911³Ô¹Ï

This event is hosted by 911³Ô¹Ï David Lam Centre, Taipei Medical University's Centre for Humanities Innovation and Social Engagement, and the TMU-ShuangHo Hospital's Joint Medical & Humanities Fund.

This panel examines relationships among the Bunun language, land, and cultural practices in eastern Taiwan. It explores how Bunun people exercise agency against structures of serial colonialism, through intentional walking projects and language revitalization. These movements reactivate kinship networks, land and cultural-rights claims, and linguistic legacies embedded in the mountain landscape and embodied in everyday life. With increasing pressure from developers entering Bunun territories for extraction and conservation, inequalities persist in public debates over water resources and access. Mandarin is positioned as the sole authoritative language of interpretation and decision-making, excluding the Bunun language and thus limiting local comprehension of legal frameworks and proposed projects. These inequalities function as a continuation of colonial governance, weakening community self-determination and the protection of land, water, and hunting rights.

Bringing together Bunun researchers from different disciplines and communities, the Baqlu team of Hualien discusses their work gathering oral histories from elders, generating place-based knowledge, restoring autonomy in cultural interpretation and building research capacities. This intergenerational effort strives to repair colonial fractures between land and language, asking: How can Bunun cultural vitality and self-governance be restored? By centering community knowledge and sustaining relationships with ancestral lands through kin-seeking journeys, cultural tours, and collaborative research, the project highlights the ongoing co-creation of a Bunun future.