Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Taiwan indigenous languages on television

One of the things I was impressed with during my short stay in Taiwan was the Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV) channel, which features programming for and by indigenous peoples of Taiwan, including news programmes, educational shows and variety shows.

Here's a screenshot of a programme that is in (what I assume to be) the Seediq language (sometimes still classified with Atayal).



And here's a screenshot of a news programme in what I assumed was the Amis language ('Pangcah' is the endonym for the group). Although I couldn't understand what they were saying, I did see that the story they were running was about Julia Gillard's March 21 apology to victims of forced adoptions in Australia. Her apology echoed Kevin Rudd's 2008 apology to victims of the Stolen Generation, a policy which I believe has some resonance among the indigenous people of Taiwan, given their own experience of institutionalised racism.



Speaking of the Amis language, most people around the world would have actually heard bits of an Amis song without even realising it. Remember Enigma's 'Return to Innocence', which was used in ads promoting the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta?


The 'chant' you hear right at the start, then throughout the song was actually sampled from a recording of a tradition Amis song titled 'Elders' Drinking Song' (or 'Jubilant Drinking Song' or 'Weeding and Paddyfield Song No. 1'), as performed by Difang Duana and Igay Duana (also known as Kuo Ying-nan and Kuo Hsiu-chu) while they were in Paris on a cultural tour in 1988.

The Maison des Cultures du Monde in France recorded the husband and wife duo, along with 30 other visiting artistes, and created a compilation titled 'Polyphonies vocales des aborigènes de Taïwan'. However, they failed to properly credit the Duanas and their compatriots. Michael Cretu, the producer of Enigma, was later sued for not giving proper credit to the original singers, stating that he had assumed the recordings belonged to the public domain and thus were not subject to intellectual property rights. The case was eventually settled out of court. [Click here for more details.]


Sadly, Difang and Igay Duana both passed away in 2002, but I found a video of them on Youtube taken in 2001 singing a bit of the song in their garage. You can still purchase their 1998 album Circle of Life on iTunes which features the famous song and was produced by Rock Records.


This issue of 'indigenous intellectual property rights' is a very tricky but important one for people involved in the documentation of language, indigenous art forms and scientific knowledge. For one thing, the 'owner' of such intellectual property is rarely a single individual or two but rather an entire 'community' - itself a problematic notion that does not always correspond to a stable cohesive unity. [Click here for Gawne and Kelly's presentation at this year's International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation.] At the same time however, there is seen to be a need to safeguard such intellectual property (be they songs or botanical knowledge) from what could be called 'exploitation' by outsiders who offer no compensation to any members of that community (even if it is difficult to determine what one considers exactly to be 'exploitation').

Perhaps having a television channel that advocates for indigenous rights and which produces and airs programmes related to traditional culture is one way of documenting and showcasing traditional art forms to a wide audience without the threat of 'exploitation' - in fact, many of the educational programmes on TITV are aimed specifically at imparting traditional knowledge to children belonging to the relevant indigenous community.

Of course this is not a solution for all indigenous peoples, even within Taiwan, especially for smaller groups with insufficient resources and viewers. Furthermore, as we see people move away from more 'traditional' forms of media like radio and television to online media, the nature of the debate surrounding indigenous intellectual property rights will undoubtedly continue to change.