Returning and rebuilding
When the young tribespeople returned to the village and discussed how to continue to press forward, they took a new tack based on what the medium Kating had said: “We realized that we didn’t want the pillars; we wanted the spirits of the old people that were inside the pillars.”
On August 14 of the following year, on a scorching summer day, the Tafalong youth, accompanied by the Tafalong chief, tribal representatives, and a mountain boar, came once again to the Institute of Ethnology, bringing offerings of pork to feed the ancestral spirits. The medium conducted a ceremony as they prepared to bring the spirits back to the tribe, while leaving the seven carved pillars depicting traditional myths in the museum. The dispute over these cultural artifacts had come to a conclusion.
When the ancestral spirits returned to the tribal village, they were first placed in a thatched hut where the Kakita’an home used to stand. In 2005, with assistance provided by the institute to purchase building materials and pay for carving expenses, work began on rebuilding the Kakita’an ancestral home.
Yet, with the land dispute within the tribe unsettled, the process of rebuilding the Kakita’an home was a rocky one.
On the legal front, the township office had sent people out to the site to plant signs declaring: “No construction allowed.” The threat was loud and clear. Fearing that the Kakita’an home would be razed after reconstruction was completed in January of 2006, Tipus took the advice of the Institute of Ethnology to send an application to the Hualien County Cultural Bureau to have the building protected as a cultural site, averting the danger that it would be torn down.
Issues of face played a role. The tribal leaders, including the chief and elected representatives, didn’t support reconstructing the ancestral home of the Kakita’an, whose economic and social status in the community had fallen.
It turns out that the Kakita’an, in addition to controlling tribal lands, had also been a provider of social welfare to the community. The Kakita’an family took on responsibility for helping the poorest members of the tribe—widows, orphans and so forth.
Tipus, who left for Taipei to work as a hairdresser when she was 16, admits that her mother hadn’t previously actively pushed to rebuild the Kakita’an home, largely because the family was so poor. Even if she had insisted upon trying to rebuild, the lack of money would have left the job unfinished, and that, she explains, would have been humiliating for their ancestors.
Even now, most people in Tafalong use the Amis word kitaan (place of wealth) to describe the Kakita’an home, ignoring the ceremonial functions served within. A young tribe member named Tilo analyses it thus: Although many of the tribal elders had no strong feelings either way about whether the home should be rebuilt, they didn’t object because its reconstruction would permit the holding of ceremonies and the observance of taboos unique to the Kakita’an that couldn’t be duplicated elsewhere in the community.
Take the Ilisin, the annual ceremony of the greatest importance to the tribe. Traditionally, the first day of the ceremony would be spent at the Kakita’an home, with offerings of food given to the ancestral spirits. With the decline in the Kakita’an family fortunes, the ceremony was simply not observed for 50 years. No one in the community had tried to usurp their authority over such ceremonial matters.
Reviewing the ethnographic literature, scholars found that the carvings of Tafalong origin myths on the pillars of the Kakita’an ancestral home were the only such carvings known in Amis communities.