The Original Taiwanese

Taiwan is similar to China in many ways, but it has some features not found on the mainland.  The indigenous people of Taiwan give the island a distinctive cultural heritage unique to the island.

After two unsuccessful attempts, Abel and I finally got to tour the Formosa Museum of Aborigines last week, and it was worth the wait.  The museum was small, but very new and contained lots of cool artifacts with English explanations.   I was totally ignorant about these cultures and was surprised by many things I learned.  For one, the indigenous people are virtually unrelated to any people on the Asian continent - they are share lineage and cultural roots with Polynesian people in Malaysia, Philippines, and the Pacific Islands, including Hawaii.  Today, only 2% of the island’s population is of indigenous descent, the vast majority of people having immigrated from Mainland China in successive waves starting in the 17^th century.

Here are some of the other interesting things (at least to an anthropology nut) that I learned about Taiwan’s original inhabitants:

·         Living on an island, the people on the coast have learned to make some incredible boats.  They are fast and light and take three years to build.  Just look at these!

·         Several of the tribes on the island practiced face tattooing, which was a coming of age ritual for both males and females.  Here is a good article explains its relation to their creation story.   Can you imagine entering a village where all the inhabitants have tattooed faces!

·         Indigenous music is awesome and I was shocked to learn that I was actually familiar with a particular song.  You have probably heard the song linked below also.  How is it that a Taiwanese aboriginal song is played around the world? The story is that a French cultural organization went around the world collecting traditional songs from indigenous people and then compiled the recordings on a collection of albums which they sold.  Michael Cretu of the group Enigma bought the rights from the French organization and used it as the foundation for “Return to Innocence”.  Cretu earned gobs of money and the elderly Difang, who originally sang the song on the bus for free, got nothing. Luckily the situation was somewhat rectified as Difang received a settlement out of court and subsequently recorded albums of his cultures’ traditional songs.   Something about it is beautiful and haunting – makes me want to listen to more of his songs.

·         Rukai villages built homes out of beautiful slate rock – creating streets, walls, floors, roofs, and all out of huge slabs of black slate.  No thatched huts for these people!  They had a nice mock-up of a home in the museum – it looked like it would stay cool in the summer, be easy to clean, and stand up to any typhoon.

Jess and I are planning a visit to Wulai in the next few weeks to experience some of the food and cultural events of the Atayal people.  Two things I look forward to are walking on ancient hunting trails to waterfalls in the jungle and eating traditional foods such as fried bees - I assume they remove the stinger.  I'll eat anything once!