24-hour TV station devoted to aborigines in Taiwan (fwd)

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24-hour TV station devoted to aborigines in Taiwan

By Cindy Sui
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/03/news/taiwan.php

TAIPEI: It is Saturday at Taiwan Indigenous TV, and the station is abuzz
with giggles and flirtations.

One of TITV's most popular shows, an aboriginal matchmaking program called
"I Love You, What Should I Do?", is taping, and the young contestants are
getting ready to go onstage. Their initial shyness fades as a vivacious
hostess in a black evening gown coaxes them to start a sexy dance.

Before long, the three women and three men are checking each other out.

It is all part of the mission of Taiwan's first aboriginal television
station.

The two-year-old Channel 16, which marked its second anniversary Sunday,
aims to help the island's 470,000 aborigines regain a sense of pride in
their long-devastated cultures. The station also hopes to raise
consciousness in Taiwan's larger society about aborigines, who make up less
than 2 percent of the population but have inhabited the island for thousands
of years, longer than the majority Han Chinese.

It comes at a time when Taiwan's government is eager to promote local
heritage and underscore its separateness from mainland China, which
considers the island a breakaway province. TITV is one of a small number of
stations devoted to telling the stories and preserving the cultures of
indigenous peoples, along with Canada's Aboriginal Peoples Television
Network and New Zealand's Maori Television, among others.

"In the past, Taiwan's aborigines didn't feel comfortable expressing our
culture in mainstream society because there was a lot of discrimination,"
said TITV's director, Masao Aki, who is an aborigine. "Once people knew you
were aboriginal, they thought you were backwards, liked to drink or, if
you're a woman, they thought you're a prostitute.

"Only by having our own TV station are we able to have discussions about
issues that concern us and have aborigines' point of view heard in Taiwan's
media, laws, education, et cetera," he said in an interview. "And only when
we have a joint way of expressing ourselves as a group can we realize who
we are."

Aborigine advocates had discussed a channel since the 1980s, and a Han
Chinese legislator from a small political party, hoping to win aboriginal
votes, publicly proposed it in the late 1990s. TITV went on the air July 1,
2005.

Previously, the only programs about Taiwan's 13 officially recognized
indigenous tribes - people of Austronesian heritage similar to those in
Australia, the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia - were two
once-a-week shows on public television. Mainstream stations' reports were
rare or tended to promote stereotypes.

With about 100 workers and 350 million Taiwan new dollars, or about $10.6
million, in annual government funding, TITV offers 24-hour programming,
including news, interviews and aboriginal language lessons, as well as a
music and a cooking show, and soon, the first aboriginal situation comedy.

The station regularly invites experts, including doctors and academics, to
address issues like alienation among aboriginal youth, alcohol abuse and
the encroachment on aborigines' land by development projects. Aborigines
have shorter life spans and higher unemployment and suicide rates than the
rest of Taiwan's population.

The cooking show features rarely seen aboriginal recipes and cooking
methods, like adding hot stones to a broth to cook fish. Other programs
teach traditional songs and dances - an important way to communicate
history because many aboriginal languages are unwritten - and ancient
methods of fishing with simple tools, a disappearing skill as young people
leave villages for the cities.

But TITV faces many challenges, including the large number of aboriginal
languages, and the difficulty hiring aborigines with the right skills.

Some critics say the station is not doing enough to promote tribal languages
that face extinction.

Few aborigines younger than 40 are fluent in their tribal language, and less
than 5 percent of children are believed to able to speak their tribal
language at all, thanks to previous government efforts of assimilation.

"The station should do more to reverse this trend, but most of its broadcast
is in Mandarin," said Namoh Rata, an aboriginal language professor at
National Dong Hwa University in eastern Taiwan.

Masao, the station director, said it would be difficult to broadcast mostly
in aboriginal languages because there are so many. "Which language do you
choose?" he asked.

Other than the language lessons and weekly news broadcasts in the major
tribes' languages, most of TITV's programs, including the daily news, are
in Chinese.

Janubark, an aboriginal ethnic relations scholar at National Dong Hwa
University, said tribes would benefit more if each had its own station in
its own language. "That would be more helpful in preserving our languages
and cultures, which is what Taiwan's aborigines need most," said Janubark,
who uses only one name.

But there is no financing for multiple stations, and TITV has difficulty
maintaining aboriginal staffing at its current level of 87 percent, given
the lower educational levels among indigenous peoples. Most of the
station's technical jobs go to Han Chinese.

Even so, TITV's critics say the station has had a significant impact in a
short time. Mainstream stations have picked up numerous stories the station
has broken.

Meanwhile, station officials are focusing on providing more appealing
programs, like the matchmaking show, which is not purely entertainment. At
a time when many aborigines marry Han Chinese, the station hopes it can
help single aborigines meet each other.

"I don't really care whether the girl I date is an aborigine or not, but of
course my parents would prefer I marry someone who's aboriginal," said Yan
Qi, 20, one of the contestants at the Saturday taping.

Each contestant had been asked to show viewers something that was meaningful
to them. Yan brought an aboriginal-style necklace he made.

That sort of cultural pride is where Masao believes TITV is making a
difference.

"The sense of self-acceptance among aborigines is stronger now," he said.
Many people, he said, now feel they "can wear aboriginal clothes on the
street."

"What we're trying to do at the station is to get people to think about who
they are. Where are you from? How do you speak your language? How do you
dance your dance?" he said. "If we always focus on learning about the West,
learning Mandarin, then over time, our own culture and languages will
disappear."