This paper examines the leather tanning craft of the Bunun people to explore how Indigenous ecological knowledge is represented and revitalized within museum practices, focusing on the Bunun Cultural Museum in Haiduan Township, Taitung, Taiwan. In Taiwan’s settler-colonial context—where Indigenous peoples comprise only two percent of the population—these communities face not only demographic marginalization but also deep epistemic divergence from dominant Han cultural systems. Throughout Taiwan’s modern history, Indigenous cultures, knowledge systems, and citizenship have long occupied a gray zone within national law and education, as mountain territories were appropriated by the state and developers.

Leather tanning, more than a traditional craft or wearable art, embodies complex power relations within these structural conditions. The process—transforming animal hides through plant-based materials and environmental attunement—reveals multispecies relationships that root human practice in local ecologies. When research and transmission of this knowledge enter museum spaces, they confront challenges of cultural de-stigmatization. This paper further considers how museums, as cultural mediators, can translate and reconstruct hunting culture and leather tanning knowledge through Indigenous epistemologies, thereby advancing knowledge sovereignty and decolonizing practices.