The women shaving their heads were Panay, Fengqin, and Big Sister Zhang, a woman from Hong Kong who married into the Sanying community and considers herself an Amis.

It was cold and wet under the Sanying Bridge in February 2008. Anxiously watching the approach of the backhoes, 60-year-old Panay, whose Mandarin name is Pan Jinhua, planted herself in front of her home intent on using her body to protect her land. She was ultimately carried away by female police officers while she railed, "I'm not leaving! This is my home!"

"Mama, have we got nowhere to live now?" The destruction of Sanying laid waste to the community under the bridge, and left mothers holding their children and looking for traces of their homes.

Don't insult my home

Panay is a common Aboriginal name that suggests a bountiful rice harvest. Sanying's Panay was born in Taitung's Chishang Township, and recalls a hill there with the Aboriginal name meaning "throat" in recognition of a local custom-when grazing cattle or sheep stray onto someone else's land, the landowner cuts their heads off to warn away others.

Panay's home in Sanying was ultimately destroyed. When students came to the community to offer their support, they found a small strip of white cloth emblazoned with the words "live here" among the belongings she had rescued. When they asked her why she hadn't written the words larger, she replied, "That's all the strength I have as an individual."

Dissatisfied with her own answer, she's thrown herself into every one of the community's protests since last February. Having lived in Taipei for a couple of decades, Panay is fluent in Mandarin and Taiwanese, and is often called upon to speak for the tribe.

"I gained a lot insight from the lives of the old veterans who came to Taiwan in the 1940s," she says. Panay spent a decade caring for patients at Taipei's Veterans' General Hospital. "I learned about many of Taiwan's problems from them, especially political ones, and the government's unjust way of doing things."

"First, I'm an Aborigine. Second," she argues, "the government should give those of us who were colonized preferential treatment, and should apologize." Panay, whose formal education ended with elementary school, has well formed ideas about Taiwan's racial issues.

Sanying's women, including Panay (top) and Zhang Xiuyi (bottom), a Hong Kong woman married to an Amis, have played a leading role in the protests.

Regaining clan spirit

Panay's daughter Hong Fengqin is a different story. She came to Taipei at 16 to go to school and work. Having lived in more than a dozen places around Taipei City and County since then, she considers herself an urbanite first.

"When I saw the razing of the Amis community on Taiwan Sugar's land in Daliao, Kaohsiung County, on TV, I thought: 'These Aborigines are able-bodied and capable of holding jobs. Why are they so bent on living there?'" recalls Hong. Having rented apartments in Banqiao and Xinzhuang, and held down a steady job caring for hospital patients, she just didn't get why her parents felt they had to live under the Sanying Bridge.

Nonetheless, when she learned the community had been demolished, she hurried over to see. She was shocked by what she saw. Every home had been leveled, and the metal and wood left covering the ground made the site look like a dump. "There aren't many things in life that leave you numb," she says. "This was the first ever to affect me that way."

Seeing her now homeless tribespeople, Fengqin rediscovered a clan spirit she had thought lost long ago. "It usually takes a wedding or funeral to bring everyone together, but in the wake of the destruction, many tribespeople who live elsewhere-some we knew, some we didn't-came by to help. I suddenly felt I had reclaimed my true self."

She subsequently quit her hospital job and moved back to Sanying to help her people. Late last year, with the help of Coolloud Collective special correspondent Jiang Yihao, they formed a community self-help society, and Fengqin became its spokesperson.

Fengqin works with Xiujuan, Jiaru, and other young girls from the tribe in a temporary office erected on the community's ruins, where they are learning how to organize protest movements and write news stories. With the enthusiastic participation of her tribespeople, they also organized a year-end banquet celebrating the community's protest movement just before the Lunar New Year. More than 200 artists, social activists, and tribespeople attended and loudly proclaimed, "The Sanying Community has returned!"

The razed buildings also reawakened Fengqin's awareness of herself as an Aborigine. "I'm just staying here, supporting my tribespeople," she says.

Willing to marry an Amis

Over the years, Han culture's influence on Aboriginal society, and the "men marry down, women marry up" principle of the marriage market, have limited Han-Aborigine intermarriage.

While transnational and cross-cultural love stories do exist-such as the marriage 20 years ago of Zhang Xiuyi, the Hong Kong woman the tribe knows as Big Sister Zhang, to Kuras, an Amis from Taitung's Chenggong Harbor-they are rare.

"My family opposed my marrying an Aborigine," says Big Sister Zhang, "But they couldn't stop me." To keep them from worrying, Zhang has never let them visit her in Sanying. Instead, she meets them in hotels and restaurants when they come to Taiwan.

The destruction of Sanying may well have made Big Sister Zhang the angriest non-Aborigine in Taiwan. "On previous occasions, they'd knock down a few front doors at most, then take a few pictures as evidence," she says. "They never leveled the community on this scale."

As the wife of an Amis, Zhang says she has become "three-quarters Amis" herself. When the tribespeople held their Ketagalan Boulevard protest march last year, she didn't hesitate to join them in cutting off the long hair she'd worn for years.

Zhang also assists in the self-help-society office every morning after she finishes work for a chicken vendor in the market. Sometimes she helps produce slogans, while other times she cooks up communal meals. She also shares her opinions in the meetings they hold before protests.

Where the Amis women have brought ideas and organizational skills to the protests, the Amis men have chosen to play a role more akin to "worker ants." They handle manual tasks, such as plumbing and electrical repairs, or building toilets. Who says that women involved in revolutions are just decorative? Who says that women involved in protests serve only to elicit sympathy with their tears? The Amis women of Sanying are writing a new page in the history of Taiwan's urban Aboriginal women and possibly even rewriting the rules for all Aboriginal protests.