Ljavek’s Indigenous Urban Futurities-Making: Some Stories about Learning to Feel a Way Towards Home in Taiwan’s Urban Lands and Waters

Abstract

This dissertation centers stories shared with me from Ljavek, a primarily Paiwan Indigenous community located in one of Taiwan’s largest cities. Ljavek is an urban Indigenous community that formed nearly seven decades ago, even while they continue to face government pressures to displace and relocate from the central areas of the city. My main research partner was/is Galaygay Balasasu, a key public figure in Ljavek’s ongoing political advocacy for their rightful presence in the city. The purpose of this research is to re-assert that urban spaces still hold Indigenous presence, affect, knowledge, and histories, while urban spaces are still lands and waters with their more-than-human and more-than-living agentic capacities. The research inquiries focus on the role of affect in learning to sustain human-place relations, particularly as Indigenous communities sense-making pathways to assert their self-determination within the colonial structures of urban spaces. I mainly drew on Indigenous Research Methodologies of visiting and conversations (Kovach, 2021; Tuck et al., 2023; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014; Wilson, 2020) to re-center Ljavek’s intergenerational and affective learning within urban spaces. The research data is composed of conversation transcripts with several Ljavek community members and their political advocacy partners, as well as field notes and archival documents. The dissertation presents findings in three separate research articles: First, I explain how listening is an embodied revision for qualitative research methodologies to identify and resist colonial norms embedded in academic research, while attending to the Indigenous research partners’ relational invitations. The second article theorizes that learning is reflected in the changing composition of the city, from changes in the urban infrastructure, communities who stay or are coerced to leave, to budding more-than-human relations in urban spaces. I propose learning as emerging through the co-constitutive processes of worlding and acclimating between humans, more-than-humans, lands, and waters. The third article focuses on how Ljavek’s affective political sense-making both foregrounds the affective colonial technologies attempting to undermine Indigenous community building in urban spaces and exemplifies Ljavek’s continual re-assertions of intergenerational Paiwan self-determination. Through this research, I listen to and re-share Ljavek’s invitations for us to re-envision urban human-place relations, and how we may respect Indigenous sovereignties and stewardship within urban spaces.