Urban Settler Colonialism: Policing and Displacing Indigeneity in Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract

This article argues that colonialism needs to be explicitly foregrounded in analyses of urban processes in settler colonial cities. Urban settler colonialism is an ongoing process that affects urban indigenous subjects, a force that builds on the longue durée of settler colonialism that has dispossessed them for centuries. My article draws on ethnographic research conducted with a group of indigenous Pangcah/Amis people who have migrated to the Taipei region in Taiwan over the last forty years. While paying attention to the long history of settler colonialism on the island and specifically in the Taipei region—the erasure of indigenous Ketagalan heritage in northern Taiwan, indigenous land dispossession in rural villages, and a consequent post-WWII influx of indigenous people into Taipei, and the displacement of urban indigenous squatter settlements since the 1990s—I will ethnographically focus on a group of indigenous public housing residents who have continued to face urban settler colonialism. I discuss how they have negotiated with surveillance and policing from their on-site housing management team, charges of incivility from Han state agents and neighbors, and displacement from urban redevelopment.