In the village of Ma­ko­ta’ay (Gang­kou in Chinese) in Hua­lien County’s Feng­bin Township there is a coastal area next to Provincial Route 11 called Ti­daan (Shitiping). It’s a very popular tourist site, and about 100 tour buses pass through there every day. As of 2011, coastal land that had long lain abandoned and overgrown with weeds had come back to life. An irrigation channel from decades past is flowing once again, and emerald-green rice seedlings populate the water paddies, just like before. It’s all happening because Sumi set her mind to it, for the sake of the land, the village, and her native culture.

Sumi Dongi and her son Lekal Sumi took very different paths to their family hometown of Makota’ay, where each has found peace of mind and a sense of belonging.

In Amis culture, the eldest daughter is expected to bear children and continue the family line, but Sumi wanted nothing of it. Upon graduating from junior high school she stole NT$100 from her grandmother’s purse and blew town to live with friends up north, where she continued her schooling. After graduating from Shin Shing Vocational High School in Tao­yuan, she took a job at an American electronics firm, and later went with a friend to Kee­lung, where she worked in a coffee shop.

Taiwan society back in those days had a lot of misconceptions about indigenous people. The stereotypical Aborigine, in the mainstream view, was hard drinking and lazy. Life in the city for Sumi was full of frustrations. Looking back, she says, “I was without direction in the city, and often felt very depressed.” But it was during this confusing time that she gradually came to zero in on her identity. In the early 1990s, tired and divorced, she decided to return to Makota’ay.

But she pretty much just spun her wheels during the first two years back home. She took a job for a time at the Feng­bin Township Office, and also served as a tour guide at Moon Cave. But eventually she became aware of community development work and began learning how to weave from the old folks in the indigenous community. Before long she hit upon the idea of setting up an art workshop right next to Tidaan.

A few years later she branched out by establishing the Ce’po theater group, which mainly creates plays based on Amis culture. The first work they did was called The Beginning of Matriarchal Society. It was a story about her own personal experience.

Worried about the loss of traditional culture, Sumi Dongi has decided to restore rice cultivation in terraced paddies that had lain fallow for 30 years. Her hope is to leave a bit of heritage behind for future generations.

The names of the group’s plays—The Beginning of Matriarchal Society, followed by The Shaman, and then the 2010 work SaSa (an Amis word for “living room”)—are a strong indication that Sumi wants to use her own language to express her love for her hometown.

In recent years, watching one guesthouse after another get built in her hometown as locals continually sold off their land, she has come to worry about the loss of the tribe’s land and culture. She asks: “If everybody just keeps selling their land, what will be left of our village? What will we have to pass on to our children and grandchildren?” In 2008, in order to ensure that future generations would still have memory of the land, she decided to restore the rice paddies that had gone untended in her hometown for 30 years.

Sandwiched between the sea and steep mountain slopes, the village of Ma­ko­ta’ay has little level farmland, so an earlier generation of residents built a series of terraced rice paddies at Ti­daan, where the Xiu­gu­luan River empties into the sea. But 30 years ago, the township mayor felt it very unreasonable that the locals should be paying for the upkeep and management of irrigation channels for the paddies when water was already so plentiful in the area, so he refused to pay the fees any longer. The paddies have lain fallow ever since.

Sumi looked into the situation and found that local residents wanted to restore the paddies to production, but didn’t know how to go about it. She also learned that the Forestry Bureau’s Forest Protection Section intended to promote restoration of coastal rice farming in Ti­daan, so the pump was already primed.

However, the paddies in Ti­daan had been abandoned for 30 years, and the land had been bought and sold so many times it was hard in some cases to find the owners. The earthen dividers between paddies had crumbled, making it hard to even measure dimensions. And, as Sumi explains: “The hardest thing of all was that 80% of the local residents had received almost no schooling, so it was hard to know how to persuade them to take part in the restoration projects or adopt environmentally friendly wet paddy farming techniques. And then there was the problem of subsidies that the government was paying to keep the land out of production.”

To persuade the villagers, Sumi invited all the local old folks to meetings conducted in the Amis tongue, and went calling door to door with millet wine and braised flying fish in hand to visit all 68 families that owned pieces of the paddy land. Sumi acknowledged with candor: “I made almost no headway in the beginning. Most people were noncommittal.” When she planted the first rice crop in 2011, only one villager showed up to take part. She planted an area of land measuring around nine-tenths of a hectare, 0.15 hectares of which she had borrowed from her mother.

People were impressed to see Sumi traveling three kilometers to hook up the irrigation channel leading to the paddies. The number of participating landowners jumped to 30 in 2012, and the area planted increased to 5.1 hectares. The harvest also jumped sharply, from 2,100 kilos in 2011 to 12,000 kilos in 2012, of which 70% went to the landowners. The other 30% went to Sumi, who branded it as “Mi­pa­liw” rice and sold it on the market. The word mi­pa­liw means “mutual assistance” in the Amis language. Mutual assistance is a big part of life in an indigenous village, where the residents help each other build their homes, plant their fields, and gather harvests.

Today, four years on, the paddy restoration project has seen some initial success, but villagers still talk about pulling out, which is a source of pressure. Above all, crop reduction subsidies are still higher than the income derived from rice cultivation, so lots of landowners who joined in have subsequently opted out because the subsidies are simply too attractive. And an even more nettlesome problem for Sumi is the fact that some landowners have polluted their land in years past through the use of chemical ­herbicides, which necessitates a lot of extra work to get the land in condition for planting. To get landowners to hold off on the herbicides, she has offered to weed their fields herself.

Right next to Tidaan, Sumi Dongi has opened a shop called the Fire Studio, where younger generations of native sons and daughters can find a sense of hometown identity in the locally branded rice and homegrown art and culture.

Year after year, Sumi has seen the Amis people stream back home for the annual harvest festival, then stream back to the cities afterward. She can’t help but sigh at the nomadic fate of her people.

But she is only too aware that young adults who have left are not going to return to a village without job opportunities. The older generation, meanwhile, would rather see the younger ones head for the cities than continue farming. “In their eyes, farming is a low-status occupation,” says Sumi.

That is why she decided to create the Mi­pa­liw brand. She explains that by creating a brand, farmers will be able to sell their surplus crops. Once a brand has been created, the local area can employ people in marketing, sales, and design. Branding of the rice thus means that farming is no longer the only work to be had.

Sumi’s efforts to preserve traditional culture eventually inspired her son, Le­kal Sumi, to quit his job in the city and come back home.

A graduate from the auto maintenance program at Yang Ming Vocational High School in Tai­nan, after finishing his military service Le­kal worked for a time as a mechanic in Tai­nan, and later joined the service staff at a hotel in Hua­lien City. But in 2007, after going out on a performance tour as part of the cast in his mother’s Ce’po theater group, he moved to Makota’ay.

Within a year of her son’s return, Sumi had launched into her paddy restoration project in Ti­daan. Watching on as his mother hustled about the village seeking support for her cause, Le­kal decided to document her activities on video, even though he had never filmed anything in his life. As the first harvest was being gathered in July 2011, Le­kal finished up his first-ever documentary short, entitled Hoping for a Coastal Rice Crop.

After his documentary short met with widespread acclaim, Le­kal Sumi continued telling the same story in a 55-minute work called Terraced Paddies ’Orip (’orip meaning “life” in Amis), which is due for release in March.

Now 27 years old, Lekal grew up from a young age in Han Chinese society due to the breakup of his parents’ marriage. As a result, he is very unfamiliar with traditional Amis culture, and admits that he can’t do a thing to help his mother with the arduous task of restoring the terraced rice paddies and maintaining Amis culture.

During his first two years back in his hometown, Lekal often struggled over whether to stay, for he had no local friends and couldn’t understand the Amis language. With his documentary, however, he found a sense of accomplishment and direction in life, and began to embrace his indigenous identity.

After life took them along two very different paths across Taiwan, mother and son have now found peace of mind side by side in the rice paddies of home.