanli), a Sediq/Toda Indigenous community, the Ramie Festival revitalises and demonstrates the traditional processes and knowledge of plant fibre. These knowledge and narratives are recorded in the book Blnga Hana Tminun Alang Tawsay (Echoes of Tawsay: Weaving Stories and Catalogue from the Shanli Community). In Cyakang (a Truku Indigenous community), the book Cyakang Weaving Landscape created a Truku weaving map, embedded with stories and weaving knowledge passed down through generations. And Akay Play Life, a prominent indigenous-led local company in the Cyakang community, develops immersive ecotourism experiences that transform traditional Truku culture and ancestral history into sustainable, hands-on journeys for visitors.
In recent years, many Indigenous youth returners have established weaving studios, joined community associations, and developed ecological tours grounded in local knowledge. In many cases, weaving has become a means of rebuilding intergenerational relationships disrupted by colonialism, forced assimilation, migration, and industrialisation. Indigenous participation in these projects supports cultural and social development by strengthening Indigenous knowledge and practice while also creating community-based economic opportunities.
Yet institutional heritage frameworks often require classification, preservation, documentation, and display. Indigenous knowledge, however, is often relational, embodied, and contextual. Some forms of knowledge do not exist as fixed information in books or archives. Instead, they emerge through movement, repetition, social relationships, and lived practice. It is carried in the body, in the sound of the loom, in the touch of thread, in the patience of learning beside an elder, and in the emotional recognition that memory can return before words do.
For Truku weaving practitioners, weaving is not only a skill or a tradition. It is a way of remembering kinship, loss, intimacy, and ancestral connection. It is also a way of understanding how knowledge can be passed on through feeling as much as through explanation.
This does not mean returning to a fixed or untouched past. Tradition itself is dynamic. Truku weaving has already survived colonial rule, forced relocation, missionary influence, state assimilation policies, and capitalist transformation. What continues is not a frozen tradition but a set of relationships, memories, responsibilities, and ways of being that are carried and adapted across generations. This is why weaving cannot simply be understood as a cultural object. Weaving space is also a site of negotiation. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I use the idea of conscientisation to think about embodied cultural practice. In weaving, Indigenous people engage with museums, tourism, state institutions, and global heritage discourse. It is also where younger generations ask what it means to become Truku today and where memory can return unexpectedly through sound, gesture, and bodily practice.
Museums and cultural institutions, therefore, face an important challenge. Collaboration with Indigenous communities cannot stop at inclusion or representation alone. It must also recognise Indigenous epistemologies on their own terms, including forms of embodied and relational knowledge that do not always fit neatly into institutional categories.
In Taiwan, Indigenous collaboration within museums has already produced meaningful transformations. Indigenous curators, artisans, scholars, traditional cultural practitioners, community organisers, and residents are increasingly reshaping exhibitions and public discourse in important ways. Indigenous weaving is not only a craft technique but also a cultural practice that connects ancestors, land, gender roles, and Indigenous identity. It also extends beyond Taiwan, as the Special Issue: Indigenous Weaving and Its Evolving Cultures in Taiwan Insight shows in 2023. Across aesthetic, relational, political, and cosmological, Indigenous weaving points to an embodied way of knowing.
Truku weaving offers a way of thinking beyond the divide between embodied knowledge and institutional heritage frameworks. In Truku, tminun (weave’) refers not only to textile production or weaving practice but also to a way of becoming in relation to others and to oneself. This becomes especially clear in the ways weaving is taught and learned.
I learned Plain Weave (a weaving skill) with my aunt. The warp arrangement is called Tmsay (a process to organise the settings of the colour thread). Through her guidance, I learned how to create different patterns, such as hakaw (‘stairs’) and kuyi (‘bud-like’ pattern), which emerged through thread organisation and colour combinations.
Image credit: Hakaw (‘stairs’ pattern).
Image credit: Kuyi (‘bug-like’ pattern).
Later, I learned Twill Weave (another weaving skill) from another practitioner, who taught me to structure the warp through numbers. I followed that method and created the same eye-like pattern as the one my grandmother had woven, but I could not fully master it.
Then I went back to my aunt. “What number? It’s not three layers. It’s two. ‘Up’ and ‘down,’” she said. I relearned Twill Weave with her, which in Truku is called Snuruq. The warp arrangement of Snuruq (Twill Weave) develops from Tmsay (Plain Weave), following this sequence: Tmsay–Priqo–Ksudun ta kana. As my aunt explained, “Tmsay means “up-and-down,” a difficult turn, and wrapping them together.” Through that lesson, I learned how to make eye-like motifs, Doriq (Eye), and mountain-like patterns. That is Snuruq, which I eventually learned to weave.
Image credit: Note of Snuruq. Provided by the author.
What I learned from these two weaving practitioners came from two distinct bodies of knowledge. One is rooted in Truku epistemology, where Tmsay points to a relational, embodied sense of structure. The other draws on Western textile studies and numerical classification. Both can create the same pattern, but they teach differently and assume different kinds of knowledge from the very beginning. This is why Indigenous weaving cannot be reduced to a fixed object or a single way; it is taught, corrected, remembered, and felt.
Image credit: Snuruq with an eye-like motif.
Image credit: Snuruq with a mountain-like pattern.
What happens in museums is that “Indigenous weaving” is only one moment within a much wider field of relations involving memory, labour, kinship, responsibility, and movement. Threads do not become identical; they remain distinct while continuously crossing, adjusting, and responding to one another. Similarly, knowledge in weaving is not simply transferred as information but emerges through rhythm, attentiveness, repetition, and bodily adjustment.
From this perspective, Indigenous collaboration within museums is not simply about inclusion or representation but about whether relational epistemologies can remain alive within institutional forms that often seek to stabilise, classify, and contain knowledge. The question, then, is not whether Indigenous weaving should enter museums or heritage systems. It already has. The question is what happens to knowledge when it is translated into institutional regimes that require it to become objectified, documented, and displayed. More importantly, what kinds of worlds are Indigenous people weaving through these encounters?
Ipiq Matay is an Indigenous weaving practitioner and researcher from the Truku group in Taiwan. Ipiq Matay is her Truku name. She is currently pursuing an MPhil/PhD in Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London. From 2014 to 2022, she worked as a teacher and Indigenous community worker across Truku communities, collaborating with schools, local organisations, and NGOs to develop cultural learning programmes. She has contributed to participatory mapping projects of the Truku traditional territory and co-edited Cyakang Weaving Map (2018). In 2026, she received the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) Young Scholar Award. As both a weaving practitioner and researcher, she actively engages in Indigenous storytelling, cultural revitalisation, and community-based knowledge production.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Polyphonic Curation: Museum Exhibitions and Indigenous Dialogue.