對於「文化照顧」的提倡者Leininger（1987）而言，文化照顧是一種專業服務模式，但本專題拒絕將文化照顧受限在專業論述中，也拒絕將原住民變成專業服務的對象，讓文化照顧變成諸多服務模式之一；相反地，我們把「文化照顧」視為解殖原漢族群關係的概念，希望透過文化照顧挑戰現有國家主導的專業照顧模式背後所反應的漢人觀點，以及所複製的原漢殖民關係。三篇論文都選擇原住民族的立足點出發，以呈現「在地觀點」的民族誌作為研究方法，為被消音的原住民族發聲。使用民族誌不只呈現當事人如何敘述文化，透過參與觀察更進一步理解當事人如何在日常照顧中實踐文化，但文化不停留在傳統，而是流動多元交織而成的。這三篇論文分別從建制化與專業化程度不同的照顧服務切入，因此三人分析的權力結構因場域而不同。但共同的挑戰是，面對外來現代性知識的介入，在地文化透過文化轉譯的行動，進行對雙方都有意義的詮釋，透過日常實踐，建立迎向未來、隨時等待變化而重新詮釋的「文化」。

Cultural care means care should be provided in a way that is sensitive and reflects the cultural background of the care recipients. For some of its proponents, cultural care was a service model for the nursing profession. However, caring involves more than the providers and recipients. Care is socially organized by power relations that reflect the worldviews of the privileged groups while those of the marginalized groups are excluded. For indigenous people, the care tends to reflect the world of their colonizers. Therefore, for authors of this special issue, cultural care is a conceptual device to deconstruct the colonial discourse of long term care by the state, offering an alternative discourse that demands the indigenous worldview to be centered in the daily practices of long term care. To make indigenous culture visible in the analysis, the authors of three articles in this issue used ethnography to present the native point of view of members of Taiwan's indigenous community. What they have in common is their goal of meeting the challenge of incorporating indigenous knowledge and the perspective of the local culture into meaningful care practices to benefit the local people. However, they diverge on two issues. The first one is how indigenous culture is studied and represented. Some studied culture in participants' daily activities, while the others assumed traditions as the essence of culture, such as gaga is the tradition of Atayal culture. The second issue is the power relations that the authors aimed to reveal vary according to the field they chose to focus on.