John Christopher Upton

In recent decades, Taiwan's indigenous communities have come into a new visibility and, with this visibility, a proliferation of domestic laws directed at protecting indigenous practices, land, and tradition has followed. Rather than viewing Taiwan’s indigenous rights legal framework as yet another iteration of colonial oppression, I argue that it constitutes a special, productive space of state and indigenous imagination. This project attempts to read along, rather than against, the grain of Taiwan’s indigenous rights framework to show how it is a site where the state and indigenous groups come to imagine and discover new ways of understanding themselves and their relationship.