Taiwanese Aborigines - History and Tribal Definitions

History and Tribal Definitions

For most of their recorded history, Taiwanese aborigines have been defined by the agents of different Confucian, Christian, and Nationalist "civilizing" projects, with a variety of aims. Each "civilizing" project defined the aborigines based on the "civilizer"'s cultural understandings of difference and similarity, behavior, location, appearance and prior contact with other groups of people (Harrell 1996:5–20). Taxonomies imposed by colonizing forces divided the aborigines into named subgroups, referred to as "tribes". These divisions did not always correspond to distinctions drawn by the aborigines themselves. However, the categories have become so firmly established in government and popular discourse over time that they have become de facto distinctions, serving to shape in part today's political discourse within the Republic of China (ROC), and affecting Taiwan's policies regarding indigenous peoples.

The Han sailor, Chen Di, in his Record of the Eastern Seas (1603), identifies the indigenous people of Taiwan as simply (Dong Fan) 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 (Teng 2004:61–5).

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/wild" ("生番") to define those people who had not submitted to Qing rule, and "cooked/tame" ("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, but retained a pejorative designation to signify the perceived cultural lacking of the non-Han people (Harrell 1996:19), (Diamond 1995:100). This designation reflected the prevailing idea that anyone could be civilized/tamed by adopting Confucian social norms (Crossley 1999:281–95; Dikotter 1992:8–9).

As the Qing consolidated their power over the plains and struggled to enter the mountains in the late 19th century, the terms Pingpu (平埔族; Pingpu-zu/Pepo; "Plains tribes") and Gaoshan (高山族; Gaoshan-zu; "High Mountain tribes") were used interchangeably with the terms "Raw" and "Cooked" (Teng 2004:125–27). 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". Soon after Mona Rudao led the uprising known as the Wushe Incident (depicted in the film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale), the Japanese government began referring to them as takasago-zoku (高砂族) (Tai 1999:294). 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 (Harrison 2001:54–5). 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 (Harrison 2001:60). 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 (Republic of China) 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 (Brown 2001:163 n6). The distinction between Plains and Gaoshan people continues to affect Taiwan's policies regarding indigenous peoples, and their ability to participate effectively in government (Saisiyat people 2006).

Although the ROC's Government Information Office officially lists 13 major groupings as "tribes" the consensus among scholars maintains that these 13 groupings do not reflect any social entities, political collectives, or self-identified alliances dating from pre-modern Taiwan (Teng 2004:104–5). The earliest detailed records, dating from the Dutch arrival in 1624, describe the aborigines as living in independent villages of varying size. Between these villages there was frequent trade, intermarriage, warfare and alliances against common enemies. Using contemporary ethnographic and linguistic criteria, these villages have been classed by anthropologists into more than 20 broad (and widely debated) ethnic groupings (Tsuchida 1983:62; Li 1992:22–3), which were never united under a common polity, kingdom or "tribe" (Shepherd 1993:51–61).