Tayal time, space and territory: rethinking scale, property and Taiwan

This dissertation addresses Indigenous property rights and experiences of dispossession and recovery in Taiwan. Drawing on geographical fieldwork with Tayal people, an Indigenous group living in northern Taiwan, it engages with Indigenous experiences of and responses to a settlers-sanctioned logic of possession and the hegemonic geographical imaginaries imposed by multiple colonizations. The dissertation first examines Tayal ontological understandings of 'possession'. It then discusses the inconsistent ontological understandings of 'property' and 'possession' between Tayal people and the State that underpin Tayal people's dispossession. Drawing on this analysis and using examples from Tayal territory in northern Taiwan, the dissertation argues that the current property system, which was enacted through colonial geographical expansions, requires careful reconsideration. The dissertation offers a re-reading of Taiwanese geopolitics that re-places Indigenous, in this case Tayal, perspectives rather than colonizing narratives, as central to understanding Taiwan's past-present-futures.