Simon, Scott E. Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa. University of Toronto Press, 2023.
This isn't going to be a full-on review of Simon's book. I want to mention one thing about it that I found interesting, given what I've been reading this summer about decolonizing comparative rhetoric (part of Simon's project involved decolonizing anthropology).
While I was reading this book, I came across an article by Dominique Salas, "Decolonizing Exigency: Settler Exigences in the Wisconsin Winnebago Mission Home," from Rhetoric Society Quarterly. One of Salas' arguments is about how the settler colonialists who were running a school for Native American in nineteenth century Wisconsin were "manipulating time" as part of their project of making the students see themselves as part of the colonialist Christian history. That is, the Indigenous peoples' history becomes part of the church's history of the working out of the Christian God's plan for the world. This manipulation of chronos allows the settlers to ignore settler colonialism as the problem/exigency and treat the Indigenous people themselves as needing to grow or develop as part of the (settler) Christian society. The manipulation of time and the exigency treats the Indigenous people as sharing a common heritage with the white settlers, while at the same time viewing them as children in need.
After reading this article, I was struck by Scott Simon's depiction of the role of Christianity among the Indigenous Sediq in Taiwan because he also discusses the change in orientation toward time (and space) that resulted from the Christianization of Indigenous Taiwan. Simon casts this, however, in terms of churches "help[ing] orient individuals in time" (p. 188). He writes,
Due to the annual cycles of biblical readings, people can imagine themselves as part of a human history progressing from the creation of the earth, through the fall of Adam and Eve, the tribulations of Jewish prophets, redemption through Christ, and finally to a promised messianic future for all. Many Presbyterian pastors combine these teachings with traditional myths; for example, where the first man and the first woman emerged from a giant boulder called Pusu Qhuni, is the actual site of the Garden of Eden. Others embed their own history within the timeline of Christianity, contrasting the headhunting past to their post-conversion lives. (p. 188)
As Simon argues, comparing the Indigenous experiences of Christianity in Taiwan to that of his native Canada, "Christianity and colonialism are intertwined in history... . Taiwan is unique only because that historical process is refracted through a very different history of Japanese and Chinese colonialisms" (p. 191). While agreeing that there are culturally imperialist aspects of Christianity in Taiwan, he points out that "[i]n some ways, conversion [to Christianity] is a clever strategy by the least powerful in the society to seek alliances with even more powerful outsiders. Conversion can thus also be a way of seizing agency, of maintaining the host position in the mountains rather than conceding territory to Han-controlled Buddhist monasteries or Taoist temples that are often built on mountains in China or in non-Indigenous parts of Taiwan" (pp. 191-2).
The idea of agency is important here, I think, because it moves us away from thinking about only what the colonizers are/were doing and to thinking about what the Indigenous people might be doing with what they encounter. It reminds me of Mary Louise Pratt's discussion of "transculturation," in which "members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by dominant or metropolitan culture" (p. 36). As she notes, "While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for" (p. 36). In the case of the Sediq, as Simon points out, they have used one cultural form from the "metropole" to balance that with the pressures coming from other dominant cultures (the Japanese during that period and the Han since 1945). (I should add that Salas states specifically that in her article she focuses on "the reality the settler has crafted not to bypass Indigenous agency and sovereignty but to elaborate on the totalizing force of settler time" [p. 109]. As she notes, Indigenous voices "have largely been reduced to silence" in the archival record [p. 109].)
Anyway, that's just one small point that came from reading this book and thinking about it in relation to other texts I've been reading. There's a lot more going on in this book, and I probably can't do it justice. My suggestion is that you read it yourself. It's well worth the investment of time!
* See also what Jonathan Clements has written about the book.
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