From Media Platforms to a Cultural Ecosystem:
How Indigenous Public Media Opens New Possibilities for Cultural Transmission through Children’s Aesthetic Education.

From Media Platforms to a Cultural Ecosystem:

How Indigenous Public Media Opens New Possibilities for Cultural Transmission through Children’s Aesthetic Education

Sustaining Cultural Transmission: PULIMA Kids – Children’s Aesthetic Creation Program

By Alang Galavangang - Chief Executive – TITV (Taiwan Indigenous Television)

As an Indigenous public media organization, we have always been clear that our role is not equivalent to that of a conventional television station or news outlet. What we carry is not merely the production of programs or the delivery of information, but a constellation of cultural transmission tools, including television, radio, documentary filmmaking, artistic action, and increasingly, physical cultural spaces.

With the planned relocation of the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation (IPCF) to its new headquarters in Qingpu, Taoyuan, in 2027, we have been consciously seeking an operational model that can integrate these diverse media forms while responding meaningfully to Indigenous cultural values and ways of knowing.

IPCF is also the operating body of Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV). The responsibility we assume has never been limited to content production alone. More fundamentally, we continue to ask how Indigenous media can function as a living cultural system that sustains language, memory, creativity, and cultural continuity across generations.

Over time, we have come to recognize that the three-year journey of the PULIMA Kids Children’s Aesthetic Creation Program has become a critical point of convergence, offering an unexpected yet powerful framework for this integrated approach.

Returning to the Ethical Origins of Cultural Transmission: The Indigenous Aesthetic of Gathering

Within Indigenous worldviews, cultural transmission is not an act of declaration that comes first, but a process that must begin with relationships. Aesthetic sensibility is cultivated through ongoing interactions among people, land, nature, language, and collective memory.

Since 2023, IPCF’s children’s aesthetic creation initiatives have been grounded in a core principle: “Gathering is the beginning of creation.” This principle emerges from more than a decade of engagement and reflection within Indigenous art and cultural practices. It represents not only an educational approach, but also a profound and complex spiritual ethic. In Indigenous knowledge systems, whether one is making pottery, weaving, preparing food, building homes, or singing ancestral songs, creation never begins at the workbench. It begins with entering forests and oceans, walking the fields, observing natural rhythms, and understanding human relationships through acts of gathering. Gathering is both a response to the world and an ethical practice that situates creation within responsibility and respect.

The 2023 PULIMA Kids program was structured around this philosophy. Children learned by working directly with land and natural materials. They collected clay, kneaded earth, and fired pottery. Through these embodied processes, they learned that success and failure are equally integral to creation. The objective was not the completion of a polished object, but the cultivation of a deeper understanding through bodily labor, sensory experience, and repetition. Creation became a process of building relationships with land, ancestors, and others, rather than a display of technique.

In 2024, the program further expanded the concept of gathering to include “gathering stories.” Children were encouraged not only to gather natural materials but also to collect local memories, everyday experiences, and the life narratives of elders. Whether in Shoufeng, Fenglin, or Xilin communities in Hualien, the curriculum emphasized the necessity of entering the field, engaging in dialogue, and sensing the environment through one’s body. This included the temperature of the land, the weight of labor, and the rhythm of daily life. This form of gathering was not about accumulating material. It was about understanding that stories are not readily available resources. They require time, patience, and respect before they can be entrusted.

It is within this context that children’s aesthetic education and Indigenous media practice deeply resonate with one another. For Indigenous broadcasting, program production has never been about rapid extraction or instant montage. Instead, it extends the community-based ethic of gathering into the realm of media transmission. At Taiwan Indigenous Television, content creation often requires long-term field engagement, repeated listening, and careful attention to local perspectives and elders’ narrative traditions. In a media environment driven by information saturation and rapid consumption, this pace is demanding, yet it is precisely what gives Indigenous media its enduring value.

The Values of IPCF’s New Headquarters: A Cultural Site Centered on Relationships

As IPCF prepares to relocate to its new headquarters in Qingpu, Taoyuan, our creative practices are not merely responding to an administrative shift. Instead, we are rethinking a deeper question. When an Indigenous public media organization enters a new urban context, how should it build relationships and become part of the local cultural ecosystem?

The 2025 PULIMA Kids program continues the guiding principle established in 2023, which regards gathering as the beginning of creation. It also marks the first phase of engagement in Qingpu. Here, gathering no longer occurs solely in Indigenous communities or natural landscapes. It unfolds within a highly urbanized environment. Children begin gathering stories from Qingpu’s terrain, its pond systems, everyday family interactions, and their own imaginations of the city’s future. Through collaborative art installations involving children, parents, and artists, creation becomes a practice of relationship-building.

This approach directly reflects Indigenous cultural philosophies that emphasize harmony among the natural world, human communities, and social structures. In Indigenous worldviews, culture is not a manufactured product. It emerges gradually through long-term interaction, care, and response. Therefore, IPCF’s entry into Qingpu is not centered on channel operations or program production alone. It is guided by an educational mission to cultivate a physical cultural space that can coexist with and contribute to local life.

Through continuous acts of gathering, we are beginning to form meaningful connections with Qingpu’s surrounding ecological features, particularly its unique pond systems. We are also engaging with nearby cultural institutions such as museums and theaters. In addition, we are connecting with urban entertainment spaces like shopping centers and baseball stadiums, as well as schools and residential communities. These relationships are not short-term collaborations or event-based partnerships. They are long-term ethical commitments grounded in mutual trust and cultural responsibility.

For us, a site is not a space to be used. It is an entity that must be respected and responded to. When media practices learn to build good relationships within a site, cultural transmission shifts from the mere circulation of information to a living practice that can take root and continue to grow.

Cultural Identity as a New Narrative

Reflecting on the trajectory of the children’s aesthetic creation programs over recent years, we have come to understand that media integration is not simply about linking online and offline platforms, channels, and events. It represents a deeper comprehension of cultural transmission itself. Within this understanding, cultural identity is no longer something designed or packaged in advance. It emerges gradually through lived cultural practices and becomes the narrative itself.

Workshops, fieldwork, family-art collaborations, and creative actions, together with documentary records, broadcast platforms, and public exhibition spaces, form a continuously operating cultural cycle. Over the past several years, the processes of these children’s camps have been carefully preserved through documentary filmmaking. Beginning in 2026, these recordings will not only be broadcast on Taiwan Indigenous Television but also presented within the physical spaces of IPCF’s new headquarters.

Through this practice, our understanding of media taste has also become more concrete. Media taste, in this context, is not a matter of style. It is an ethical judgment shaped by long-term fieldwork, respect for local knowledge, and trust in children as cultural subjects. This sensibility echoes Indigenous values that emphasize balance and harmony among land, people, and society.

As IPCF prepares for its new home in Qingpu, our preparations extend beyond the completion of infrastructure. We are cultivating the conditions for a new cultural identity to take form. The new headquarters is not merely a building. It is a cultural subject with a soul and may even be regarded as an independent living entity. Its naming, visual identity, and spatial narrative are themselves vehicles of cultural transmission. Through them, architecture becomes a site where new narratives can continuously unfold.

Looking Ahead: Sustaining Indigenous Media Practice in the Digital Age

As international networks such as the World Indigenous Broadcasters Network (WIBN) continue to grow, the challenges we face are no longer limited to expanding reach. The more pressing question is how to sustain Indigenous media practice in an environment dominated by speed, immediacy, and short-term attention.

For IPCF and TITV, the future of Indigenous broadcasting does not lie in chasing short-term visibility. It lies in cultivating relationships, sites, and time. The integration of broadcast channels with physical cultural spaces represents our response to a short-form media environment.

The future of Indigenous media does not begin with the activation of a camera, nor does it end with the completion of a program. It takes shape through repeated and patient acts of gathering and relationship-building. When sustained initiatives such as the PULIMA Kids Children’s Aesthetic Creation Program give form to cultural identity as the foundation of a new narrative, media can endure across time and grow alongside society rather than being consumed by it.