Written by Yu-Yueh Tsai. This article examines how government housing policies in Lanyu during the martial law era replaced traditional Tao homes with flawed concrete structures. This modernisation project caused displacement, social upheaval, and long-term trauma. Inadequate reconstruction assistance forced families into debt and incomplete housing, widening inequality and weakening traditional kinship support systems while exacerbating mental health struggles.
Written by Yang-Hsun Hou. Through this article, the author examines their position as a Han person in Taiwan, reflecting on how Han settler colonialism is felt, normalised, and tied to systemic racism. The author advocates for recognising colonial structures and listening to Indigenous perspectives to foster accountability and relational healing.
Taiwan is too often reduced to a geopolitical abstraction, but this essay reads the island as a body — one that carries the trauma of colonisation, the 228 massacre, and the White Terror in its very flesh. Through memorials, indigenous counter-mapping, and the Mazu pilgrimage, Taiwan heals by inscribing its wounds back onto the map: re-membering, in the flesh, as another name for healing
Written by Wasiq Silan. This article invites us to rethink individualistic academic mobility and advocates for a decolonial approach to international collaboration. Drawing on journeys to New York and Panama with Taiwan’s Millet Ark team, the author introduces Indigenous methodologies such as lmuhuw (singing map/weaving) and qutux niqan (kinship bonds). The author argues that meaningful collaboration requires moving collectively with Elders and youth, transforming travel from knowledge extraction into relational accountability.
Written by Ipiq Matay. This article explores the tension between embodied Indigenous knowledge and rigid institutional heritage frameworks in Taiwan. Through tminun (weaving), how cultural heritage is a lived, relational practice passed down through muscle memory, rhythm, and ancestral law (gaya), rather than static museum displays. The author calls on cultural institutions to look beyond simple representation and embrace dynamic Indigenous epistemologies on their own terms.
