Kangke Aborigines protest exam policy

This article was published by the Taiwan Headlines on April 25, 2006. It reports that aboriginal people from Kangke Village, who are a branch of northern Taiwan's Atayal tribe, recently protested against the Council of Indigenous People's tribal language examination policy.

They said that the Kangke dialect should be included in the policy. According to this article, the Kangke dialect has long been different from other Atayal languages because it was influenced by the Japanese language during Japan's colonial occupation of Taiwan (1895-1945).

The Council of Indigenous People plans to begin tribal language examinations in 2007. However, the Kangke dialect is not listed as one of the official dialects of the Atayal aboriginal tribe. In the current policy, the Kangke dialect is incorporated into the Squliq and the C'uli' dialects.

According to indigenous rights activists, in order to pass the tribal language exams, students in Kangke Village must now study either the Squliq or the C'uli' dialects using a romanized spelling system because the Kengke dialect is nothing like them.

Currently, according to regulations set by the Ministry of Education, for high school and college entrance exams, an extra 25 percent is added to the total scores of indigenous students in order to encourage further education.

If the tribal language exams are carried out as planned in 2007, students who pass will have an additional 10 percent added to their entrance exam scores, making it a total of 35 percent extra overall.

According to indigenous rights activists, the system is unfair for Kangke students because the Councill of Indigenous People does not classify their dialect as an official one. More importantly, the tribal language examinations should not be linked to entrance exams scores in any way.

Meanwhile, according to the Parent-Teacher Association at Kangke Elementary School, such a classification stunts the preservation of the dialect and the Kangke culture.

According to the association, tribal language exams, if indeed necessary, should be conducted by the tribes or villages themselves, instead of by the government. While the Ministry of Education was in a hurry to promote native language education, many aboriginal dialects are still neglected.

In response to all these protests, the Council of Indigenous People's Department of Education said that the tribal language examination policy is still being discussed with the Ministry of Education. However, the goal of the language examination is to promote tribal language education.

According to the council's Department of Education, the language exams are in fact oral. The council will consider including the Kangke dialect in the exams. If included, then a representative from the village will be invited to be an oral examiner.