"I'm old
and about to die quietly in the mountains.
In the evening you'll hear the wind
rushing through the pitch-black forest.
My children, don't be afraid.
It's only me, coming back to see you."
--Song of an old Atayal woman.

At six o'clock in the evening on October 20, 1991, the sky was already dark, and vague forms could be glimpsed on the square in front of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial in Taipei. The elders of the Bunun tribe, with nearly perfect natural harmony, were recreating the sound of the wind in the forest . . . .

Wind of the Wild: The urban jungle has been swept now and again by the beat of the wild: More than 6,000 members of the world tourist industry from over 100 countries were treated to a dance by the Yami warriors, representing one of Taiwan's many cultures, at the Taipei International Conference Center in October. The Bununs' "Sound of the Mountains" was showcased at the National Theater, following up the Amis' "Dance of the Ocean" in 1990, as part of the Taiwanese Aboriginal Dance and Music Series, produced by the ethnologist Ming Li-kuo and jointly sponsored by the National Theater, the National Concert Hall and the Council for Cultural Planning and Development. The Formosan Aboriginal Dance Troupe, formed by young people from the various tribes with the support of the Council, put on more than 50 performances at cultural centers and outdoor stages around the province. Beyond music and dance, Hagu (Chen Wen-sheng), a 69th-generation village chieftain of the Puyuma people, held his first one-man sculpture exhibition at the Hsiung Shih Art Gallery in Taipei, and a reading of aboriginal poetry was held at the Chuan Men Art Center in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan . . . .

The literary world hasn't lagged far behind. The Chen Hsing Publishing Co. has brought out eight works of aboriginal literature, including The Last Hunter, a short story collection by Tobas (Tien Yako) of the Bunun; Beautiful Ears of Rice, a poetry collection by Monanen (Tzeng Sun-wang) of the Paiwan; and Footsteps of the Atayal, a bilingual novel by Walis Nogang (Wang Chieh-ju). Other works by the island's indigenous people have been published by Living Psychology Magazine and the Taiyuan Publishing Co.

From March to June this year, the Council for Cultural Planning and Development will sponsor its first Aborigine Art Festival in Kaohsiung, Taichung and Hualien, featuring a full spectrum of aboriginal culture including traditional and creative song and dance, painting, sculpture, literature and poetry readings in the aboriginal languages.

Shoddy Imitations: Aboriginal art and culture have long been presented in two extreme formats--if not in recondite scholarly journals then in commercialized song and dance shows for tourists--and most people have had almost no chance to approach the real thing unless they have gone to the villages in person.

"Those of us who have been in contact with the aborigines for a long time are well aware that this culture is really worth getting to know, but we haven't had the power to disseminate it. It's just had to lie there in reports and papers," says Hu Ti-li, a researcher in the Institute of Ethnology at the Academia Sinica.

Academic dissertations have a limited readership, while the performances at tourist are as are commercial in concept and aboriginal handicrafts are ultimately just decorations, just commercial products.

"The gorgeous costumes and the choreographed steps may look pretty but they're phony," says Auvini (Chiu Chin-shih), a Rukai from Haocha village who is engaged in keeping the tribe's genealogy. The Rukais' characteristic stone slab dwellings, for instance, are marvels of human ingenuity, constructed without a single nail or other modern material, using stone slabs of any shape or size pieced together into a product of wisdom and beauty. "But those houses in aborigine culture parks that are made with nails and neatly cut slabs of stone and still leak in the rain are simply rip-offs, just like the fake pots and cups sold in tourist areas," he sighs in exasperation. "They aren't ours."

Timeless Hills: Taiwan's indigenous people number some 300,000, about three fifths of whom live in the mountains. In these wild surroundings they have developed a culture vastly different from that of the Han Chinese, with different languages, customs and values.

Yeh Shih-tao, a doyen on the Taiwan literary scene, relates that the first time he went to Nanao township to visit an Atayal village, he asked a tribesman how much longer he had to walk and was told "You'll get there soon!" When he asked how long "soon" meant, the hardy aborigine said, "about half an hour." In fact, he walked another two hours before reaching his destination. "It was only later I found out that people in the mountains don't have much concept of time. Time is eternal, they feel, and there's no need to limit it by the clock." That's why you can come across vivid descriptions like "the time it takes a bull to pass water" in the stories of Tobas.

Another example of an interesting cultural difference is provided by the Yami poet Shaman Rampoan (Shih Nu-lai): The Yamis afford women and children special love and respect. Instead of big, medium and small, they classify fish as men fish, women fish and children fish. The most tender, least bony fish go to children, the hope of the tribe, while the big, plump ones go to the women, who work just as the men do but also have to feed the children.

Beyond the unique charm of their culture expressed in literature, the music and dance of the various tribes has become an object of study for many academic students of dance.

Massive Stone: A recent work by the modern dance troupe Tai Ku Ta called Great Sacrifice incorporated the "hair dance" of the Yami, in which women dancers face the ocean and simulate the flow of the tide, praying that their menfolk will return safely from catching fish. People involved in the arts are almost inevitably attracted by the richness and vitality of aboriginal art when they first come across it.

"I felt like a massive stone had dropped to the ground," the troupe's director, Lin Hsiu-wei, says, describing how deeply she was stirred on encountering aboriginal dance for the first time. When they breathe in deeply and stamp the ground with all their might to drive away evil spirits, they truly seem to link themselves up with nature. "The force they apply in stamping down is just the opposite of Western dance, where the force is applied up. But I was stirred by more than that."

Ping Heng, head of the dance department at the National Institute of the Arts, says, "The Yamis have passed down their songs for generations, accompanied by few simple body movements. But the Amis really throw themselves into their dances, dancing hand in hand for an extended period of time with the kind of energy a dancer might spend a lifetime looking for." Ping Heng recorded the choreography of some of the Ami dances in Iwan three years ago and has taken students on field trips there to study.

"The aborigines rely on oral transmission--they have no system of writing--so the only way they can keep their culture alive is through artistic creation," says Sun Ta-chuan, a Puyuma who is a professor of philosophy at Soochow University. Watching an aboriginal performance or reading an aboriginal essay or novel can provide contact with a different culture as well as aesthetic enjoyment.

"When you look at their artwork, ask yourself why they carved snakes or carved heads. It looks strange, but if you delve into it, you'll find a whole culture behind it," says Kao Ye-jung, an associate professor of primary education at Pingtung Teachers College.

In Tobas' story "Ibu's Ear," the members of little Ibu's family clan accidentally killed a dog belonging to another clan while they were out hunting. Everyone was supposed to keep the secret, but little Ibu told the other clan, and his family cut off one of his ears. To our way of thinking, cutting off a child's ear just because of a dog is cruel and unreasonable. But that's because we don't understand how important a dog is to hunters in aboriginal society and the conflicts that could arise over it, or how strict family ties and discipline are, none of which can be judged in terms of our ethics and culture. In this way, art provides an insight into aboriginal ways of thinking, social structure and philosophy of life, all of which go to make up their culture.

Entry Permit for the Mountains: But artistic creations and performances have their limitations in presenting a culture as a whole.

"I approve of exhibitions and performances," Auvini says. "But they're just a form of advertising, really, telling people there's a group of people with a culture like this--so if you're really interested, why not come on up into the mountains?"

At a Paiwan wedding in Santimen Village, Pingtung County, the old folks gather in the home of the newlyweds and sing song after song, from the origins of the tribe to the feats of the various chiefs and heroes to a blessing on the bride, one person leading and the rest following along. "The gods blessed us with a daughter," they sing, "and now they're letting her go--is that fortune or misfortune? Now that she's leaving, I only hope she doesn't look back," while the bride and her mother hug each other and cry. To comfort her, the leader sings, "If you can't bear to lose your daughter, maybe she should be turned back into an infant, and you can bring her up all over again!" They sing into the wee hours of the night, until some of the older people, as much as they cherish the occasion, start to nod off, singing, "What's wrong with our eyes? They're misting over. These tears are so sweet I could eat them."

Tears of true emotion and vivid improvisations like these would be hard to reenact on the stage.

Going into the Villages: "Performances are simply a window," Ming Li-kuo says. No matter how faithful and polished a music and dance performance may be, no matter how big a splash a sculpture exhibition may make, they can't guarantee a deeper level of understanding between the mountains and the plains.

But through this window the audience can experience aesthetic delight and wonder and go on to open the door to deeper understanding. "Only with understanding is it possible to talk about dignity and respect," Auvini says.

Examples of moving from a chance encounter to wider exposure to in-depth understanding are heard of from time to time.

The dance students who went to Iwan with Prof. Ping Heng, for instance, gained more affection and understanding for the Amis by coming into contact with them and began to pay more attention to aborigine problems like child prostitution and alcoholism when they came back.

In Haocha Village, Auvini and his lowlander friend Wang Yu-pang are busy rebuilding the old part of town. Wang, who works for Formosa Plastics, likes to hike in the mountains. One time he came across some handicrafts that interested him so much he began to frequent the tribal villages more and more. That's how he came to know Auvini and get involved in the rebuilding project.

Reawakening a Dormant Heart: "Setting off a spark" like this doesn't just occur with Han Chinese. Many indigenous people who have been away from their own culture for a long time have reaffirmed their self-worth now that aboriginal art has been introduced seriously to the wider public, and some of them have joined the ranks of artistic creators. After the "Dance of the Ocean" was performed at the National Theater by their fellow tribespeople, the young people of Chimei Village, Hualien County, began singing the old songs again and taking part in the fish catching festival, which had gradually been dying out.

"Even now, the people there like to get together with outsiders or by themselves to watch tapes of past performances," Ming Li-ko happily confides. It was only after seeing an exhibition of aboriginal art and culture that Hagu, the Puyuma chieftain, got the idea to pick up a sculpting knife and create.

Living in the highly sinified village of Chienho, Taitung County, Hagu had always felt that he was a chieftain in name only. Before becoming a wood carver, he had tried growing oranges, pineapples, chrysanthemums and sugar cane, all unsuccessfully. When he had to sell off some of his ancestral property to cover his debts, his fellow tribemembers made fun of him: "How come the chiefs are getting worse by the generation!"

Depressed and unable to sleep, with childhood memories surfacing one after the other, Hagu picked up a sculpting knife and began carving out the stories passed down by his forebears, stroke by stroke. Once he had finished, he felt calmer and steadier. He had finally done something for his people as chief.

The Spirit of a Hunter: Since their traditional culture is so beautiful, aboriginal artists are almost all engaged in exploring their traditions and recording the splendid life of the past. But that makes one wonder whether a dialogue like that can enable lowlanders to see the true face of aboriginal culture, or just a utopia far removed from reality.

Sakuliu (Hsu Kun-hsin), a Puyuma potter, feels that art can convey the in-depth spirit of the indigenous people as well as their life on the surface. Depicting their hunting culture, for instance, "doesn't mean people should think of us as carrying knives and arrows and hunting in the wilderness all day but should let people see the respect hunters have for their elders and the fair competition that goes on between man and nature."

The pestle music of the Bunun, which is played before the rice harvest, was originally intended to attract people from neighboring villages to come and share in the crop. Rice isn't planted much any more, but the performance still shows the tribe's solidarity and generous spirit of sharing, qualities worth cherishing by indigenous people and outsiders alike.

Procrustean Fit? When aboriginal art first appeared on the larger stage of mainstream culture, friends who had helped or encouraged on the side often offered up well-intentioned suggestions.

"The aboriginal languages have a different structure from that of Chinese. When I first read Tobas' pieces, I thought the sentences were too long and the diction wasn't quite right and tried to rewrite them," says Wu Chin-fa, a senior columnist at The Commons Daily who edited the Taiwan Aborigine Book series. After he was done, the diction seemed smoother, "but the power of the original was lost."

A story of his called "Night of Comforting a Spirit," tells how a family whose son had just died stayed up all night by the corpse recalling his life, relating minute particulars of the tribe and telling the stories of their ancestors . . . the story soon loses track of the son. After he had read it, a literary friend of his told Tobas that the "theme isn't clear." He didn't realize that telling jokes and stories to comfort the spirit of someone who has recently died is a deeply felt custom among the Bununs.

Hagu also had a several well-meaning art professors suggest he make his work more abstract and his technique more wild and savage to bring out the aboriginal style. . . . He couldn't help wondering: These carvings represent the voice of my heart. Why tell me to mimic other people's voices instead of listening to my own?

"People who discover them or want to help them along should be careful not to try to manipulate them from the standpoint of mainstream culture. That's the only way to leap across the cultural gap and set up a real dialogue," Kao Yeh-jung says, warning against letting help become the first step in smothering their creativity.

A Sham Window? The problem is, since it's art, there must be good and bad. Given the vast difference in cultural background between the mountains and the mainstream, how should we evaluate these works of art and literature when we compare them? Is aboriginal art really so unamenable to judgement?

"There's good and bad in aboriginal art too," Kao Yeh-jung says. "Its greatest characteristic is its vital force, its source in life itself." Traditional artisans always used to produce good work, he feels. The traditional soup spoons of the Rukai, for instance, were made bit bit from different materials according to their intended function, and even though they didn't have any patterns or decorations, they each had a style of their own. It's rather troubling, then, to see that present-day artisans, with no grounding in life experience or the spirit of their forebears, have simply imitated the form, added complicated patterns to cater to the market and gone into mass production. "They have a lovely appearance, but they're hollow and shoddy deep down"--just like the song and dance shows in some of the tourist spots. "I don't know why works like these are appreciated or viewed so highly," Kao says.

"Even though they have some defects in technique, people who have seen Hagu's works never forget them," says Lin Hui-chen, vice manager of the Hsiung Shih Art Gallery. He doesn't just copy tribal totems, she says. Even if it's a myth, he broods over it and then re-expresses it in a way that has the power to move people.

Lamps in the Night: From the viewpoint of cultural anthropology, only by tolerating diversity and respecting different cultures can a people's own culture continue to evolve.

"The ripples in the stream, the nectar in the flowers, the sweat of horses and the perspiration of man are all the same. We are all members of one kind. . . . How precious is the air, the breath that gives us life, the wind in which our forefathers cried their first cry and breathed their last breath, the wind that will give our descendants the breath of life. . . ." These are the words spoken 150 years ago by the American Indian chief Seattle when the U.S. government came to seize the Northwest. Seen as a precursor of the environmental movement, they are still repeated by people today.

Taiwan is two-thirds covered by mountains and completely surrounded by the ocean, yet we have treated the land and the sea so roughly for so long. For us the mountains are silent, but the indigenous people have given them a voice in which man and nature have closely conversed for thousands of years. In terms of ecology, they know better than we how to coexist on this piece of earth.

Listen to the song of the Atayal hunters:

"We're off to go hunting, so gather seeds quickly! The rain is over, the grass is growing, the birds are in the air, and the rabbits are building nests. Hai! Let's go hunting!"

Traditional culture is under assault, be it that of the mountains or that of the lowlands. Its problem is a part of our problem.

"Change, like the dawn affer dark, will come in the end," says Sun Ta-chuan, a Puyuma. "We don't have to deny that the night is dark, just prepare a lamp to illuminate it." May every piece of sculpture and every dance performance from the mountains shine like a lamp so we can see each other in its light and follow our way back to the village, where we can talk through the night, waiting for dawn.

[Picture Caption]

Evoking the sound of the mountains, the Formosa Aboriginal Dance Troupe has opened a window enticing urbanites to visit the tribal villages. (photo by Vincent Chang)

What sort of dialogue ensues when children from the lowlands encounter an exhibition of primitive masks from the mountains?

Even in the tribal villages, aboriginal culture is quickly disappearing. Auvini of the Rukai records the genealogical histories of the older tribespeople and plans to help them move back to the older part of Haocha village.

A Yami poet recites a poem of his in his native language at an aborigine poetry reading.

Hagu, a 69thgeneration chief of the Puyuma, though in name only, has carved out thelegends and daily life of his ancestors and recovered some of his dignity as chief.

Bereft of life and the ocean, this Yami boat at the Nine Tribes Cultural Village is merely another display. (photo by Arthur Cheng)

If you aren't deeply versed in the culture, it's easy to produce distortions and succumb to touristtype cliches in moving aboriginal dance and music, which originate in religious ceremony, onto the stage. (photo by Diago Chiu)

Quite a few aboriginal writers have expressed themselves in literary works recently, supplementing the recondite academic dissertations of the past.

Ceramic ware, wood carvings, stone sculptures, embroidery, hair Ornaments--behind every kind of aboriginal art lie myths and a view of the universe. (photos by Arthur Cheng and Pu Hua-chih) Most of Lidagu's works, which are lively, vivid and natural, have been bought by Han art dealers. Only a few are left in Haocha Village.

In the coming-of-age ceremony at the Rukai harvest festival in Tanan, the elders dispel evil spirits by striking the young men's legs with a bundle of leaves. (photo by Arthur Cheng)

Hand in hand, singing songs passed down from their ancestors, the Ami people of Iwan dance for days on end at the harvest festival, a source of admiration and wonder to professionally trained dancers. (photo by Arthur Cheng)

At a wedding in Tashe, the elders gather at the home of the newlyweds and sing the old songs late into the night, a deeply moving part of Puyuma culture that can't be duplicated on stage.

With the meeting of the mountains and the plains, will the Han people and the aborigines learn to understand and respect each other better?

What sort of dialogue ensues when children from the lowlands encounter an exhibition of primitive masks from the mountains?

Even in the tribal villages, aboriginal culture is quickly disappearing. Auvini of the Rukai records the genealogical histories of the older tribespeople and plans to help them move back to the older part of Haocha village.

A Yami poet recites a poem of his in his native language at an aborigine poetry reading.

Hagu, a 69thgeneration chief of the Puyuma, though in name only, has carved out thelegends and daily life of his ancestors and recovered some of his dignity as chief.

Bereft of life and the ocean, this Yami boat at the Nine Tribes Cultural Village is merely another display. （photo by Arthur Cheng）

If you aren't deeply versed in the culture, it's easy to produce distortions and succumb to touristtype cliches in moving aboriginal dance and music, which originate in religious ceremony, onto the stage. （photo by Diago Chiu）

Quite a few aboriginal writers have expressed themselves in literary works recently, supplementing the recondite academic dissertations of the past.

Ceramic ware, wood carvings, stone sculptures, embroidery, hair Ornaments--behind every kind of aboriginal art lie myths and a view of the universe. （photos by Arthur Cheng and Pu Hua-chih）