Written by Wasiq Silan
Image credit: Millet Ark Team with the Ărramăt Project Pathway Four in front of the UNHQ in New York City. Photo by Maisang Hanako.
In the Thomas Berry Place outside New York City, Tayal Indigenous elder and knowledge holder Pagung Tomi stood before hundreds of delegates at the Indigenous Peacebuilding Summit. Coming from across the globe, the audience grew still as she began to chant lmuhuw, which means a Tayal “singing map.” This form of chanting carries contemplation, migration memories, and ancestral connections. As her voice filled the room, participants were drawn into a sonic landscape of Tayal migration routes, mountains, and relational worlds that extend far beyond Taiwan’s geographical borders.
Listening to Pagung’s Lmuhuw in that space, I suddenly realised this was not just another ordinary academic conference trip. Travelling alongside the Millet Ark team (小米方舟), particularly with an Elder and Knowledge Holder like Pagung Tomi, fundamentally transformed my understanding of international collaboration. This was not simply academic mobility; it was a form of collective movement grounded in community relationships. It was kind of a land-based lmuhuw that ethically guided us to move collectively and as one qutux niqan (a Tayal term that refers to a kinship bond based on social relations, with reciprocal responsibilities and communal foodways).
Image credit: The Millet Ark team in New York City at the Taiwan Union Christian Church, where we were generously provided shelter and warm support during our visit. Photo by Jonah Lin.
Mobility as Academic Privilege
Before returning to Taiwan, I spent more than a decade studying and working in Helsinki, Finland, completing my Master’s degree, PhD, and postdoctoral research within Nordic and European academic institutions. In that environment, international movement was treated as both natural and necessary. Conferences, research visits, workshops, and collaborative meetings were built into academic life. As a salaried university researcher, I was regularly encouraged, and luckily at times financially supported, to travel abroad for research and networking.
Over time, I internalised this movement as a benchmark for academic success. To become an independent researcher, the mandate was clear: publish internationally, secure grants, build networks, and constantly cross borders. Academic visibility depended entirely on making oneself seen and heard and on disseminating brilliant research results.
At the time, I rarely questioned this system; it functioned like an invisible, secure infrastructure deep within the academy. As an Indigenous Tayal scholar trained at elite educational institutions in Taiwan and later in English-medium academic environments in Europe, I had gradually come to take this mobility for granted. Only later did I begin to notice: if you can afford to do mobility, the reason is most likely gendered, racialised and embedded in class privilege. The dominant model of individualised mobility I had long accepted began to sit increasingly uneasily with the community relationships and decolonial ethics I often spoke of in my work. For me, this understanding shifted profoundly when I travelled with the Millet Ark team to Panama in 2025. Travelling alone as an institutionally supported researcher felt structurally distinct from moving collectively with Elders, students, and community practitioners grounded in Indigenous relationality.
Mobility as building relations from within
My understanding of international collaboration began to shift in October 2025 during a trip to Panama for the First Meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Article 8(j) and Other Provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity Related to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, SB8J-1, under the Convention on Biological Diversity (Read the news about our participation here). As a co-PI, together with the Millet Ark delegation, we participated in the Indigenous-led, place-based Ărramăt Project. In Panama, we share how revitalising millets becomes a core tenet of healing, reconciliation and social justice, and of responding to the challenges of biodiversity and climate change. If we enact Tayal’s knowledge, lmuhuw, which means “to thread or weave,” it offers an alternative methodology for mobility that contrasts with the conventional model of mobility.
Lmuhuw, in this sense, has three dimensions. First, this cross-border threading experience is inclusive and transformative. The Millet Ark delegation did not consist only of researchers. Alongside graduate students and academics were community practitioners, youth participants, Elders, and Knowledge Holders who had spent more than a decade cultivating Millet Ark as a place-based Indigenous initiative in Taiwan. Of course, moving a team of ten across international borders is neither simple nor romantic. Guided by Prof. Yih-Ren Lin, a visionary veteran of Indigenous social movements, I quickly learned to plan strategically, coordinate logistics, and navigate the meticulous academic accounting. Second, lmuhuw as a methodology of mobility is Indigenous-led and cultivates Indigenous leadership. Namely, this trip to Panama would not have happened without the spirit of mâmawi-atoskîwin (all working together). The funding flexibility and trust from the Ărramăt Project would not have facilitated it. Its existence challenges dominant epistemologies that separate community from research. Last but not least, this form of mobility is grounded in resilience. Why do I say so? It is because the workload to coordinate this form of mobility still felt overwhelming and administratively labyrinthine. Nevertheless, it was precisely this effort of travelling with community practitioners, Elders, and youth that made the journey meaningful. The logistical complexity itself revealed how rarely institutional systems are designed to support relational forms of international collaboration.
Understanding mobility through lmuhuw and as qutux niqan together with the Millet Ark delegation transformed the nature of the travel. In the conventional academic model, as movement is individualised, relationships with communities risk becoming objects of extraction (the ethics in question are raised in, e.g., the seminal book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith and in the foundational book by Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson (2008), Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods). The knowledge is mobilised by the researcher (even with the best intentions) and circulates globally to build academic capital, while the Indigenous Knowledge remains localised within the bounded community.
In contrast, moving collectively–in this case, as qutux niqan–altered this flow of interpretation and authority. Conversations were no longer filtered exclusively through the researcher’s lens. Elders and Knowledge Holders engaged directly with Indigenous participants from other parts of the world. Students actively learn to facilitate dialogue and practise and strengthen a sense of accountability by building relations with people, ideas and the land (and not solely through the institutional board of ethics, the problem I voiced together with mentor Peter Mataira elsewhere). This kind of relational accountability is rarely visible within standard university classrooms.
Most importantly, the relationships formed abroad did not remain confined to an abstract academic exchange. Because Elders and community practitioners were active agents in the movement, these cross-border conversations immediately fed back into community practice upon our return. For example, when Pagung took part in discussions regarding developing the curriculum on healing, reconciliation and social justice, she immediately linked the dialogue to her daily practice and understanding of Sbalay (Tayal word; refers to the ethical framework and process that rebuilds relations by correcting asymmetrical power balance; often translated as reconciliation). This model of mobility does not mean simply bringing an Elder along to tick a diversity box. The core of mobility as relation-building requires researchers to take Elders’ sharing and expertise seriously, allowing their presence to fundamentally transform how knowledge and responsibility circulate within a collaboration. Unfortunately, even when well-meaning, decolonisation projects invite Elders; they are too often treated merely as cultural representatives brought in to perform arts, rather than as Knowledge Holders to exercise self-determination and sovereignty (e.g., to participate substantively and make decisions concerning the foundations of the collaboration). For more about how to decolonise decolonisation projects, see here.
These experiences forced me to reconsider what international collaboration in Indigenous studies is ultimately for, and whom it should serve.
Coming back to rethink international collaboration
Travelled with Millet Ark as qutux niqan to Panama and New York, which helped me realise that I have to decolonise my original assumption about international collaboration and indigenise the mobility through lmuhuw. If decolonising academia within Indigenous Studies requires shifting from research on Indigenous peoples to researching with them, in the case of international collaboration, wouldn’t it make sense to focus less on how to collect data from them and analyse for them and more on how to facilitate across borders together with them?
This is not easy to answer, as within academic institutions in Taiwan and elsewhere, internationalisation is often measured through individual mobility: conference presentations, international publications, global networks, and externally funded collaborations. Researchers are expected to move constantly across borders in order to remain visible and competitive.
Yet, Indigenous relational ethics direct us to a different set of questions: Who gets to move? Who has access to funding, passports, academic legitimacy, and institutional support? More importantly, Indigenous relationality also shifts our understanding of the purpose of movement itself. International collaboration cannot become another mechanism through which researchers extract stories, experiences, and knowledge from communities to accumulate academic capital. The question is not only whether communities are “represented internationally”: this is often heard in the community, where researchers use the paternalistic guise of “We, the smart researchers, will document your story and make it known worldwide.” From the Tayal perspective, we need Sbalay as an ethical framework that corrects the asymmetrical power balance between the academic researcher and the community.
What matters more, in the end, is whether relationships themselves can travel, return, and sustain community life.
In May 2026, I participated in a forum hosted by Taiwan’s Indigenous Professors Association at National Dong Hwa University in the Pangcah people’s traditional territory, now known as Chihak (the northern part of Hualien). The theme was Rethinking Scholars’ Responsibility and Research Ethics From the Standpoint of Community Relations. It was humbling to present my initiative on international collaboration at such a gathering and to thread Tayal concepts of lmuhuw, qutux niqan and Sbalay as constitutive elements that deconstruct the usual way of academic travel.
I ended the presentation with an open question: I have been thinking about a possible future exchange with Quechua Indigenous communities in Peru, centred on potato farming and knowledge of food sovereignty. Like many researchers with access to institutional funding, I have the structural means to organise travel and bring people abroad. But increasingly, I find myself asking:
If I cannot go, who should go? Should I invite community members who speak English, or should I consider an entirely different set of criteria rooted in community continuity?
And perhaps more importantly,
Who can facilitate lmuhuw and ground those relationships in sbalay, bringing relations back home to the Tayal community?
Acknowledgement: This activity was supported by the Ărramăt Project (New Frontiers in Research Fund, Canada, NFRFT-2020-00188).
Wasiq Silan (高怡安) is a Tayal researcher from the Taranan River Valley in northern Formosa (Taiwan). She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Indigenous Development and Social Work at the National Dong Hwa University and a researcher at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN) at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include developing sustainable quality-of-life care systems, decolonising state-Indigenous relationships, elder care, Indigenous relationalities, indigenising curriculum, and sovereignty and collaborative, community-based approaches.