Like many young tribespeople, she has two names. When she attends university down on the plains, where she studies Indigenous culture, she is Corayne Kaiteri, a name taken from her father. But up here, and with her great-uncle, she uses her tribal name, Away Maya Titiyon.

“Before I began to explore my heritage, I was confused, because I am also half a New Zealander. So I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere,” she said. Her classmates called her a “hybrid.” At school in the capital of Taipei, she was teased when her class was taught that tribeswomen had served as “comfort women” for the Japanese. She battled stereotypes; her peers asked her if she rode a pig to school.

But under government policies dating to Taiwan’s democratization in the mid-1980s and amplified under the current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government, she was taught her language in school and, gradually, “I came to want to be part of my tribe and learn more about what that means.”

She is not eligible to vote for another year and so pays little attention to the differences between Taiwan’s two main political parties, the DPP, which is the more progressive and advocates for a distinct Taiwanese national identity, and the more mainland-China-friendly KMT. The KMT is the same party that sent her great-uncle to war and that, for nearly four decades from 1949, ruled Taiwan as a one-party state before democratization in 1987. The party has changed in many ways, but still claims that there is only “one China,” with its legitimate government being the Republic of China. Elements in the party still favor eventual reunification with mainland China, though not necessarily on the CCP’s terms.

But rather than following these disputes, Titiyon is engaged in the politics of being Indigenous. She has participated in international Indigenous youth forums, including visiting the First Nations people of Canada and making connections with Maori in New Zealand. She is taking continuing lessons in the Saisiyat language—made harder by the fact that there are few people with whom she can speak it. She hopes to make a career out of representing her people on the international stage.

What do the old man and the young woman think of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s claim that Taiwan is a breakaway province of China and must be reabsorbed? The older Titiyon said his people did not previously have the concept of land ownership, but this place is where he and his family have always been. So how can others have a claim? It is a fair point. About half of Taiwan’s land mass—mostly the mountains that form the island’s central spine—is categorized as the traditional land of Indigenous peoples. It remains under their control at the local government level.

Further up the mountain, Lahling Yumin, a leading member of the Atayal tribe whose lands abut those of the Saisiyat, explained that the early Han Chinese colonists, who arrived in the 17th century, never occupied the mountains. The PRC’s claim to historical ownership can, at most, be to the plains of Taiwan, he said—those densely settled areas far below, covered with cities and warehouses and the factories of this high-tech manufacturing nation.

Yumin’s great-grandfather died fighting the Japanese, who were the first to attempt to control the entire island. Today, he supports the DPP and has run under that party’s banner in local village elections. The Han Chinese who dominate the DPP, he said, are “a bit better” than the Han Chinese who dominate mainland China. Following his narrow defeat in the local election, Yumin’s life is dedicated to making sure his children learn the three pillars of his culture: language, history, and the intimate knowledge of how to live, hunt, and gather in the mountain forests.

Meanwhile, Taiwan exists in strategic and diplomatic ambiguity. It considers itself a nation, yet doesn’t dare declare independence from the PRC for fear of provoking invasion. In this ambivalent space, the Indigenous peoples hold a particular place. Their continuous occupation undercuts the PRC’s claims, and their cultural renaissance underscores both Taiwan’s position as the region’s newest liberal democracy and its unique relationships with other countries in the region—relationships that do not rely on its tenuous nation status.

In the Chinese nomenclature, the Indigenous peoples were crudely divided into two categories—shengfan (literally wild or uncivilized) and “shufan,” or “tamed.” The Saisiyat and Atayal were in the first category. China ceded Taiwan to the Japanese at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese rigorously categorized each household, making records that are still used by the current government in ascertaining who can claim to be Indigenous. Half a century later, after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KMT, then running Taiwan as a single-party authoritarian state, judged that the plains people—“pingpu,” as they were known—were now assimilated into mainstream Chinese culture and no longer merited recognition as Indigenous.

Under Xi, the PRC has adopted an assimilationist approach to ethnic minorities. The repression of the Uyghurs and Tibetan Buddhists are the highest-profile examples, and the Taiwanese Indigenous people interviewed for this article are well aware of that record. The PRC recognizes the Taiwanese Indigenous peoples as one of China’s 56 ethnic groups under a single heading: “gaoshan,” or high mountain people. It avoids using words such as “Indigenous” or “aboriginal” to describe them, probably because that would undermine the CCP’s insistence that Taiwan is merely a renegade province with the same racial and cultural identity as the mainland.

Since democratization in the mid-1980s, Taiwan has gone in the opposite direction—encouraging recognition of distinct Indigenous identities. Successive governments have gradually added to the number of officially recognized tribes, legislated land rights, and reformed the constitution to set aside six seats in the legislature for Indigenous representatives. Tribal languages have been given the status of national languages and must now be taught in schools where there are Indigenous children.

In 1996 a Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) was established to preside over welfare measures, including educational subsidies, and land and hunting rights for Indigenous peoples in an attempt to overcome the legacies of prejudice and disadvantage, as well as strengthen tribal relations with Indigenous peoples in other countries. This effort bolsters Taiwanese identity internationally, whether or not its nationhood is formally recognized. And, in 2016, on coming to power, the current president, Tsai Ing-wen—whose paternal grandmother was from the Paiwan tribe—issued a comprehensive apology to the tribes for past injustices.

Today, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples—or those recognized by the government—make up about 2.5 percent of the island’s 23 million inhabitants, similar in proportion to First Nations people in Canada and aboriginals in Australia. But unlike in those countries, Taiwanese Indigenous are at the center of international diplomacy.

The Indigenous peoples of Taiwan are Austronesians. Most anthropologists agree that the island was the point of origin for this, one of the most widely dispersed ethnic groups in the world. Starting 5,000 years ago, Austronesians migrated from Taiwan to the Philippines, then spread over a vast area—across the islands of the Pacific, as far west as Madagascar, as far east as Hawaii, and south to New Zealand. Today, all these cultures have common traits in language and culture.