Taiwan transitions and tribal tongues: From the language of reconciliation to the revitalisation of language?

On 1 August 2016, a few months after being sworn in as Taiwan's first female president, Tsai Ing-wen accomplished another milestone: the first official apology to Taiwan's Indigenous peoples.In her address to representatives from the various tribes, Tsai apologised for multiple forms of damage inflicted during 'four centuries of pain and mistreatment', and outlined actions her government proposed to take as forms of redress.In recent decades, other heads of government have apologised to Indigenous peoples: in 2008, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd for the Stolen Generations; in the same year, his Canadian equivalent Stephen Harper for the Indian Residential School system; 2012, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos for brutalities perpetrated during the early-1900s Amazon rubber boom; and in 2020, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen for removals of Greenlandic Inuit children.Tsai's apology, in its historical breadth, was akin to the one proffered by King Harald V in 1997 for injustices of Norway's colonisation of Sámi territories, or president Andrés Manuel López Obrador's May 2021 apology to the Maya of the Yucatán peninsula covering both Spanish colonial and post-independence Mexico.