TAIWANESE ABORIGINES
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
Taiwanese Aborigines (原住民, literally "original inhabitants") are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. Although Taiwanese Aboriginal groups hold a variety of creation stories, recent research suggests their ancestors may have been living on the islands for approximately 8000 years before major Han Chinese immigration began in the 17th century. The Taiwanese Aborigines are Austronesian peoples, with linguistic and genetic ties to other Austronesian ethnic groups, such as peoples of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Oceania. The issue of an ethnic identity unconnected to the Asian mainland has become one thread in the discourse regarding the political status of Taiwan.
For centuries Taiwan's aboriginal peoples experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of conquering peoples. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, intermarriage and other dispassionate intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. For example, of the approximately 26 known languages of the Taiwanese Aborigines (collectively referred to as the Formosan languages), at least ten are extinct, five are moribund and several are to some degree endangered. These languages are of unique historical significance, since most historical linguists consider Taiwan to be the original homeland of the Austronesian language family.
Taiwan's Austronesian speakers were formerly distributed over much of the island's rugged central mountain range and were concentrated in villages along the alluvial plains. As of January 2006, their total population is around 458,000 (approximately 2 percent of Taiwan's population). The bulk of contemporary Taiwanese Aborigines reside in the mountains and the cities.
The indigenous peoples of Taiwan face economic and social barriers, including a high unemployment rate and substandard education. Many Aboriginal groups have been actively seeking a higher degree of political self-determination and economic development since the early 1980s. A revival of ethnic pride is expressed in many ways by Aborigines, including incorporating elements of their culture into commercially successful pop music. Efforts are underway in indigenous communities to revive traditional cultural practices and preserve their traditional languages. Several Aboriginal tribes are becoming extensively involved in the tourism and ecotourism industries to achieve increased economic self-reliance from the state.
History of the Aboriginal Peoples
Chipped-pebble tools dating from perhaps as early as 15,000 years ago suggest that the initial human inhabitants of Taiwan were Paleolithic cultures of the Pleistocene era. These people survived by eating marine life. Archaeological evidence points to an abrupt change to the Neolithic era around 6000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture, domestic animals, polished stone adzes and pottery. The stone adzes were mass-produced on Penghu and nearby islands, from the volcanic rock found there. This suggests heavy sea traffic took place between these islands and Taiwan at this time.
Recorded history of the Aborigines on Taiwan began around the seventeenth century, and has often been dominated by the views and policies of foreign powers and non-Aborigines. Beginning with the arrival of Dutch merchants in 1624, the traditional lands of the aborigines have been successively colonized by Dutch, Spanish, Han (from both the Ming and Qing dynasties), Japanese, and Chinese (the Chinese Nationalist government, or Kuomintang) rulers. Each of these successive “civilizing” cultural centers participated in violent conflict and peaceful economic interaction with both the Plains and Mountain tribal groups. To varying degrees, they influenced or transformed the culture and language of the indigenous peoples.
The European Period
During the European period (1623–1662) soldiers and traders representing the Dutch East India Company maintained a colony in southwestern Taiwan (1624–1662) near present-day Tainan. This established an Asian base for triangular trade between the company, the Qing Dynasty and Japan, with the hope of interrupting Portuguese and Spanish trading alliances. The Spanish also maintained a colony in northern Taiwan (1626–1642) in present-day Keelung. However, Spanish influence wavered almost from the beginning, so that by the late 1630s they had already withdrawn most of their troops. After they were driven out of Taiwan by a combined Dutch and Aboriginal force in 1642, the Spanish “had little effect on Taiwan’s history”. Dutch influence was far more significant: expanding to the southwest and north of the island, they set up a tax system and established schools and churches in many villages.
When the Dutch arrived in 1624 at Tayouan (Anping) Harbor, Siraya-speaking representatives from nearby Saccam village soon appeared at the Dutch stockade to barter and trade; an overture which was readily welcomed by the Dutch. The Sirayan villages were, however, divided into warring factions: the village of Sinckan (Sinshih) was at war with Mattau (Madou) and its ally Baccluan, while the village of Soulang maintained uneasy neutrality. In 1629 a Dutch expeditionary force searching for Han pirates, was massacred by warriors from Mattau, and the victory inspired other villages to rebel. In 1635, with reinforcements having arrived from Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the Dutch subjugated and burned Mattau. Since Mattau was the most powerful village in the area, the victory brought a spate of peace offerings from other nearby villages, many of which were outside the Siraya area. This was the beginning of Dutch consolidation over large parts of Taiwan, which brought an end to centuries of inter-village warfare. The new period of peace allowed the Dutch to construct schools and churches aimed to acculturate and convert the indigenous population. Dutch schools taught a romanized script (Sinckan writing), which transcribed the Siraya language. This script maintained occasional use through the 18th century. Today only fragments survive, in documents and stone stele markers. The schools also served to maintain alliances and open aboriginal areas for Dutch enterprise and commerce.
The Dutch soon found trade in deerskins and venison in the East Asian market to be a lucrative endeavor, and recruited plains Aborigines to procure the hides. The deer trade attracted the first Han traders to Aboriginal villages, but as early as 1642 the demand for deer greatly diminished the deer stocks. This drop significantly reduced the prosperity of Aboriginal tribes, forcing many Aborigines to take up farming to counter the economic impact of losing their most vital food source.
As the Dutch began subjugating Aboriginal villages in the south and west of Taiwan, increasing numbers of Han immigrants looked to exploit areas that were fertile and rich in game. The Dutch initially encouraged this, since the Han were skilled in agriculture and large-scale hunting. Several Han took up residence in Siraya villages. The Dutch used Han agents to collect taxes, hunting license fees and other income. This set up a society in which “... many of the colonists were [Han Chinese] but the military and the administrative structures were Dutch”. Despite this, local alliances transcended ethnicity during the Dutch period. For example, the Kuo Huai-i Rebellion in 1652, a Han farmers’ uprising, was defeated by an alliance of 120 Dutch musketeers with the aid of Han loyalists and 600 Aboriginal braves.
The Dutch period ended in 1662 when Ming loyalist forces of Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) drove out the Dutch and established the short-lived Zheng family kingdom on Taiwan. The Zhengs brought 70,000 soldiers to Taiwan and immediately began clearing large tracts of land to support its forces. Despite the preoccupation with fighting the Qing, the Zheng family was concerned with Aboriginal welfare on Taiwan. The Zhengs built alliances, collected taxes and erected Aboriginal schools, where Taiwan’s Aborigines were first introduced to the Confucian Classics and Chinese writing. However, the impact of the Dutch was deeply ingrained in Aboriginal society. In the 19th and 20th century, European explorers wrote of being welcomed as kin by the aborigines who thought they were the Dutch, who had promised to return.
Qing Dynasty Rule
In 1683, following a naval engagement with Admiral Shi Lang, one of Koxinga's father's trusted friends, Koxinga's grandson Zheng Keshuang submitted to Qing Dynasty control.
Despite the expense of the military and diplomatic campaign that brought Taiwan into the imperial realm, the general sentiment in Beijing was ambivalent. The point of the campaign had been to destroy the Zheng-family regime, not to conquer the island. Qing Emperor Kangxi expressed the sentiment that Taiwan was "the size of a pellet; taking it is no gain; not taking it is no loss" (彈丸之地。得之無所加，不得無所損). His ministers counseled that the island was "a ball of mud beyond the sea, adding nothing to the breadth of China" (海外泥丸，不足為中國加廣), and advocated removing all the Chinese to the mainland and abandoning the island. It was only the campaigning of admiral Shi Lang and other supporters that convinced the Emperor not to abandon Taiwan. Koxinga's followers were forced to depart from Taiwan to the more unpleasant parts of Qing controlled land. By 1682 there were only 7000 Chinese left on Taiwan as they had intermarried with aboriginal women and had property in Taiwan.
From 1683, the Qing Dynasty ruled Taiwan as a prefecture and in 1875 divided the island into two prefectures, north and south. In 1885, the island was made into a separate Chinese province.
The Qing authorities tried to limit immigration to Taiwan and barred families from traveling to Taiwan to ensure the immigrants would return to their families and ancestral graves. Illegal immigration continued, but many of the men had few prospects in war weary Fujian and thus married locally, resulting in the idiom "mainland grandfather no mainland grandmother" (有唐山公無唐山媽). The Qing tried to protect aboriginal land claims, but also sought to turn them into tax paying subjects. Chinese and tax paying aborigines were barred from entering the wilderness which covered most of the island for the fear of raising the ire of the non taxpaying, highland aborigines and inciting rebellion. A border was constructed along the western plain, built using pits and mounds of earth, called "earth cows", to discourage illegal land reclamation.
Plains, Mountains and Tribal Definitions
The Han sailor, Chen Di, in his Record of the Eastern Seas (1603), identifies the indigenous people of Taiwan as simply 東番, or “Eastern Savage”, while the Dutch referred to Taiwan’s original inhabitants as “Indians” or “blacks”, based on their prior colonial experience in what is currently Indonesia.
Beginning nearly a century later, as the rule of the Qing Empire expanded over wider groups of people, writers and gazetteers recast their descriptions away from reflecting degree of acculturation, and toward a system that defined the Aborigines relative to their submission or hostility to Qing rule. Qing literati used the term (raw) “生番” to define those people who had not submitted to Qing rule, and (cooked) “熟番” for those who had pledged their allegiance through their payment of a head tax. According to the standards of the Qianlong Emperor and successive regimes, “cooked” was synonymous with having assimilated to Han cultural norms, and living as a subject of the Empire. This reflected the prevailing idea that anyone could become a civilized person by adopting Confucian social norms
As the Qing consolidated their power over the plains and struggled to enter the mountains in the late 19th century, the terms “Plains tribes” (lowland) Pepo or Pingpu zu 平埔族 and “High Mountain tribes” (highland) Gao shan zu 高山族 were used interchangeably with the terms “Raw” and “Cooked”. During the 50 years of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), anthropologists from Japan maintained the binary classification. In 1900 they incorporated it into their own colonial project by employing the term Peipo (Plains Aborigine) for the “cooked tribes”, and creating a category of “recognized tribes” for the Aborigines who had formerly been called “raw”. They referred to them as takasagozoku (高砂族). The latter group included the Atayal, Bunun, Tsou, Saisiat, Paiwan, Puyuma, and Ami peoples. The Yami (Tao) and Thao were added later, for a total of nine recognized tribes. During the early period of Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) rule the terms Shandi Tongbao 山地同胞 “mountain compatriots” and Pingdi Tongbao 平地同胞 “plains compatriots” were invented, to remove the presumed taint of Japanese influence and reflect the place of Taiwan’s indigenous people in the Chinese Nationalist state. The KMT later adopted the use of all the earlier Japanese groupings except “Peipo”.
Despite recent changes in the field of anthropology and a shift in Taiwanese government objectives, the Gaoshan and Pingpu labels in use today maintain the form given by the Qing to reflect Aborigines’ acculturation to Han culture. The current recognized Aborigines are all regarded as Gaoshan, though the divisions are not and have never been based strictly on geographical location. The Amis, Saisiat, Tao and Kavalan are all traditionally eastern plains cultures. The distinction between Plains and Gaoshan people continues to affect Taiwan’s policies regarding indigenous peoples, and their ability to participate effectively in government.
Aboriginal children under Japanese occupation
Wushe Incident
The "Wùshè Incident" (霧社事件) was the biggest and the last rebellion against Japanese colonial forces in Taiwan, resulting in the massacre of the Taiwanese aborigine group, Atayal in 1930.
The cause of the rebellion is attributed to Japanese policy toward Taiwanese natives. In Japanese policy, Taiwanese tribal natives were classified as "aboriginal", and a separate lower class in comparison to the Komin (imperial citizens). Forced resettlement, oppression of tribal practices as well as forced labour and exploitation by Japanese police forces caused a large amount of hostility towards the Japanese, particularly their police forces, from the native tribes.
* Formosa's First Nations and the Japanese: From Colonial Rule to Postcolonial Resistance by Scott Simon
Assimilation and Acculturation
During the Japanese and KMT periods centralized modernist government policies, rooted in ideas of Social Darwinism and culturalism directed education, genealogical customs and other traditions toward ethnic assimilation. Ethnic shift among the Gaoshan, who had less contact with outsiders due to the inaccessibility of their lands, was more the result of centralized assimilative pressures than gradual social change. Nonetheless, the cultures and languages of most of the recognized tribes remain resilient today. Multicultural policies have contributed to ethnic pride in those communities.
The complexity and scope of Aboriginal assimilation and acculturation on Taiwan has led to three general narratives of Taiwanese ethnic change. The oldest narrative holds that Han migration from Fujian and Guangdong in the 17th Century pushed the plains Aborigines into the mountains, where they became the highland tribes of today. A relatively newer view asserts that through widespread intermarriage between Han and Aborigines between the 17th and 19th centuries, the Aborigines were completely sinicized. Finally, modern ethnographical and anthropological studies have shown a pattern of cultural shift mutually experienced by both Han and Plains Aborigines, resulting in a hybrid culture. Today people who comprise Taiwan’s ethnic Han demonstrate major cultural differences from Han elsewhere
With Pythons and Head-Hunters in Borneo: The Quest for Mount Tiban
The Lapita Peoples
4000 years ago (4 ka), but the chronological resolution of existing control-region data is poor, and an East Indonesian origin has also been proposed. By analyzing 157 complete mtDNA genomes, we show that
Neolithic of Southeast China: Cultural Transformation and Regional Interaction on the Coast
