Taiwan Aborigines Battle to Save Their Culture (fwd)

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Taiwan Aborigines Battle to Save Their Culture
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29908/story.htm

ALISHAN - Resplendent in leather headdresses mounted with eagle feathers
and trimmed with bear fur, and wild boar tusks tied with ribbons around
their sinewy arms, the warriors surround a squealing mountain pig.

A few swift stabs in the neck and the hog is dead, to be offered to the
God of War in the annual Mayasvi ritual -- the most sacred ceremony for
the aboriginal Tsou people in central Taiwan's misty Alishan mountains.

Clad in leather and handwoven tribal red, the warriors dip their spears
and knives into pig's blood. In the light rain, they join hands around
a smoking woodfire and begin a low, melodious chant to welcome the god
to the Mayasvi, or war ceremony.

Once a post-battle thanksgiving, the festival has become a coming-of-age
rite for boys and a way for the Tsou tribe to honour and affirm their
unique cultural heritage.

"A long time ago when we used to go to battle, we would ask the God of
War to help us," said 34-year-old Voyu Peongsi, descended from a family
of tribal chiefs in the small Tsou village of Tefuye, nestled in the
foothills of Alishan.

"Today, it allows the younger generation to understand the culture and
songs of our ancestors, and express the spirit of our kuba," he told
Reuters.

Peongsi and his fellow villagers spent a month rebuilding the kuba -- a
large thatched hut raised on cypress logs at the heart of the Mayasvi
ceremony. It serves as a sort of village hall for Tsou men on ordinary
days.

Women are forbidden to enter the kuba and do not join in the Mayasvi
until evil spirits have been banished at the end of the ceremony, and
the tribe begins to dance and revel till dawn.

FOREIGN INTRUSIONS

Like many minority groups all over the world, the 6,000-strong Tsou
tribe is fighting -- some say losing -- a battle to preserve its
traditional customs in modern Taiwan.

The clansmen were originally coastal dwellers who were forced into the
mountains by encroaching Han Chinese settlers from China.

Some Tsou find the debate over whether Taiwan is part of China to be
preposterous: if anyone has claims on the island, it is Taiwan's
earliest inhabitants, the 12 remaining aboriginal tribes which now form
only two percent of its 23 million people.

Isolated in the mountains, though, the Tsou care little for politics and
live mainly from subsistence farming and hunting.

Aside from Christian missionaries, no foreigners intruded on them until
the Japanese colonisation from 1895 to 1945.

The Japanese stopped customs that they considered barbaric, such as the
Tsou practice of taking human heads as war trophies. The Mayasvi was
itself halted for a about a decade.

Then, when the Chinese Nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949
after losing the mainland to the Communists, the Tsou language was
smothered. The Nationalists imposed Mandarin Chinese in schools and
banned all other languages and dialects.

"People say we are gradually losing our culture but it's actually
happening very quickly," said Liao Chin-ying, a Chinese primary school
teacher who married into a Tsou family in the neighbouring village of
Dabang, next to Tefuye.

She said less than 10 percent of young people can speak Tsou, compared
to 90 percent of the elderly. The government now allows schools to
teach Tsou once a week, but Liao thinks that is not enough to pull the
language back from the brink of extinction.

"If you don't teach the mother tongue, then you lose your culture.
Without your mother tongue, your culture becomes fossilised and doesn't
truly exist any more," she said.

DYING LANGUAGE

Liao speaks only Tsou to her 2-year-old daughter but says her little
girl insists on replying in Mandarin because the other children in the
village do not speak their native tongue.

Christian missionaries are trying to help preserve the Tsou language by
using a romanisation system.

"Some of the priests here speak better Tsou than me," said Yangui
Iuheacana, a Tsou woman who teaches village children how to spell Tsou
words using the alphabet.

"They're helping to put together the first-ever Tsou dictionary and are
translating the Bible into Tsou," she said.

It's easy to see why small villages like Tefuye and Dabang, with only
about 1,200 residents between them, fear assimilation. Mandarin is
essential for anyone seeking further education or work, and for men
doing compulsory military service.

Yet Tsou pride in tradition is evident everywhere, from the carefully
observed Mayasvi to the scars on Peongsi's arms and legs -- the legacy
of his numerous tussles with boars, bears, deer, goats and monkeys.

The Tsou still teach their boys how to hunt and farm up in the lush
mountains far away from Taipei's bustling streets and the high-tech
microchip plants that helped turn the leaf-shaped island into the
world's 15th-largest economy.

It used to be that every boy had to spear a boar by himself before being
considered a man and allowed to marry. But the government has now
restricted hunting grounds, concerned over a dwindling number of
indigenous animals in Taiwan.

Taiwan's entry into the World Trade Organisation three years ago also
ushered in cheaper food imports, forcing some aboriginal groups to
abandon fruit farms and switch to speciality crops like tea or wasabi,
or move into the tourism industry.

The more confident and hopeful Tsou speak of government efforts to
nurture native cultures, such as designating land for aboriginal use
and opening Aboriginal culture museums.

The government also launched an aboriginal television channel on Jan. 1
and gave each Tsou household a free satellite dish. But villagers say
there's no reception up in the mountains.

Story by Tiffany Wu
Story Date: 14/3/2005