2012-05-24 How I fell in love with fish & Indigenous People

It's been almost three months since we started the CI class in March. It's also coming to the last month of our semester. Summer vacation is around the corner! Time flies and there are six more classes to go. 


Tonight, we dived into the discussion about the last TED video "How I feel in love with fish." http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html The speaker, Dan Barber, mentioned that we've been fishing in the seas like we clear-cut forests for the past 50 years. Now, 90% of the large fish, the ones we love: the tuna, the halibuts, the salmons and swordfish have collapsed. As a result, fish farming is going to be a part of our future and the importance of the farm's sustainability emphasizes day by day. How can we keep the balance between fishing farming and ecosystem matters to our planet. It pollutes while it's producing but amazingly, the speaker found a natural wetland as well as fish farm that's a nearly perfect ecosystem in Veta La Palma in Southern Spain. The wetland becomes the biggest bird sanctuary in the world and holds more than 250 different species of birds. It measures success on the health of the predators. The biologist working in the wetland, Miguel, uses the ecological model to not only produce healthy high-quality fish but also maintain the natural environment from harm instead of using the traditional way - agriculture model which uses machines, capital and chemistry to produce yet do the harm.


Jerry shared his ideas and held the positives in the ecological model. He has his own fish tank but he doesn't need to do a lot of work to the tank because it's been a small ecosystem in the tank already. When a fish dies, the shrimp would take care of the body and the algae would also receive the benefit. All he needs to do is to pour some water into the tank once in a while. It refreshed my memory that the fish tank of Jerry's was clean, beautiful and the algae was shiny green and the fish and shrimp were energetic and healthy when I visited Jerry in his house 2 years ago. 


The second part of the class, we put an end to the TED videos and jumped into the new topic "Indigenous people."  The term "indigenous people" is quite familiar to most of us but let's think of it more deeply. Ammar brought up a significant question: Why do we call them indigenous people? or we should ask "How do we define indigenous people?"


Abbie provided a guideline describing indigenous people and accepted by the UN. The preliminary definition was put forward by Mr. José Martínez Cobo and it says:


Indigenous populations are composed of the existing descendants of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country wholly or partially at the time when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them, by conquest, settlement or other means, reduced them to a non-dominant or colonial condition; who today live more in conformity with their particular social, economic and cultural customs and traditions than with the institutions of the country of which they now form part, under a state structure which incorporates mainly national, social and cultural characteristics of other segments of the population which are predominant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_people#United_Nations


Barrett was the first presenter to share some of his ideas about indigenous people. He gave us quite a lot of historic facts and information about the indigenous people of Taiwan and China. He also provided us an interesting way to distinguish whether you're a descendant of the Pingpu tribes. If you bend your arm and there's a stripe on your forearm of the inner side close to the elbow, you might be part of the Pingpu tribes!

Andrea also prepared a great presentation that focused on the Atayal tribes. She shared the myth and legend of the facial tattoos. Only the successful members of Atayal tribes could have the facial tattoos. For women, they must be good at weaving and for men, they must be good at hunting and brave. However, she also mentioned that those Atayal people who had facial tattoos were once forced to remove their tattoos by the Japanese government during Taiwan's being colonized by Japan. In 2008, the eldest Atayal woman, Wu Lan-mei, who had the facial tattoos past away at the age of 110. http://mag.udn.com/mag/people/storypage.jsp?f_ART_ID=162256 It was sad and also a loss of the precious culture of Taiwan. She was once our national treasure and there are only four elders who have the facial tattoos living in Taiwan. Here are the links about Atayal tribes: 
(1) http://www.culture.tw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1370&Itemid=157
(2) http://www.culture.tw/index.php?option=com_content&task=rdmap&Itemid=262&id=1034


At the end of the class, we ran out of the time for deeper and wider discussions again so we need to wait until next class. What a nice class again!