Established in 2013 by Amis singer Suming Rupi in his hometown of A’tolan, the Amis Music Festival began as a grassroots initiative for Indigenous music and community collaboration. Its move in 2019 to Pacifaran, a windswept Pacific plateau in A’tolan’s ancestral territory, affirms the festival’s political and territorial rootedness. At my first Amis Music Festival this past November, that dedication was palpable. Themed “Resilience,” the festival brought together over 70 performances from Taiwanese Indigenous communities and six Pacific Island nations. Across stages, workshops, screenings, and installations, cultural expressions were staged with care and discourse arranged with precision, offering moments of genuine engagement far beyond the usual festival spectacle. And yet, it is precisely in this space of care that the subtler currents of cultural politics emerge—not as a killjoy, but as a quiet reminder that the traces of colonial rule persist, often in places we least expect.

 

2025 Amis Music Festival. Photo: Cegaw Lin. Courtesy Mita Idea Co., Ltd.

 

Perhaps we can begin with the festival’s opening. Musicians from across the island and beyond assembled—clad in traditional attire and called forward in sequence—as the organizers staged a flag-raising ceremony of their own design. The Amis Music Festival flag, featuring a black octagonal star inspired by Amis family totems, reflects A’tolan’s enduring commitment to self-determination. Yet from a decolonial Indigenous perspective, the national flag ceremony is never neutral: through flags, formations, upright stances, and roll calls, it asserts state authority over Indigenous territories—a performative claim of sovereignty that delineates who governs and whose autonomy is subordinated. As a member of the Indigenous community, I experienced the flag-raising less as a celebration than as a form of colonial bodily discipline. Tribal groups and international Indigenous participants stood in formation under a quasi-national ritual; though the flag raised was the festival’s own, the act nonetheless reenacted the colonial-era logic of being summoned under a banner.

 

The question for me is whether Indigenous cultural spaces are compatible with colonial-style flag-raising ceremonies. If such rituals inherently enforce incorporation, allegiance, and centralized authority, then performing them on lands long shaped by colonization and sovereignty loss raises a dilemma: can they be reclaimed as expressions of our sovereignty, or do they risk tethering cultural renewal to enduring colonial norms? These moments thus read almost like Freudian slips: On stage, the moderator joked during a Seediq procession that “they will go on a raid,” invoking violent media stereotypes. Similarly, a Tahitian group, whose female performers wore revealing attire, was introduced as “very ‘busty,’”—reducing them to physicalized tropes and undermining the festival’s intention of highlighting Oceanian cultural politics, foregrounding relational, distributed, and archipelagic forms of connection. Stereotypes aside, I still wondered how the ceremony’s national-flag symbolism might be perceived by the visiting groups. 

 

2025 Amis Music Festival. Photo: Wang Wang. Courtesy Mita Idea Co., Ltd.

 

As Indigenous communities from across the islands and beyond were herded into formation, all eyes fixed on a single flag, the ritual collapsed the richness of Austronesian diversity into a flattened spectacle—its porous, horizontal networks reduced to the rigid logic of colonial or military modernity: assemble—march—obey. And as everyone rose and turned toward the flag, a wave of revulsion washed over me. This ritual inhabits no sphere of power I recognize—why, I asked myself, should I bow to a reproduction of colonial authority?

 

The flag-raising ceremony may have inadvertently echoed the festival’s Ministry of Culture funding slogan: “Amplifying domestic and international diplomacy.” Yet in its early years, the festival emphasized refusing government or corporate subsidies, foregrounding self-organization. I understand that for any decolonial movement, declining government subsidies should be a tactical choice serving a specific end, and never meant as a fixed rule. Today’s mandate—amid expanded scale, increased international participation, and heightened safety requirements—allows the festival, through careful use of ministry and local government resources while maintaining autonomy and avoiding content interference, to run more safely and smoothly, and to enable tribal youth and culture to flourish and reach wider audiences.

 

2025 Amis Music Festival. Photo: Cegaw Lin. Courtesy Mita Idea Co., Ltd.

 

Let me draw attention to another knot of cultural politics: the role of government funding in Indigenous-run events, specifically the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP). Their endorsement is fraught—once a festival carries their imprimatur, it risks being framed as officially sanctioned Indigenous culture, a state-subsidized showcase that overwrites decades of tribal autonomy, turning tribal voices into policy instruments—the most intrusive form of cultural intervention for a festival premised on Indigenous agency. Institutionally, CIP’s remit centers on “ethnic policy,” with subsidies tied to preservation, ritual, or language. For contemporary, cross-disciplinary, cross-tribal, international performances, this framework is constrictive. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the festival turns to the Ministry of Culture’s pop music support: a space more attuned to its fluidity, its daring, and its contemporaneity.

 

Setting these nuances aside, there is much to commend in the festival, including moments of genuine emotional resonance. For me, the most sustaining pleasure came in quieter ways: reconnecting with old friends—meeting them again as members of tribal teams, sharing memories, or listening as fellow attendees recounted stories about the stage performance. To conclude, I want to reflect on the relationship between the festival and the tribe through two contrasting scenes, beginning with a troubling example before turning to a more affirming one.

 

Upon arrival, one detail was immediately unsettling: a “braiding corner,” styled in a vaguely hippie-Indigenous aesthetic, placed prominently within the festival’s service area. It staged a familiar scene of cultural appropriation, offering visitors an instant, lighthearted, and ahistorical simulation of “becoming Indigenous.” In a matter of minutes, participants could don an “alternative ethnic” look—unburdened by any engagement with land, language, ancestral relations, or political history.

 

More troubling still, placing a hairstyle with little—if any—connection to Amis traditions in such a prominent position effectively signals a misaligned cultural representation, displacing Indigenous agency in favor of the ethnic chic demanded by global tourism. It is unsurprising to see Han settler participants draped in cloaks, wearing tribal-patterned accessories or Māori Tā moko stickers, or striking haka poses for selfies—ritualized gestures rich in familial, ancestral, and resistance histories reduced to mere theatrical spectacle.

 

That this occurs even on Indigenous lands, at events organized by Indigenous communities, underscores the stakes: settler tourists can mimic and consume these cultures without consequence, while Indigenous cultural agency is reduced to being observed, performed for, and appropriated. These dissonant scenes serve as a stark reminder that the challenges confronting the Amis Music Festival extend far beyond the supposed tension between tradition and innovation—they confront the enduring colonial gaze, demanding that culture be more than a borrowed ornament, and instead recognized, respected, and understood on its own terms, on its own land.

 

The festival featured a curated selection of six Indigenous short films that engage with contemporary cultural issues across territories. Courtesy Mita Idea Co., Ltd.

 

During those two windy days, the air at A’tolan carried gusts and drums in equal measure, swirling and coalescing across the plateau. While the festival upheld sustainable practices, avoiding disposable tableware, the wind still scattered refuse far and wide. Time and again, my eyes were drawn to dark-skinned tribal members, dressed plainly, tongs in hand, garbage bags slung over their shoulders, weaving between stalls and stages with unwavering focus, their words rising in the cadence of their mother tongue. Out of step with the crowd, they labored not for spectacle but for care; behind the dazzling display of culture, someone preserved order and dignity. Here, bodies labored in authenticity while others drifted in fantasy. In countless fleeting moments, I was reminded that the colonial gaze still lingered—Indigenous positionality remains fragile, as culture is appropriated, packaged, and performed far faster than it is understood, honored, or truly heard, reminding us that even in celebration, sovereignty is a labor both visible and unseen.