45-3 Decolonize: Returning to Our Ways of Being and Knowing

Jocelyn Ting-Hui Hung Chien’s Indigenous name is Tuhi, which she inherited from her maternal great-great-grandmother. The name of her ancestral worship house is Martukaw. She hails from the Kasavakan Community of the Pinuyumayan Peoples in Taiwan. Tuhi previously worked for Taiwan Indigenous TV and now is a Ph.D. student in Communications studies at Shih Hsin University. Cultural Survival’s Dev Kumar Sunuwar (Koĩts-Sunuwar) recently spoke with Tuhi about her work to decolonize in her community.  

When the European colonial powers ruled our territories of Abya Yala, they implemented policies of oppression by ransacking, dispossessing, and enslaving mainly Black and Indigenous populations. In the last five centuries those policies were driven fundamentally by racism. Colonialism created a bureaucratic, institutional, and political process to discriminate and subjugate different ethnic groups.

South Africa has had its fair share of colonization over the last 500 years. The first Europeans to reach the southern tip were led by Bartholomew Diaz in 1488. Not long after that, in 1510, the battle of Salt River saw the Aboriginal Khoikhoi emerge as victors after Francisco D’Almeida, also from Portugal, and his crew, attempted to kidnap Khoikhoi children and steal cattle. In 1652, South Africa was officially colonized, this time by the Dutch.

Too often, discussions about Indigenous communication have been reduced to an analysis of the use of communications technology. It is important to approach Indigenous communication beyond just technology use and explain it from Indigenous points of view. In our towns and communities, we affirm, with increasing force, that we existed long before the arrival of the European colonizers. Our social organization is collective in nature and is rooted in a relationship with Mother Earth.

I entered the fashion industry at the age of 30, what the industry considers "later in life.” Prior to that, I was working in visual media from filmmaking to photography. I really don’t consider myself stylish or fashionable, but I do have an eye for it. My first introduction to the fashion world began at the tender age of two when I would watch my grandmother, Hazel, develop her own textiles using sheep wool and natural dyes to create intricately woven Navajo rugs.