2024 ANU TAIWAN UPDATE
Unseen Challenges: Indigenous Elders and Hidden Colonization in Taiwan's Aged Care

Over the past two decades, aged care in Taiwan has seen rapid reform, focusing on improving service capacity. While the government highlights coverage rates as a measure of success, this narrow perspective ignores broader issues in aged care and fails to tackle relational and democratic issues that need to be addressed for support to be sustainable. This policy direction has posed particular challenges for Indigenous elders.

In this talk, Dr Wasiq Silan will discuss the experiences of Indigenous elders receiving care within their communities, drawing from her ongoing research. Although the social welfare program aims to address health inequalities and provide services tailored to community needs, it inadvertently acts as a form of colonization for Indigenous peoples. By framing them as social problems, these programs perpetuate colonial power dynamics in everyday welfare provision.

Dr Silan will provide an overview of current social welfare programs, focusing on Day Clubs, to highlight often-overlooked colonial ideologies that lie behind a mask of benevolence. Finally, she will share insights into the type of care Indigenous elders desire and propose an ethos for policy-making that truly works for their communities.

Speaker
Wasiq Silan (I-An Gao 高怡安) is an Indigenous Tayal woman from the Mstaranan region, known as the Nanshi river valley in the northern region of Taiwan. Her research interests and experience are in developing sustainable quality-of-life care systems, decolonizing state-Indigenous relationships and exploring collaborative and community-based approaches. She is an Assistant Professor at the National Dong Hwa University and is currently affiliated with the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN) at the University of Helsinki.

Drinks reception at 5pm for 5:30pm start. View the 2024 ANU Taiwan Update Program.

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation plan please contact ciw@anu.edu.au.

Photo credit: 08.01 總統代表政府向原住民族道歉 by 總統府/Flickr, license CC BY 2.0