Mapping Traditional Territories of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples by the Volunteered Geographic Information System

摘要

The indigenous peoples have been living in Taiwan for thousand years. Currently there are 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples in Taiwan but there were more before the colonization. Although they don't treat land as private property as the Chinese or the Western people do, each tribe has its territory for living, hunting, farming, or fishing. People shall not intrude other tribe's territory without getting their permission. However, during the colonization of the Ming Dynasty, the Mandarin Dynasty, the Japanese government, or even the current Taiwanese government, the most part of land within their territory is retrieved by the government. For deeper control of the indigenous peoples, the Japanese government forced the tribes moved and moved. The migration of the tribes makes their territories overlapped and complicated. The lost and change of the traditional territory seriously changes the way of the indigenous peoples to make for living. They are no longer able to hunting, farming, or fishing. Instead, they have no choice but devote themselves to the factories or construction sites. The traditional environmental wisdom and knowledge, and even the living culture of the indigenous peoples are rapidly fading. In this study, we wish to establish a web mapping platfonn for mapping the traditional territories of tribes of the indigenous peoples. Unlike the official map are drawn by professional surveyors with professional surveying instruments, this study encourage the indigenous peoples to map their own traditional territories by themselves. This platform is established by open GIS software based on the concept of volunteered geographic information. Anyone who are willing to contribute their information about the territory are welcomed. Each point, polyline, or polygon on the map can be modified if someone think wrong. But we'll record every modification and we are able to restore the map back to any previous status. The concept of this platform is similar to the OpenStreetMap, but this platform is focus on the indigenous traditional territories and the indigenous knowledge. The details of the establishment of the VGI web mapping platform are described in this paper. Some of mapping results are also shown to prove the potential of the proposed VGI platfonn.