Colonial historians erased Indigenous Taiwan from the record, study finds
Researchers analyzing historical scholarship under Japanese rule discovered that Indigenous Taiwanese peoples were systematically excluded from mainstream historiography through deliberate silencing and misrepresentation. The finding reveals how imperial powers shaped academic narratives to reinforce colonial dominance—a pattern with implications for how organizations today assess whose voices shape institutional knowledge and decision-making.
Originaltitel: From Takasago's Past to Taiwan's History Murakami between Silencing and Exaggerating
<p>This final chapter takes a closer look at how Indigenous peoples’ pasts were excluded from history research and teaching under the Japanese colonial regime. Imperial historians created an outside narrative – a mix of silencing and othering – that drew heavily on colonial tropes of difference and backwardness. As a result, Taiwanese–Japanese encounters were only reluctantly included in the otherwise expansive historiography of early modern foreign relations. This may seem a contradiction to Murakami’s fascination with Indigenous sources such as the Sinkan manuscripts. Sinkan manuscripts, which refer to land rental agreements concluded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are in itself colonial hybrids, mirrors his obsession with the discoverable written archive and thus another aspect of his scholarly colonialism.</p>