the ancestors that we know who we are. We may not tattoo our bodies, but we can consolidate our village communities, speak our language, and follow our own way of life.
I have faced a lot of opposition. In my mind, I can hear my father, a devout Christian, cursing me when I announced that my wife and I were going to get married in a traditional wedding ceremony. But even when my father called me Satan for reconstructing the culture of our tribe, I did not waver. Never have I wavered since I made my choice. I have never complained nor regretted a thing.
For I am Paiwan! This is an unalterable fact. The beauty of Paiwan culture attracts me profoundly. In fact, it has become my faith and my identity.
There are moments of clarity in everyone’s life, and for me the moment of greatest clarity came when I stood on the top of the Ta-she Mountain in Pingtung County, south-western Taiwan and looked down at the old tribal village in the valley.
In that moment, I finally realized what it means to be Paiwan! I perceived the Paiwan-ness in our traditional slate houses and in our stunning totemic carvings of the hundred pacer snake. My tears gently fell. I stood there all emotional for the longest time. It was as if I were an orphan boy finally learning his parentage.
In the tribal village where I grew up, it was once hard to find traces of traditional Paiwan culture because of the severity of Sinification.
Everything Paiwan was a distant blur for me, until I met my mentors – the Paiwan sculptors Sakuliu and Vatsuku. From them I learned many precious things. From Sakuliu I learned the practicality of a Paiwan person’s wisdom, while Vatsuku shared with me the Paiwan manual creativity.
Sakuliu and Vatsuku initiated me into Paiwan culture, but I would never have been receptive to it if it weren’t for my father and my grandfather.
My father hasn’t always supported my decision, but it was in observing him and his father that I first saw beauty in the traditional relationship with nature. When I was a child, nature was my classroom. Everything in the mountains was my textbook. My grandfather was the headmaster of the school, my father the teacher. It is there that I learned the wisdom of my tribe, passed down from generation to generation.
I’m still celebrating my luck in having an amazingly wise grandfather and a hunter for a father. In my father, I saw the principle of coexistence between man and animal. In my grandfather, I realized the truth of coexistence of man and nature, the truth of sharing and mutual benefit.
One day, Grandpa said, “I’m old. There are not many days left for me to see the sun rise and set. The millet in my field is now ripening for the very last time. My legs no longer have the strength to kiss the land I know so well, nor my fingers the force to pull the trigger of my hunting gun. I am old. I’m old.
“Last night I had that dream again,” he said. “The ancestral spirits were calling me, asking me to go with them. I asked them to give me a bit more time and let me tell all the stories I have to tell, before my life ends. In these eighty years I’ve lived, I’ve lived enough. But before I leave, I want to pass on the glory and dignity of the past to the next generation.
“The words that I’ve uttered, you must record with pen and paper.” Grandpa’s helpless eyes, which had borne witness to the ravages of time, and the wrinkles on his face, which was inscribed with the runes of history, obliged me to comply with his request. Before he passed away, I had to transcribe his wisdom in a book for everyone to read, hopefully to understand. The hard part was that I had to do it in my own words.
“I’m dumb,” I told an editor to whom I had shown an essay. “I haven’t read much, and the things I write nobody reads. I can’t write essays like the other people.”
“Sakinu, why would you want to be like anyone else?” she said. “Everything in you is literature, things other people don’t have and can’t imitate. Sakinu, let everyone know all the things you keep hidden, let your life story, and Paiwan history, come flowing out of your pen.” That was a revelation. I thought it over. I should be proud because I’m indigenous – I’m Paiwan! Now I am proud to tell everyone my only faith is Paiwan, from beginning to end, never to change.
In the past six years I’ve written a lot of things. My objective at the beginning was to make an account of what had happened to me, what I had realized, and what I had heard of the oral accounts of the village elders and their life histories. I wanted to tell the next generation how we once lived in this space.
I dedicate this book, such as it is, to my mentors, my father and grandfather, to the next generation, and to the beautiful woman by my side who has supported me the most, my beloved wife A-chen. A Siraya princess from Tainan County, she has chosen to make a life with me in New Fragrant Or-chid, Lalaoran in Paiwan, between sea and sky on the southeast coast.
Which is where, if you will allow me, I will guide you in this book.
Sakinu Ahronglong
Translator’s Note
“My name is Paiwan!” Sakinu proudly declares. “This is a fact that will not change!” But what does it mean to be Paiwan? Sakinu speaks an Austronesian language that is now called Paiwanese, but it is unclear exactly what paiwan itself means. It might have been a village name – it might have been the name of a plant. It has only become the name of a language in modern times. According to the “Out of Taiwan” hypothesis, Taiwan is the original homeland of the Austronesian language family, meaning that Paiwanese as it is spoken today shares a common ancestor with Polynesian languages and Indonesian, not to mention Tagalog, Malay, Hawaiian, and Maori. Austronesian is a cultural category, too, and Paiwan practices like headhunting and millet cultivation spread from Taiwan through the Austronesian sphere thousands of years ago.
In pre-modern times, Paiwanese was linguistically and culturally unstandardized and therefore highly variable from village to village. In modern times, Japanese scholars from 1895 to 1945 and Chinese and Taiwanese scholars since 1945 have studied the Paiwan and their language. Their studies are written representations of the Paiwanese language and Paiwan culture. These written representations have, in turn, become the basis for written standards. There are now written standards for different dialects of Paiwanese, which are used in teaching materials designed to save the language. Sadly, Paiwanese is now only spoken by people of Sakinu’s age – he was born in 1972 – or older. It really is a mother tongue, and it will soon be a grandmother tongue if attempts to rejuvenate it are not successful.
In supporting the compilation and use of these teaching materials, the Taiwanese government is trying to undo decades of efforts to suppress the language and the culture. Taiwan was officially Chinese until martial law was lifted in 1987, and has only belatedly embraced multiculturalism, particularly with regard to ethnic minorities like the Paiwan who were once called savages. Taiwan has recognized peoples like the Paiwan as indigenous since the mid-1990s based on a simple principle: they were living on the island of Taiwan for thousands of years before the ethnically Han Chinese settlers arrived in southwestern Taiwan in the seventeenth century, and they remain distinct. Official recognition of indigenous peoples is just one of the reasons why Taiwan is now one of the most progressive places in East Asia. Today, Taiwan is the East Asian country that has tried to do the most to make its original residents feel at home in their own homeland.
Sakinu feels at home in his village in southeastern Taiwan and is playing a role he has cast himself for. That role is to be a cultural ambassador for the Paiwan people, where “culture” can be understood in two ways, as identity and as adaptation. As an identity, Sakinu’s culture is distinct practices, including the festivals his village holds and the styles of clothes he wears. To some extent, Sakinu understands these practices according to standards based
