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Taiwan is one of the world’s fastest aging societies, and the challenges are especially stark for Indigenous communities, where elders face not only health concerns and rural isolation but also exclusion from national policy decisions.
In Hualien, social workers and scholars are rethinking how to support these aging populations with approaches rooted in culture, dignity and inclusion. Among them is Wasiq Silan, an assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous Development and Social Work at National Dong Hwa University, who has spent nearly a decade studying Indigenous care practices.
Silan says her personal connection to the Tayal people, where her grandmother lived and spoke the language, informs her research. “I feel that I have the relational accountability that I can speak to,” she said. “But throughout this decade of doing research, I realized that it’s not that we’re doing pan-indigenizing all these concepts, but you can really see that there’s shared challenges and shared solidarities.”
She argues that Indigenous models of care cannot be reduced to static traditions. “There’s no pure collective care that I see, but it’s more about doing things together,” she said, pointing to how tourism and waves of colonization shaped life in her village.
Government recognition of Indigenous perspectives in social policy is relatively recent. “I think it was starting when the martial law was lifted towards the end of the 1980s,” Silan said. She added that Indigenous movements grew stronger as people pushed for recognition of their rights and traditional territories.
Even with progress, Silan sees gaps. “What we have seen so far in language revitalization or identity reclamation among Indigenous people is that there is a lot of money being put into these policies. But the way it has been done has been mainly state centric,” she said. “It has been emphasizing these metrics rather than the relational and more Indigenous-led approach.”
For Silan, shifting the design of elder care policies means ensuring Indigenous voices are not tokenized. “Indigenous-led is one of the key things that we need to address in a way that when we’re designing policies, Indigenous peoples, not just one representative, need to have a meaningful dialog with the communities and about the community,” she said.
She also points to international standards such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as underused tools in Taiwan. “It would be really important to have this education and this dialog that we are actually in a shared structure with all these other Indigenous communities that have been struggling to advance our human rights situation,” she said.
At a recent conference titled “From Oppression to Decolonization and Reclaiming Indigenous Sovereignty,” Silan described the importance of solidarity among frontline workers. “Only by knowing that we are not alone in this whole structure can we have a consolidated voice,” she said.
She is also focused on preparing younger generations to take on leadership roles in care. “Many of the young people, they are going to be in this profession,” she said. “Education is very important. And also this kind of dialog space, this platform conference, would be very important.”
Looking ahead, Silan believes the transformation of social work in Taiwan will depend on solidarity. “It’s such an important consciousness that we are building and this shared solidarity that the distress you are facing as a social worker is not individual,” she said.
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