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Long Night Over Hualien: The China Threat Through the Eyes of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples

“The current situation is not the fruit of our choosing, but of history itself.” 

As the United States and China wrestle for control of Taiwan, the Taiwanese people want nothing more than to be free. But even as the specter of conflict looms large, the meaning of freedom differs wildly for different groups in Taiwan – particularly the Indigenous communities, historically the most vulnerable to all forms of oppression.

Bulaw Tumi is a Sakizaya activist. And like any Sakizaya he is wary by nature. He has good reason to be. His people “continue to suffer the effects of colonial oppression, which has sapped their spirit and instilled in them a sense of inferiority,” Tumi told me.  “The current situation is not the fruit of our choosing, but of history itself.”

In 1878, invading soldiers from the Qing dynasty – the regime that ruled mainland China at the time – nearly wiped out the Sakizaya, who then inhabited the Hualien Plain. Their leader, Kumud Pazik, was butchered slowly, sadistically, until nothing remained of him but a bloodied, lifeless torso. 

His wife, Icep Kanasaw, met an equally tragic fate. Qing soldiers trampled her to death, crushing her face, legs, and chest with their boots. She endured this ordeal for roughly 20 minutes before passing out. She would never awaken. 

Perhaps it was a mercy. The alternative would have been to watch her husband, bound to a tree, bleeding relentlessly, as he held on until sunrise the following day. Unlike Kanasaw, the surviving  Sakizaya people were forced to bear witness, stunned and mortified, to that nightmarish spectacle. 

The barbaric execution of the couple brought the hostilities between the Sakizaya and the Chinese invaders to a close. There was no ceasefire, no gentleman’s agreement. There was simply almost no one left to resist the Qing. It is estimated that over the course of three months, thousands of people were killed, some of them belonging to neighboring tribes. 

Men, women, children, and elders – Sakizaya people of all ages were slaughtered. The survivors were forced to remain in silence, in the shadows. Many moved eastward, toward the coast, abandoning their traditional lands in search of safety.

Then came the Japanese, who colonized Taiwan after the Qing ceded their claim in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. By that point, many of the Sakizaya were living among the Amis, forced to conceal their real tribal identity to survive. They had grown accustomed to a way of life and a culture that were not their own. 

Later came the Nationalist Chinese, who fled to Taiwan en masse after losing the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Leader Chiang Kai-shek showed the same contempt for Indigenous peoples as his predecessors had done centuries before. Prejudice and xenophobia were rampant everywhere. 

It was not until 2007 that the Sakizaya were officially recognized as Taiwan’s 13th tribe. Nearly 130 years after the mass slaughter of their people, the Sakizaya could finally openly lay claim to their unique identity.

Until quite recently, children were discouraged from asking about their ethnic heritage, and sometimes even mistreated for doing so. Perhaps that is why it proved so difficult to find anyone willing to speak on the Sakizaya. I reached out to half a dozen people and a handful of non-governmental organizations. Of that list, only two responded: one was Tumi, and the other was Jolan Hsieh, a Siraya academic and activist. 

Over Hualien hangs a fear – real and justified – that history will repeat itself and that invading forces will punish Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples once more. But are the Sakizaya and the remaining tribes prepared for the possibility of war? 

The Chinese of today would not come bearing sabers and muskets, but cannons and torpedo boats. How will they fight back? 

About a month ago, I heard word of a rather curious individual. He goes by the name “Samuel Morpheus.” That is not, of course, his real name. He is called Hsieh Yi-hung. Word has it he travels back and forth across Taiwan, hoping to raise public awareness about how people should act in the event of war. 

He is frequently accompanied by a former U.S. soldier, retired Lieutenant Colonel Guermantes Lailari, better known by his nickname, “G-man,” who sees their shared goal as “prevent[ing] the next terrorist incident – the red terror.”

“If Taiwan lacks the determination to defend itself, then will Americans sacrifice their own lives to protect cowardly Taiwanese who are unwilling to make a sacrifice for their country?” Hsieh asked the Radio Free Asia newspaper in a 2024 interview. He added: “Our preparations are as powerful as nuclear weapons.” 

Hsieh was wrong. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, more powerful, more terrifying,........

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