Jan 13 to Jan 19
Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed.
“Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定).
Photo courtesy of Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station
“Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.”
Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th official indigenous group on Jan. 17, 2007, a survey showed that most of the population under 50 had grown up identifying as Amis and did not even know the term until the cultural movement picked up in the 2000s.
Kilang was also clueless about his Sakizaya heritage until he met Tiway Saiyon, an educator and activist who, despite being a renowned expert in Amis culture, was also a relentless advocate for Sakizaya awareness.
Photo courtesy of Kolas Yotaka
Saiyon was raised by his grandmother, a survivor of the 1878 Karewan Incident in which the Kavalan and Sakizaya peoples rose up against Qing oppression. The two groups, once dominating the plains around today’s Hualien City, were decimated and forced to scatter and hide their identity, living among the Amis and adopting their customs. When the Japanese surveyed the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, they classified the Sakizaya as a branch of the Nanshi Amis, and the label stuck.
However, despite more than a century of close interaction and intermarriage, the differences between the two peoples persisted, especially the languages that were not mutually intelligible. Kilang’s Amis grandfather, for example, married into a Sakizaya family and learned the language, and his father was fluent in it as well.
The Sakizaya did not want their split from the Amis to be acrimonious; this is shown in their 2005 declaration: “We’ve been wandering for 127 years, it’s time to go home. The Sakizaya will forever remember with gratitude and respect the sun’s warmth, our mother’s love and our deepest friendship with the Pangcah.”
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
ORIGIN DISPUTE
Spanish records from 1632 note the existence of the “Saquiraya” living in the district of “Turoboan.” They added that the villages produced gold and silver, leading some modern experts to believe that Turoboan was located in the northeast coast around today’s Jiufen District (九份) in New Taipei.
Huang Hsuan-wei (黃宣衛) writes in “From the south, from the north – Inspecting the literature on the origins of the Sakizaya” (南來說北來說 關於薩奇萊雅源流的一些文獻考察) that this theory originated from Jose Borao’s 1993 paper “The Aborigines of Northern Taiwan according to 17th Century Spanish Sources” and was perpetuated in Hsu Mu-tsu’s (許木柱) 2003 book, Reconstruction of the history of Hualien City’s indigenous villages (花蓮市原住民部落歷史重建).
Photo courtesy of Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station
However, the Liwu River (立霧溪) in Hualien County also produced gold, and Huang writes that it is more likely what Spanish sources referred to. In fact, Borao’s 2001 book The Spanish Experience in Taiwan places Turoboan squarely on the Hualien coast and “Saquiraya” just west of Hualien City, where the historic main settlement of Takobowan (today’s Sakul) was located.
Saiyon, on the other hand, was adamant that the Sakizaya were originally Siraya from Tainan who were pushed out of their homeland by the arrival of Ming Dynasty warlord Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), in 1662.
He posited that “Siraya” was a Chinese corruption of Sakiraya (alternate pronunciation of Sakizaya) and that Takobowan was named after Taiovan in today’s Anping District (安平), Tainan. This contrasts with the Spanish observation that the Sakizaya had already been in Hualien County in the early 1600s.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Huang concludes that there is insufficient evidence to support both claims, plus Sakizaya origin myths also indicate that they have been in Hualien County since at least 1600 and have long associated with the Amis. Both theories emerged during the time when Sakizaya were seeking separate recognition from the Amis, hoping to show that they had disparate origins.
THE VILLAGE BURNS
The Sakizaya first encountered the Kavalan around 1840, when the latter were forced south due to Han Taiwanese settlers encroaching on their original home in Yilan County. The two sides briefly clashed when the Kavalan tried to expand south of the Meilun River (美崙溪); that marked their boundary and they became close allies against the Truku to the northwest. The Kavalan named their new settlement Karewan.
This new home came under threat once more with the Qing’s “open the mountains and pacify the savages” (開山撫番) policy in 1874, as the government began stationing troops on the east coast and encouraging Han settlers to move there. The Kavalan appeared receptive to this at first, hoping that pledging allegiance to the Qing would provide protection against Truku and Han incursions. However, things turned sour as the number of soldiers increased and began oppressing the populace.
In 1878, Kavalan representatives headed to the army camp to air their grievances, only to be slaughtered. This finally pushed them over the edge, and their Sakizaya allies also joined the fray.
As a child, Saiyon’s grandmother would tell him about the events that transpired next, and he published one of the earliest modern accounts of the Karewan Incident in 1989.
After several clashes, Qing reinforcements arrived in September and decided to take down the Sakizaya first to isolate the Kavalan. At that time, Takobowan was surrounded by a thick defensive bamboo forest planted over centuries, making it hard to penetrate. However, rival groups informed the Qing where the entrances were, but due to the narrow path no soldier made it into the village alive.
As the bodies piled up by the gate, the Qing resorted to shooting fire arrows at the settlement, and as the place burned, the Sakizaya chiefs surrendered.
Takobowan chief Kumud Pazik and his wife Icep Kanasaw reportedly stayed behind so that the younger villagers could escape; the two were brutally executed in public. Today, they are worshipped as fire deities and are the focus of the Sakizaya’s annual “palamal” fire ceremony.
RECLAIMING IDENTITY
A 16-year-old Tiway Kalang and 13-year-old Rutuk Sayion fled south to Ciwidian Village in today’s Shoufeng Township (壽豐) in Hualien County and established a Sakizaya settlement; they became Taway Saiyon’s paternal grandparents, writes Sayum Bolaw in “The etho of Sakizaya — Ethnic identity and cultural practice” (撒奇萊雅族的精神—族群認同與文化 實踐).
Other survivors also established new settlements or took refuge in Amis villages, while some eventually returned to Takobowan and founded the new village of Sakul, although it was much smaller than before. Nevertheless, they vowed to keep their identity a secret in fear of retribution, blending in with the surrounding Amis and adopting their customs.
This taboo persisted until modern day; when Kilang was doing field research for his thesis in the late 1990s, he had great trouble finding Sakizaya subjects outside of those he knew personally. Interestingly, he found that the most effective way was to ask the Amis which people in the villages were Sakizaya — and they almost always knew, showing that a tacit difference still existed.
Saiyon is considered the first to bring attention to the issue, holding the first ancestral worship ceremony using the name Sakizaya in July 1990. However, most still preferred to identify as Amis, and nothing came of the effort. By 2001, however, he told Kilang that he had decided to give his all to reviving Sakizaya culture. In 2003, a year after the Kavalan were officially recognized, he held a meeting with elders and leaders and vowed to seek official recognition.
Saiyon died later that year, and after a brief lull, his son Tuku Tiway along with Sayum Bolaw launched a new task force and recruited other young people to continue the push. After three years, they finally succeeded.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that either have anniversaries this week or are tied to current events.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
These are volatile times for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with the party’s founder, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), in and out and back in jail repeatedly, Ko resigning as party chair and naming TPP caucus convener Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) to replace him and an upcoming party leadership vote. How representative of the party’s supporters has the party’s leadership been recently? The TPP caucus in the legislature is so closely aligned — and votes so similarly to — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that they are in effect a pan-blue party now. Billing themselves as the “white force” between the pan-blue and pan-green
RSS