The budget was tripled this year to about $20 million, and last year, parliament ordered the government to establish a foundation to develop writing systems and dictionaries for indigenous languages.
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Taiwan’s central government has allocated money since 2012 to preserve native languages and aboriginal culture.
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Still, interest in the island’s past has grown. Indigenous people have populated Taiwan for about 3,500 years, but they now number just half a million people, or 2% of Taiwan’s population. The relationship between the two has so grown so fractious that China has even asked international airlines to stop referring to Taiwan as a country. Most Taiwanese trace their lineage to China, and Beijing cites that heritage as part of its claim that China and Taiwan, ruled separately since the 1940s, belong under one flag. You can say the indigenous culture is all the Taiwanese have to set themselves apart from the Chinese culture.” “That’s something that’s unique for all of Taiwan,” he said. It’s vital work, says Tony Coolidge, an American national who is half indigenous and runs the Taiwan-based advocacy group Atayal Organization, which works to preserve indigenous culture. Portraits of elderly tattooed women cover every wall of his home-based exhibition hall, where he lectures to tourists and students. Through the years, though, Sibal has photographed about 300 people with the markings and collected around 100 stories to go with the images. Government officials believe there are now only two people left on the island who have the original facial tattoos. Those not tattooed risked being expelled from the villages.Ĭompared with the intricate designs of the modern-day tattoo, the artwork of the facial tattoos in Taiwan was simple, though impossible to miss - a black stripe across the forehead to indicate an achievement or a profession, a thicker band extending from the mouth to each ear, a sign of beauty, The Truku people and those in at least two other tribes on the island of Taiwan once tattooed their faces, withstanding pain so intense they couldn’t open their mouths for days, to prove themselves worthy hunters or weavers who deserved to join other tribe members in the afterlife.
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Sibal, 66, is an indigenous Taiwanese man who lives in the island’s steep mountains that his Truku tribe has always called home. Polls show Taiwanese strongly favor autonomy from China. Preservation suddenly matters in Taiwan as residents here try to reach into their past to distinguish themselves from China, a political rival that cites ethnic bonds as a reason to unify the island and the massive country. “And I don’t want them to think we’re savages.” “I really just want everyone to understand our culture, why we had tattoos, Sibal said.
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Now, as part of a larger movement to save the customs, languages and artifacts of Taiwan’s past, Sibal has collected hundreds of photographs of older Taiwanese who bear the tattoos. Reporting from Xincheng Township, Taiwan -Īs a child, Kimi Sibal got his first lesson on the significance and the stigma of the facial tattoo when he asked his grandmother about the strange markings on her face.įacial tattoos had been banned in Taiwan by Japanese colonists decades earlier and his grandmother hushed him, worried that if the wrong person saw the black vertical lines across her forehead she might be beaten or tossed in prison.Īlthough the long-ago colonists saw the tattoos as a form of mutilation, Sibal and others came to recognize them as vivid reminders of Taiwan’s aboriginal culture, something to preserve - if only in photographs.