Taiwan aborigines back in spotlight as cultures fade

Dec 5, 2011, 6:11 GMT

By Ralph Jennings, dpa =

Itashao, Taiwan (dpa) - The Thao aborigines hold three dance performances a day in this lakeshore village as a 10-storey hotel looms overhead, the din of construction from another guesthouse buzzes from behind the stage and the smell of fried tofu wafts from down the street.

The group of hunters and farmers danced the same way, with blazing red costumes, 200 years ago all around the lake to remember the spirits of ancestors. The dominant ethnic Chinese had not yet taken most of the land for hotels and food stalls.

Subsidized free performances, introduced in response to a plea not to forget aborigines, are about the only thing keeping the Thao in the spotlight today.

Like other aboriginal groups that together stand at just 2.2 per cent of the population, Gu's tribe hopes to stop its culture from being diluted beyond recognition by Chinese creations but doesn't know quite how.

'You can't go out and hunt so easily anymore, since the animals are protected,' said Gu Ming-cheng, a 50-year-old dance instructor, part of a tribe that numbers just 704. 'The young people don't even speak Thao.'

Younger people instead leave the mountainous lakeside, often for low-wage service jobs, living in the cities as a barely visible underclass. About half the island's total 515,000 aborigines live in cities, raising the odds of inter-marriage and the erosion of native traditions.

'The pressure of assimilation looms large, so people need to conserve the culture,' said Namoh Rata, anthropologist at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. 'Aboriginal culture might otherwise end up in museums.'

But the rest of Taiwan is slowly realising it wants to help preserve aboriginal culture, which makes their island historically unique.

Its disappearance would hollow out any deeper understanding of Taiwan, which aborigines controlled for some 8,000 years, until four centuries ago when Chinese began to arrive.

'It is still not well understood why the greatest diversity of Austronesian peoples is found just within the island of Taiwan, more than the rest of the Pacific and the world,' said Linda Arrigo, an researcher of aboriginal history in Taipei.

Anthropologists see the aborigines as key to understanding ethnically linked Austronesian people from Easter Island to Madagascar, for which they set sail about 3,500 years ago.

Taiwan is a 'model' because its aboriginal customs have been less influenced by foreign religions than other populations in the region, said Sun Ta-chuan, minister of the government's Council of Indigenous Peoples. But the government fears that some of the 20 remaining languages will vanish within 50 years.

Taiwan's cabinet recognizes 14 tribes, from the 571-person Sakizaya to the Amis group, the island's largest at nearly 190,000. They get resources and land-use privileges to help sustain their traditions.

In the 1960s, former Taiwan leader Chiang Kai-shek of the Nationalist Party ordered the assimilation of the aborigines, destroying traditional homes and imposing the use of Mandarin Chinese language.

To bring Taiwan in line with the global trend of recognizing native peoples, the cabinet decided in 1996, after democracy had taken root, to raise the budget for improvements in their living standards, health care and education.

Today aboriginal art, performances and humour captivate ethnic Chinese historians and youth. The island government spends 1.5 billion Taiwan dollars (51 million US dollars) per year on preservation of the indigenous culture.

Officials are talking to counterparts in 12 countries that also want to resuscitate or revitalize aboriginal cultures, with particular attention to New Zealand, where the native Maoris have kept their language alive.

Taiwan government agencies aim to establish an autonomous village, to open as early as this month, where Thao language and ceremonies can flourish without outside influence.

Today, aboriginal ceremonies allow outside music, non-native attire and even campaigning by Chinese politicians.

Despite government-sponsored art and architecture classes for children of recognized aboriginal groups, aborigines say state schools run by ethnic Chinese lead the same children to adopt the dominant race's ways of doing things.

Taiwan officials plan to step up language preservation work and develop a law to strengthen tribal rights over ancestral land, said Sun.

But aborigines should expect preservation only through change, he said. 'In the cities, not every experience is a happy one due to identity issues, and that's also an aboriginal experience,' he said. 'No culture in any society can just remain in one form.'