This plenary session of NATSA (North American Taiwan Studies Association) Annual Conference features the screening of two documentaries, Children in the Heaven and The Elephants Have Walked to Taipei, and a discussion with the directors of the films, Mayaw Biho and Salone Ishahavut. This session engages with the concept of Indigenous visual sovereignty through a conversation with the directors on documentary films as a medium for telling stories on Indigenous peoples’ own terms. Children in the Heaven depicts repeated forced evictions faced by the Pangcah Sanying community, an urban Indigenous settlement in Taipei, throughout the 1990s. The Elephants Have Walked to Taipei documents a 265-kilometer march in 2013 along the east coast from Taitung to Taipei to protest against a resort development on Pangcah people’s ancestral lands, known as Fudafudak. The post-screening conversation invites the directors to reflect on their filmmaking practices, including their motivations, narrative choices, and structural obstacles of making Indigenous voices heard. Decades on, the discussion also asks what these films still mean today, and how they resonate across Indigenous and transnational contexts.

Speakers: Mayaw Biho, Salone Ishahavut

[Timetable]

Introduction- 5 min

Film screening- 30 min

Brief talk by Mayaw and Salone- 40 min

Q&A- 15 min