Why is it that even after the law opened up the possibility, so many Aboriginal people have yet to restore the names their ancestors gave to them? To find out, Aboriginal film director Mayaw Biho took along his camera for a ten-year retrospective. Having used every chance he got to attend tribal and campus conferences in a constant effort to promote the name restoration movement, Mayaw now hopes to utilize the opportunity afforded by this year's nationwide reissue of ID cards to strike a critical blow in favor of the movement.

With the support of their son, 74-year-old Samuhan Kaing and his wife Pisu Tefi paid a visit to the Chungcheng District Household Registration Office in Keelung on January 18, 2006 to restore the traditional names for the eight people in their three-generation family, a family with many branches and that can be traced back nine generations.

"My name was given me by my father and mother. It can't be changed. When the Nationalist government made us change our names it was as if the Aboriginal part of us died. Also, with Han Chinese names, there was no way the names of our elders could be passed down the generations," says Samuhan. The Amis tribe does not use surnames but uses the given name of their elders to which is added to the given name of the father or mother, thus representing the generational lineage without the use of surnames.

For over ten years the Aboriginal film director Mayaw Biho (center) has shouldered his camera and gone deep into the Aboriginal villages to find out what he can about the progress of the name restoration movement.

What is your surname?

With a father from Hunan and a mother who was a member of the Amis tribe (see endnote), Mayaw Biho (Peng Shih-sheng) grew up in the Chunjih, Hualien tribal community. Before 2000 Mayaw couldn't yet call himself an Aboriginal. At that time, according to the definition of the Ministry of the Interior, a person had to have 100% Aboriginal blood before he or she could obtain Aboriginal status. Later this was changed so that only one parent had to be fully Aboriginal for Aboriginal status to be conferred to a child. In some foreign countries only one eighth parentage is necessary to establish a particular identity.

In order to recover his own Aboriginal status, Mayaw had first to help his mother recover her own Aboriginal status on the household registration. This was because in the past, as part of the government's "benevolent government," when an Aboriginal woman married a Han Chinese her status would be "raised" to that of a Han Chinese and her original Aboriginal status was automatically lost.

"This was really a kind of genocide," says Mayaw disapprovingly.

As the only male in the family, Mayaw has always felt the mothers in the Amis tribe were more capable than the fathers but lower in socio-economic position. This, together with his experience in growing up in the tribal village, led Mayaw to choose to identify with his "Aboriginal" status.

Seventy-four year-old Samuhan Kaing and his wife, accompanied by their two sons, restore the Aboriginal names of their family of eight.

Just one identification?

The changing of Aboriginal names began in 1946 after the move of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. The Ministry of the Interior issued the "Revised Procedures for the Restoration of Original Names for Taiwanese," which stipulated that all Aborigines had to change over to Han Chinese names within three months. This means the vast majority of 50- and 60-year-olds today have been using Han Chinese names for most of their lives.

Thus Mayaw's targets are those people under 40 years old, for to have people who had been forced to use a Han Chinese name more than half their lives now go back to their original names "would be like finding them guilty of a life of error. That would be a second injury to them," says Mayaw.

But for symbolic figures like politicians and cultural leaders, Mayaw cannot avoid some veiled criticism.

"Of the ten current Aboriginal legislative deputies, not one has changed his name. At Indigenous TV only two people have restored their native names. In the Council of Indigenous Peoples only five people have changed back to their own names."

Aborigines who have been using their Chinese names for many years quite naturally use their Aboriginal names among themselves and their Chinese names on the outside, moving easily from one to the other.

Sun Ta-chuan, head of the Institute of the Development for Indigenous Peoples at National Dong Hwa University, believes "a name is not the same as identification. A person doesn't just have one name. Why should I get rid of such a nice name like Sun Ta-chuan?" Sun chooses to use both his Chinese and Aboriginal name.

Wang Ya-ping, a long-time student of Aboriginal names and a lecturer in the department of ethnology at National Chengchi University, feels that as far as Aborigines are concerned, the major ethnic divisions have received recognition of their names and their tragic past has found outward expression. It is understandable that, to avoid problems and even discrimination, an individual might choose not to use an Aboriginal name.

Nine characters fit onto a small seal, the last four characters--la la ku ssu-- represent the clan name.

A long road

Besides such criticism, Mayaw turns his camera lens on the tribes themselves to examine the reasons why so few Aborigines have reclaimed their native names.

In the ten years since passage of the revised Name Act, only 899 (as of December 2005) out of 460,000 Aborigines have reclaimed native names. Of that number, 47 have subsequently changed back to their Chinese names.

The numbers reflect the fact that the overall environment is still unfriendly to Aboriginal status. First and foremost is the rigmarole and lack of respect involved in the administrative procedures.

Mayaw's documentary shows that although the Name Act expressly provides that the procedure for the restoration of a native name requires no fee, most of the lower-level civil servants still collect a NT$10 fee as if for a normal "name change." When an Aborigine protests, the official impatiently responds, "This money doesn't go into my pocket." Worse, an official might get sarcastic and quip that nowadays Aborigines enjoy preferences in schooling and employment and get all the advantages.

And restoring a native name requires following the same procedure as for making a name change. There is a three-workday identity check and you frequently have to make three separate trips to the office before you can obtain your ID card.

"We are 'restoring a name,' not 'changing a name,'" points out Mayaw. In the 1940s the Nationalist government issued an order giving Aborigines no choice, forcing them to change their names, and many people were given Chinese names with ridiculous meanings by household registry personnel. Even more family and clan members, in their haste, had no time to contact relatives outside the area where they were living with the result that the names of fathers, sons, and brothers were completely different. Blood relatives of the same clan with different Chinese names would meet and fall in love on the outside only to return home to their tribe and discover that they belonged to the same family and could not marry.

"We have suffered all kinds of absurdities and hardships in silence. If now difficulties are created for those wanting to restore a native name, then many people will just give up after they have made their first trip to the office," says Mayaw. He is constantly working on the name restoration movement and hopes the Ministry of the Interior will be able to provide a one-stop service where a person can get a new ID card, driver's license and National Health Insurance card all at one time with a restored name, but so far this has not happened.

For the convenience of Household Registration personnel, Samuhan kindly prepares a concordance of Aboriginal and Chinese names.

What country are you from?

In addition to the problems of procedural red tape, many measures that should be associated with the name restoration movement have been slow in coming. One, for example, is the rather important romanized transliteration standard. It wasn't until the beginning of this year (2006) that the CIP commissioned National Chengchi University's ethnology department to start work on this. Previously, one fairly common Atayal name, for example not only had many Chinese character versions, but even different Roman letter versions, such as Walis Ukan, Walis Nokan and Walis Nogang.

There are many other problems that make you depressed just to hear about. For example, the household registry agency computer has space for only six characters in the name column (still a system based on Han Chinese). If a name requires more than six characters to transcribe, then the ID card has to be hand written. On the household registry there will appear the note "see comment column" where the "name" normally goes. This limitation wasn't fixed until the end of last year, when the column was expanded to provide space for 15 characters.

The reissue of ID cards this year finally includes a revision in format. There is a horizontal line for the name and Aboriginal names are written out in Roman letters. Maya hopes this will prove a critical turning point and will be helpful to Aborigines in restoring native names.

The naming conventions of Taiwan's Aborigines and Han Chinese differ from one another. For example, the Tsou tribe have no surnames. After the given name comes the name of the clan, then comes the place of birth. For the Atayal, after the given name comes the given name of the father. Here, too, there is no surname. For the Tao, the name is changed three times during a person's lifetime. When a person is still unmarried, a "Shih" is placed before the given name. For example, there is the Tao author Syaman Rapongan (Chinese name Shih Nu-lai). After he had a child, he had to change his name to Syaman and add the name of his son, Rapongan. In the future when he becomes a grandfather, his name will change to Syapen and be followed by the name of his eldest grandson. The idea here is the same as when a wife addresses her husband as "father of our son" in Chinese.

Different naming conventions open up different cultural ways of ordering the universe. A naming convention is the symbolic code for a people that allows children to connect themselves to their ancestors through their names like beads on a string.

"Restoring Aboriginal names is not finished with changes on the ID card. What is more important is for Han Chinese to be able to accept this change and in daily life to acknowledge and accept the differences of Aborigines and let Taiwan's pluralism begin with names." Mayaw, who has worked for the name restoration movement for many years, hopes that in the future Aborigines and Han Chinese will be able to speak out Aboriginal native names naturally and confidently.

Note: Amis is the name used by the Puyuma tribe in Taitung for the Amis living in that area. It means "people to the north." As for the Aboriginals in Hualien County generally referred to as Amis, they have always referred to themselves as Pangcah. One of Mayaw's future tasks will be restoring Aboriginal tribe names.