From the 1970s, the PCT had been preaching ethnic resurrection, speaking out about the rights of both Taiwanese and Aboriginals against KMT colonial rule. One of rights they championed was the right to use their own languages to print Bibles and hymnbooks. Printing in Aboriginal languages was illegal under KMT laws, which permitted only Mandarin Chinese in public usage. Although the police had generally overlooked Bibles in Aboriginal languages, one Sunday morning in early 1975 police raided Tayal churches and seized Bibles and hymnbooks. The PCT responded with a public statement (Our Appeal, 1975) affirming that "Every person should be able to use his own language to worship God and express his own religious faith." Our Appeal was directed to “"he government," but also to the world beyond; protests came from overseas churches and even the U.S. Congress. The statement was also for the members of the Presbyterian Church, upon whom it called "to be more concerned for social justice, get involved in the actualities of modern society and through service seek to change the conditions of society." Unremarkable platitudes? Not in Aboriginal villages in Taiwan under martial law in 1975, where conservative Catholics and eschatological sects made up the other two-thirds of the Aboriginal Christian landscape, and where KMT cadres and police empowered by martial law ruled daily life.

The Bible affair displays a pattern to be repeated many times over the next 15 years. Oppressive government policies were resisted by denouncing them as violations of God-given human rights in what was perhaps the only ideology that could then openly trump the KMT. Foreign resources were mobilized to add leverage to the Church’s voice. And the Church sought to educate and encourage its own people to political action for justice. For KMT clergy and elders (and almost all Aboriginal Presbyterian clergy and elders were KMT Party members because refusal of a membership invitation would be foolish), such an event could be a turning point. They wanted to be loyal to the Party (for the patronage if for nothing else), but the Party was attacking their identity as Aboriginal people, their religion, God’s laws, and the Church’s mission "to protect human rights and preserve human dignity." For people to whom conversion was perhaps not so much a change as a deepening of identity, and for whom the Bible was read as a parable of their own ethnic salvation, these were powerful times of counter-hegemonic conversion, in which their ethno-religious identity was strengthened by political action. It was, in fact, Presbyterian activists who first brought and applied Paulo Freire’s "pedagogy of the oppressed" to Taiwan. The Church’s creation of the Aboriginal land rights movement is the most important of many campaigns it launched between 1981 and 2001.

The Return our Land Movement

Most land in mountain areas of Taiwan is controlled by the Forestry Department or other state agencies. Less than 250,000 hectares is "Mountain Reserve Land" (Shandi Baoliudi) to which Aboriginal people have usufruct but not freehold rights. Over 200 Aboriginal Presbyterian churches are built on reserve land donated by believers. In 1981 many began receiving bills from the local governments for land rent. Just when the Church was in a period of tense confrontation with the state, the government discovered that it was an "outside organization" illegally using Aboriginal reserve land. For several years the Aboriginal Work Committee of the PCT General Assembly negotiated with and petitioned the government, and publicized the matter, but to no avail. In early 1986, to strengthen the petition campaign among its churches, it took a new approach: a poster addressed the underlying issue of who owned the land. The slogan adopted was "Return our Land" (Huan Wo Tudi), and a Bible verse alluding to a key Biblical precedent was added: "God forbids that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors (I Kings 21:3)." For another year they worked on the petition campaign, and in December 1986 managed to elect—on the land issue--the first ever non-KMT Aboriginal legislator, Paiwan evangelist Lin Tian-sheng. But despite rapid political change taking place throughout Taiwan, nothing happened on the land question until a contractor building a tourist hotel in March 1987 dug up a modern graveyard in Dongpu, a Bunun village in central Taiwan. The local Bunun churches, politicians, and the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines (ATA) all mobilized in protest.

The Dongpu Graves incident demonstrated the crucial role of local Aboriginal clergy, seminarians, and churches in linking the urban Aboriginal elite to the villages; the mobilizing potential of the Church for protest in Aboriginal society; and the broad unifying power of the land issue. At year’s end the PCT organized a major consultation of all Aboriginal congregations, who passed a declaration reading, "Our mission in this time and place should be to emphasize the contextualization of the gospel, the concientization of Aboriginal people, and Return our Land." In January 1988 the Aboriginal Work Committee approved a plan for six all-day education events around Taiwan on the issue of land rights, ending with a national conference in Taipei in June. The conference involved other Aboriginal organizations, including the ATA and some Aboriginal politicians. On June 25, 1988 they passed the Taiwan Aboriginal people’s Common Statement: "Return our Land," calling for the return of or compensation for all land taken by the government; national legislation to protect Aboriginal land; and the establishment of a cabinet level department for Aboriginal affairs. A few days later they formally organized the Return our Land Alliance and began plans for a major demonstration in Taipei.

The activists in the ATA (created in 1984 with significant Presbyterian participation, financial support, and clergy membership) provided the planning and drive, while the PCT provided the financial and organizational resources and mobilized busloads of people from Aboriginal villages all around Taiwan to take part in the August 18 protest. Rural clergy and KMT members found themselves marching into history against the opposition and threats of local KMT cadres and police, who even stopped some buses on the expressway and urged people to go home before they got into trouble.

Taipei in 1988 was used to large protests, but this one attracted national media and political attention. Blessed and exhorted by PCT leaders and led by ATA chairman Yijiang, a phalanx of Aboriginal ministers, and some brave politicians, 2000 Aboriginal men, women, and children marched across the city in colorful jingling Aboriginal dress, singing hymns and dancing before the Executive Yuan while they waited for the premier to meet with their leaders. The meeting never took place, but those at home in Aboriginal villages around Taiwan saw their neighbors on TV and envied them for it.

From Land to Constitutional Change

Over the next eight years, the Return our Land movement evolved into several other campaigns:

- "Return our Names" for the right to use Aboriginal names as legal names
- the Aboriginal Constitutional Revision Movement to change the designation "Mountain Compatriots" (Shan Bao) to "Aboriginal peoples" (Yuanzhuminzu) and pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing Aboriginal political and cultural rights
- the movement to end the restrictive Mountain Pass system
- the movement to establish a national cabinet-level Council on Aboriginal Affairs (achieved in October 1996).

Though the ATA took the lead in some of these, it soon withered away because it failed to build local support, and the PCT continued through the 1990s to be the mainstay organizing each of these campaigns, especially under the leadership of PCT Aboriginal Work Committee secretary Yohani Isqaqavut.

The Return our Land movement inspired numerous local land actions--the Lanyu nuclear waste and national park issues, and the Taroko fight to regain their land from the Asia Cement Company, for example--in which Presbyterian clergy and lay leaders often took the lead. As schools began to teach Aboriginal languages the teachers recruited were usually Presbyterian clergy and elders, the only people who could read, write, and teach Aboriginal languages.

The PCT also got involved with the opposition DPP’s election strategies. In 1998 the DPP recruited two Presbyterian ministers--Yohani was one--to run as DPP candidates for the seats in the legislature reserved for Aborigines. Though every Aboriginal presbytery passed resolutions supporting them, the limits of the Church’s ethno-political mission were met--even supporters of the DPP (still a minority among Aboriginal KMT) were uncomfortable with the Church supporting a political party. Both men lost.

A New Construction of Aboriginality

The electoral loss highlighted the PCT’s achievements, reminding it that it was not a vote mobilization machine. In 1987 the Aboriginal Presbyterian churches had declared that "restoring the autonomy and dignity of Aboriginal people, upholding social justice, and struggling for legal guarantees of our legitimate rights to survival is the basic responsibility of the church." The PCT had helped give Aboriginal people a new and positive identity: nations with dignity and rights given by God, the first citizens of a new multicultural Taiwan, and actors who can change history. Through its integration of theology and Aboriginality, the Church produced and still produces a continuing dynamic of self-making in Aboriginal thought and practice at both the elite and popular level. It has used its organizational strengths to mobilize its people for repeated campaigns, and has provided a continuing solid institutional base for most Aboriginal political initiatives over the past 15 years. Its links with foreign churches and organizations have increased the participation of Taiwanese Aboriginal peoples in world indigenous movements, including the UN Working Group.

Though the Church’s historic importance is clear, the centrality of the Presbyterians in Taiwan’s Aboriginal movement has also been a source of weakness for non-Church Aboriginal social movement organizations. The commitment of the Presbyterians meant that organizations like the ATA--and even the DPP itself--have often fallen back on the Church as a ready-made resource rather than develop independent organizational networks. Because not all Aboriginal activists are Presbyterian, nor are all allied with the DPP (though all affirm the goals originally formulated by the Return our Land movement), the close links between the PCT leadership and the DPP have led to new divisions.

New questions challenge the future role of the Presbyterians, but not its past contributions. Aboriginal Presbyterians have brought Taiwanese Aboriginal peoples from silence to the beginning of a new future "with their own land, culture, and self-government."

Michael Stainton worked for the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan in Aboriginal student work and rural community development from 1980 to 1991. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in anthropology at York University, Toronto. His dissertation is on the interplay between the Aboriginal movement, local politics, and churches in a Tayal township in northern Taiwan.