Preserving Aboriginal traditions
Hu says that Taiwan’s Aborigines use a series of festivals to wrap up the old year and kick off the new. The Amis Ilisin is a case in point.
While Han Chinese often refer to Ilisin as a “harvest festival” because it seems to welcome the harvest, Hu says this is a misnomer.
She explains that the Amis have rituals and festivals specifically for the harvest, and that these have nothing to do with the New Year. The turning of the year occurs some time after the harvest. Because Ilisin, the Amis’ biggest festival, celebrates this turning, it is more correctly understood as a New Year’s festival.
Moreover, the festival involves much more than the singing and dancing that ethnic Chinese associate with it. These do indeed comprise a part of it, but Hu stresses that what gives them significance is their links to traditional religion and social structure.
Different Aboriginal peoples celebrate different New Years through festivals that each have their own schedule, form, and cultural significance. Hu offers the Puyuma people as an example. Their New Year’s festival takes place between late December and early January. Its most important ceremony is Mangayau (the Hunting Festival, the coming of age ceremony for young men), which follows Vasivas (the Monkey Festival).
Hu explains that during Mangayau young men must go into the mountains to be trained to hunt and live in the wild. When they come back to their villages, they visit families who have lost family members in the preceding year, singing and dancing to alleviate the sorrow the families feel, and enheartening them so they can start the new year afresh.
Chinese culture and commercial society have left Aboriginal New Year’s festivals with little space in which to exist. Over the last few decades, tribespeople who recognize the threat have continually urged young people to help preserve their culture and traditions.
In the song “Missing the New Year’s Festival,” the Puyuma musician Baliwakes writes: “I work far from home / And rarely see my parents and friends / But I’ll never forget the warmth of being with family / Of my mother putting a fresh floral wreath on me / To dress me up for the village dances.”
Taiwan has a diverse, multiethnic society that has forged a consensus on its living community. But we don’t want this process of integration to create a uniform culture. If we are to be truly multicultural, we must instead affirm and preserve the unique aspects of all our various ethnicities’ cultures.
We should emulate Hu Tai-li, falling in love with the Lunar New Year’s dishes of her rural Taiwanese in-laws while still treasuring the Huzhou zongzi of her waishengren upbringing and the memories they recall of her deceased parents. We can also find inspiration in Baliwakes’ song of a young man working far from home recalling the floral wreath his mother made for him to wear during the New Year’s festival of remembrance.
The New Year is more than just a time of exuberant celebration. If we choose to look a little more closely, we can discover in it a new appreciation and respect for ethnicities and cultures other than our own.
Going to a temple to pray for good fortune on the first day of the new year is an important Taiwanese custom. The photo shows Taipei’s Longshan Temple.
We tend to associate the holidays with home and family. Lunar New Year’s dishes help keep us connected to our hometowns, our parents, and our friends.
We tend to associate the holidays with home and family. Lunar New Year’s dishes help keep us connected to our hometowns, our parents, and our friends.