Around the world, Indigenous communities are confronting intensifying challenges from climate change. The frequency and intensity of natural hazards—hurricanes, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and flooding—disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples who live on or near the front lines of environmental disruptions. Yet the physical impacts of hazards are only the beginning of trauma. These events often unfold into chains of disasters that are deeply rooted in structural and historical contexts. As disaster anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith argues in Peru’s Five-Hundred-Year Earthquake, disasters are never isolated events. They are long, slow processes embedded within histories of structural violence and unequal power relations. Post-disaster governance, in particular, often reproduces settler-colonial patterns in which state authorities marginalize and exploit Indigenous peoples through existing settler-colonial structures and practices of disaster colonialism.
This article traces how two major hazard events—Typhoon Morakot in 2009 and the 2025 barrier-lake flood in Fata’an—reveal a longer struggle over disaster governance, land, and Indigenous futures in Taiwan. Although separated by time, place, and hazard type, both events revealed a common theme: Indigenous peoples’ ongoing struggle to maintain collective continuance—the ability to sustain relationships, cultures, responsibilities, and ways of life with their lands across generations.
The 2025 Fata’an Barrier-Lake Flood: From Cascading Hazard to Political Crisis
On September 23, 2025, a barrier lake on the upper reaches of Fata’an Creek suddenly burst following torrential rains from Typhoon Ragasa. Within two hours, millions of tons of water and debris raced downstream, inundating Guangfu Township in Hualien County, killing at least eighteen people. More than 1,600 homes were filled with mud, and roughly 752 acres of farmland were buried under debris. Roads, bridges, and community infrastructure were severely damaged, isolating several Indigenous settlements and disrupting daily life for thousands. Among the hardest-hit areas was Fata’an, one of the largest Amis tribal communities in the region.
The disaster was not a single event but the result of a sequence of natural hazard processes. It began with the 7.2-magnitude Hualien earthquake in April 2024, which destabilized rock formations and set the conditions for subsequent collapse. In July 2025, Typhoon Winnie triggered a significant slope failure that blocked the river and created a new barrier lake. During the following months, frequent and heavy rainfall steadily raised the water level behind the natural dam. When Typhoon Ragasa arrived in late September, intense rainfall breached the temporary barrier, thus causing a devastating flood. For Indigenous people in Fata’an, the disaster disrupted mobility, schools, agriculture, and the social rhythms that sustained community life.
This event quickly evolved into a political crisis. As with many climate-related disasters worldwide, post-disaster reconstruction debates became shaped by questions of land governance, Indigenous rights, and the lingering legacy of previous disaster policies. Shortly after the flood, Taiwan’s central government introduced a new special reconstruction bill. Its initial draft included Article 6, a provision which allowed authorities to designate hazard zones, restrict residency, and mandate relocation. Indigenous communities immediately recognized this language because it mirrored the controversial relocation clause embedded in the 2009 Morakot Post-Disaster Reconstruction Act.
For the Amis people of Fata’an, the proposed legislation signaled the revival of a policy that was viewed as harmful. On October 30, 2025, more than one hundred youth, elders, scholars, and supporters from Fata’an and neighboring communities traveled to Taipei to protest. They gathered outside the Legislative Yuan carrying signs that read “Our homeland is not a bargaining chip” and “Hazard zoning equals land dispossession.” Speakers questioned why a policy so heavily scrutinized and widely criticized after Morakot was being resurrected. Their calls for change reflected not only immediate concerns about relocation but also lasting lessons from the Morakot reconstruction.
The 2009 Morakot Reconstruction: Permanent Housing Is Not Permanent
For many Indigenous communities, the 2025 barrier-lake disaster revived painful memories of the Morakot reconstruction sixteen years earlier. When Typhoon Morakot struck Taiwan in August 2009, it unleashed nearly 118 inches of rain in three days—the island’s heaviest downpour in half a century—setting off massive landslides across the southern and eastern mountains where many Indigenous communities lived. As partial or entire villages were buried and critical infrastructure destroyed, the government enacted the Morakot Post-Disaster Reconstruction Special Act to facilitate rapid rebuilding. Although the Act referred to cultural diversity and community participation in its preamble, Article 21 gave the state sweeping authority to declare hazard zones and force relocation. Major charitable organizations mobilized across Taiwan, raising large sums of money and partnering with the government to build “permanent housing” on public land.
The scope of relocation was unprecedented. A total of 3,561 permanent housing units were built across forty-three resettlement sites. Of these, 2,814 units were allocated to Indigenous households, and a striking 2,379 Indigenous families—over eighty-five percent—were resettled far from their original villages. Most of the new sites were constructed in lowland areas, meaning that many Indigenous survivors, long accustomed to living in upland areas, suddenly found themselves living miles away from their ancestral territories, agricultural lands, hunting grounds, rivers, and ritual landscapes.
The spatial displacement led to a cascade of social, cultural, and economic disruptions. Ritual practices tied to particular landscapes became difficult to maintain. Elders struggled to pass on ecological knowledge shaped by mountain environments. Agriculture, hunting, and traditional subsistence practices became inaccessible. Young people grew increasingly disconnected from a land-based culture that had shaped their identity. Community governance structures were weakened, and the rhythms of social life were altered.
Over the years, Indigenous communities consistently argued that the term “permanent housing” was misleading. The permanence it offered was architectural and administrative, not cultural or relational. Rather than supporting Indigenous livelihoods and ecological relationships, it imposed an external model of permanence—one aligned with settler logics of security, spatial order, and land control. In public forums, academic collaborations, legal challenges, and grassroots movements, Indigenous leaders emphasized that the notion of permanence embedded in state-led reconstruction policies did not align with their own understanding of permanence.
Indigenous Permanence as Collective Continuance: Comparative Reflections from the United States
Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte developed a framework that illuminates the deeper stakes behind such struggles. He argued that settler colonialism is a form of domination that systematically disrupts human relationships with the environment. One of its core mechanisms is the strategic undermining of Indigenous collective continuance, which Whyte defines as a community’s capacity to adapt to change in ways that avoid preventable harm and sustain social, cultural, and ecological relationships.
Collective continuance requires interdependence among human institutions—rituals, ceremonies, kinship networks—and the ecosystems that sustain them, including watersheds, forests, and habitats. It reflects a sense of identity rooted in the environment and a responsibility to care for lands that support community life. When relocation is imposed without meaningful consultation or consent, continuity of these relationships is jeopardized. The disruption is not merely spatial; it is relational, cultural, ecological, and intergenerational.
My current research at the University of Washington has further expanded these reflections through engagement with Indigenous climate adaptation and managed retreat cases in the United States. During my time at UW, I have had opportunities to engage with scholars, tribal planning documents, and Indigenous climate adaptation initiatives in the Pacific Northwest.
In particular, the experiences of the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington State and the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe in Louisiana reveal how relocation is never simply a technical response to environmental risk. Instead, relocation becomes deeply shaped by questions of Indigenous sovereignty, collective identity, governance capacity, and cultural continuity. These cases have also connected my research to broader social justice debates surrounding managed retreat, particularly how relocation policies may reproduce unequal power relations and marginalize Indigenous participation in post-disaster decision-making.
Although the historical and legal contexts of Indigenous peoples in the United States and Taiwan are different, these cases share an important similarity: Indigenous communities consistently frame relocation not only in terms of physical safety, but also in terms of maintaining collective continuance. The Quinault Nation’s long-term relocation planning emphasizes tribal self-determination and community-led governance, while the Isle de Jean Charles case demonstrates how state-led relocation can conflict with Indigenous visions of collective continuity and cultural survival. These comparative experiences have helped shape my broader understanding that post-disaster reconstruction and climate adaptation are fundamentally political processes involving ongoing negotiations over land, governance, and Indigenous futures.
Through this lens, Morakot’s permanent housing projects can be understood as mechanisms of settler permanence. They operated on the assumption that safety could be secured through relocating people into engineered, state-defined spaces, even if doing so severed the very relationships that mattered most to Indigenous communities. In contrast, the form of permanence that Indigenous peoples seek is grounded in the continuity of relationships—to land, culture, kinship, and the ecological systems that support their ways of life.
Fata’an’s Protest as a Defense of Indigenous Collective Continuance
Seen through the framework of collective continuance, the 2025 protest led by Fata’an people at the Legislative Yuan takes on a deeper meaning. It was not merely a refusal to relocate; it was a refusal to accept a definition of permanence from outside the community. In their public statement, the Fata’an delegation emphasized that post-disaster governance should not be reduced to engineering fixes or administrative orders. Instead, reconstruction must begin with understanding the relationships between people, land, and the institutions that shape everyday life.
Their statements underscored the idea that disaster recovery cannot be detached from the social and cultural webs that make communities whole. Fata’an people did not oppose safety measures; they rejected the assumption that safety can only be achieved through displacement. They pointed to the disruptions they were already facing—from destroyed roads and inaccessible medical care to the absence of adequate temporary housing—as evidence that disaster governance must be rooted in community knowledge and participation. Their protest called for a reconstruction model that honors Indigenous connections to land and upholds the community’s right to shape its own future.
Conclusion: Rebuilding with Continuance
The question “Why is permanent housing not permanent?” reveals a deeper truth about disaster governance in settler-colonial contexts. Permanence defined through architectural durability, administrative authority, or hazard zoning may create stability for the state but not for Indigenous communities. Permanence is not found in buildings or plans; it lies in continuity of relationships, responsibilities, and cultural beliefs that sustain Indigenous life.
Experiences of the Morakot and Fata’an show that disaster reconstruction must shift from enforcing settler permanence to supporting Indigenous collective continuance. Rebuilding must strengthen communities’ relationships to their lands and cultural responsibilities rather than severing them. As climate change accelerates and disasters intensify, this shift becomes even more critical. Taken together, the experiences of Morakot and Fata’an demonstrate that the core issue is not the hazard itself, but the political frameworks through which reconstruction is defined. The experiences of Taiwan and the United States suggest that the central challenge of climate adaptation is not simply how to move people away from risk, but how to sustain Indigenous collective continuance while confronting ongoing settler-colonial structures.
