In the mountains of Taiwan, Tayal community members reaffirm their ancestral knowledge and cultural identity to protect their territory of life.

WORDS Manju Maharjan and Yih-Ren Lin | IMAGES Manju Maharjan

A view of the mountains in Jianshi Township, Hsinchu, Taiwan. These mountains are protected by the Tayal Indigenous people as a source of survival. Tayal people consider mountains as “nature’s refrigerator,” where they can gather, hunt for, and produce food.

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Taiwan has many Indigenous groups, of which sixteen are officially recognized today. In 2005, the national government promulgated the Indigenous Peoples’ Basic Law to protect their fundamental rights, including their rights to land and natural resources. In the past, however, colonizers classified Taiwan’s Indigenous groups in different ways and gave little or no recognition to their rights. During the Japanese colonization (1895–1945), only nine groups were considered Indigenous and were called “mountain people.” Problems arose when the Japanese military invaded the mountains to access natural resources such as timber. Indigenous groups resisted the hardest. After the suppression, the mountains were taken and divided by the Japanese government into three use categories: timber harvest, Indigenous Peoples’ use, and restricted forest. Unfortunately, the natural resources policy system established by the Japanese was inherited by the succeeding government, and a discussion about transformative justice has been late to follow, beginning only at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Tayal are the third-largest Indigenous group in Taiwan. Most of them reside in the mountainous areas of central and northern Taiwan. Traditionally, the Tayal have been known as hunters, weavers, and craftspeople whose lives are intertwined with nature. During the past four decades, however, many people have migrated to urban areas for better education and job opportunities. When people leave their community, they lose not only their connection to the land but also the traditional ecological knowledge associated with the land. Bringing people back to the villages is a huge challenge to overcome. Luckily, some community members are devoting themselves to tackling that challenge. Convinced that the Indigenous community as a whole is the repository of a living heritage that is rich in culture, language, traditional ecological knowledge, and beliefs, they seek to protect and promote Tayal culture and their territories of life and to educate the younger generations.

When people leave their community, they lose not only their connection to the land but also the traditional ecological knowledge associated with the land.

Syax Tali and Pagung Tomi are two of these dedicated people. In their efforts, they often collaborate with schools and universities all over Taiwan, bringing students to their community. Their main objective is to make younger generations feel more connected to nature by sharing their traditional ecological knowledge and by letting them experience how Indigenous people live their daily lives immersed in nature. The students spend a whole day with them, engaging in daily activities such as harvesting bamboo shoots for lunch, making bamboo tableware, and preparing food with locally available resources. These activities help the youth connect with nature and become grateful for what nature has provided for them.

Our group of students and teachers from academic institutions in Taipei met Syax Tali and Pagung Tomi in Jianshi Township in Hsinchu County, northwestern Taiwan in May 2023. This area has had a long history of conflict between two Tayal subgroups, Mknazi and Mrqwang, regarding hunting issues. The feud took the lives of hundreds of people in the past. Fifteen years ago, however, the government considered building a reservoir there to provide water for city folks, as well as constructing an incinerator, which other counties didn’t want in their backyards. For these reasons, some villages would have been evacuated. The two warring groups realized that, no matter what their grievances were with each other, they needed to come together to protect the land and fight against the government’s policy. As a result, the government project was declined. The incinerator and reservoir did not get built, and the two groups have remained unified since.

A reconciliation square was established on the way to Tbahu village to commemorate the consensus between two Tayal subgroups, Mknazi and Mrqwang, after a long feud over hunting issues.

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During our visit, Syax Tali and Pagung Tomi told us their own stories. Syax Tali, forty-six years old, lives in Qramay village in Hsinchu, taking care of the land inherited from his great-grandparents. He strongly believes the way Tayal people used to live in the past is sustainable and nature-friendly, so he follows his great-grandparents’ practices. His model of natural farming is based on Tayal ecological knowledge about the use of natural resources. Thinking in terms of a circular economy, he prudently uses every resource, ensuring that none is squandered and that all are eventually replenished by nature. He says, “We are a part of nature, so if we use nature wisely, we won’t have to face any problems. Nature provides everything for us. In return, we have to take care of nature. This way nature is sustained and our lives too.” Syax Tali continues to live with an intimate connection with nature and practices Tayal customs in his everyday life. He told us about some of their cultural traditions. In Tayal culture, for example, before entering the mountains, people perform a ritual called Sbalay (“reconciliation”). In this ceremony, visitors to the mountains have to reconcile with one another by drinking millet wine together before heaven, earth, and their ancestors’ spirits.

Tayal farmer Syax Tali (left) explains the importance of performing the ritual called Sbalay for the safety of visitors to the mountains, while his daughter brings the millet wine for us, visiting university students and teachers from Taipei.

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Syax Tali teaches us about various plants and their uses. In the past, Tayal people would derive all their necessities from the mountains, which are abundant with wild and cultivated plants.

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Traditionally, millet signified the biocultural and linguistic diversity of the Tayal people. They used several varieties of millet, each variety carrying an Indigenous name based on its color and characteristics. However, agricultural modernization and monoculture practices replaced traditional millet farming, which demands manual care and huge manpower. That’s where Pagung Tomi, sixty years old, comes in. In 2016, she started growing millet in her village of Tbahu in Hsinchu. Tbahu was once the region’s millet hub, where traditional millet growing was accompanied by multi-species cropping, shifting agriculture, and its use in rituals. Pagung managed to get the millet seeds that had been collected by researchers from Tayal territories and were preserved in the government’s seed bank. She started growing millet on a small plot of land.

Pagung rekindles the Tayal people’s way of life and their connection to the land by reviving millet culture.

Pagung’s interest in millet isn’t limited to millet farming; she continues to document all the information associated with millet by interviewing many elderly Tayal people and collecting several more varieties of millet. So far, she has collected approximately sixty varieties and documented the Indigenous names of twenty-four varieties. She continues to work on cultivating all the millet varieties she has gathered, which she thinks will help revitalize the social and cultural life surrounding millet — something that would not be possible if millet seeds had remained tucked away in a seed bank. She rekindles the Tayal people’s way of life in Tbahu village and their connection to the land by reviving the millet culture abandoned many years ago.

It may be difficult to fully restore the livelihood of the Tayal as it used to be in the past. Proper documentation, however, and sharing their way of life with the younger generations can at least prevent the knowledge associated with Indigenous people from being lost. In turn, visiting the Tayal and spending the day with them according to the way they live helps students understand how Indigenous people coexist with nature and how they care for their territories of life.

Tayal people grow makino bamboo, which they call ruma, in preparation for planting millet. Shifting cultivation helps the land regain fertility, which degrades after long-term farming of millet. Tayal people create a complex adaptive ecosystem to sustain nature which in return sustains their life.

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The students in our group make tableware (plates, cups, chopsticks) from bamboo using a sickle during our visit to Qramay village, which they then use to eat dinner. Tayal people have been using nature-friendly bamboo tableware for ages.

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Wild animals are one of the main sources of food for the Tayal people. After hunting all day, the family comes together in the evening to sit around the fire and enjoy the barbecue. This practice helps to maintain a strong bond among family members.

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Jinping Bridge on the way to Tbahu village. The bridge comprises 14 bronze sculptures and 70 carvings that highlight the way of life of the Tayal people.

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Pagung Tomi looks after her millet farm. She started millet farming on a small piece of land with only one millet cultivar in 2016. Now she has collected nearly 60 varieties of millet and expanded the cultivation to 10 plots of land.

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During our visit to her millet farm, Pagung Tomi shared some of the stories that elderly Tayal women who help her weed the fields vividly recall about all the beautiful moments and incidents associated with millet farming in the past. As it’s hard for them to bend over, the elderly women help remove the weeds along the outer perimeter of patches by sitting on small chairs.

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Pagung Tomi discusses the different varieties of millet. The students are amazed to hear about the importance of millet from the perspective of biocultural and linguistic diversity and to learn how resilient it is to climate change.

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Support the Cause: Pagung Tomi and Syax Tali belong to Millet Ark, an NGO that aims to revive Indigenous ecological knowledge and integrate it into the sustainable development goals of Indigenous communities in Taiwan. Support, donate, and learn more at milletark.com, or contact oyrlin@gmail.com

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Manju Maharjan is an Indigenous Newah from Nepal and has been documenting and sharing the biocultural diversity of her community from an early age. She graduated from a master’s program in biodiversity at National Taiwan University and is now a research assistant at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Besides her professional interests, she enjoys learning about Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan.

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Yih-Ren Lin is a full professor of ecological humanities at the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies, Taipei National University of the Arts. He also is an environmentalist who for over three decades has been learning about the traditional ecological knowledge of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples through participatory action research. He has facilitated the team at Millet Ark and developed a “walking pedagogy” to promote the mutual understanding between Indigenous Peoples and mainstream society, particularly in the field of education.