An exhibition on the indigenous Ketagalan culture will open in Taipei City Nov. 19, aiming to educate people on ethnic diversity and mixing in the local population, according to the National Taiwan Museum.
A total of 36 cultural artifacts from the NTM collection on the plains aboriginal people will be shown at the Ketagalan Culture Center in Beitou District, former site of a Ketagalan community.
Taiwan is often said to comprise diverse ethnic groups, but the dichotomy between Han Chinese and non-Han remains very clear-cut in the popular mind, according to Chan Su-chuan, associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History and the exhibition curator.
“This belief does not jibe with what academic studies show about Taiwan’s indigenous people,” she said. Chan explained that the Ketagalan had been one of the major indigenous groups in northern Taiwan, but were totally assimilated into Han society by the 1940s.
The exhibition is titled “How Cooked Are You,” with “cooked” referring to culturally assimilated aborigines, in contrast to “raw,” or unassimilated, mountain aborigines. Both terms were used in the Qing dynasty and later adopted by the Japanese colonial administration in Taiwan (1895-1945).
Chan said visitors to the museum show who assume they are ethnic Chinese might discover they also have some aboriginal heritage. This will help cultivate real respect for different cultures, she added.
Highlights of the exhibition include a divination kit, presumably the last one in existence, and a relief of a man wearing a double-diamond crown, characteristic of northern Taiwanese aboriginal sculpture.
Also on display are a Ketagalan land-cultivation contract from 1763, and a map of ports and geography in northern Taiwan, first drawn by the Spanish in 1626 and copied by the Japanese in 1935.
The exhibition will run until April 29, 2012. (PCT-THN)