Crafts

Words and Music

• Byline:OSCAR CHUNG
• Publication Date:08/01/2007

Wind Music records traditional songs of the Thao people. (Photo by Yu Su-ying)

Oftentimes aboriginal-related books and albums are made with a sense of mission.

For decades Aruyai Dalimalau, a grade school teacher now retired, has been a unique cultural resource for the Paiwan people in Sandimen, an indigenous town in Pingtung County in southern Taiwan. She has helped keep the Paiwan heritage alive by singing Paiwan ballads to pupils and her fellow tribespeople. Only when she was diagnosed with cancer last year did aboriginal cultural conservationists realize that, should she pass away, then much of the tribal musical tradition would die with her, unless some effort was made to record what she knew.

"People woke up to the urgent need to put together a record of what she has to offer to our society," says Voyu Poiconu, chief secretary of the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Park Administration under the Cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP). "Losing her would mean losing many unique Paiwan ballads," says the official, who learned of her condition at the end of last year.

Through Voyu Poiconu, Lin Ching-tsai and two assistants from National Taitung University's Department of Music on the island's southeast coast have visited the Paiwan woman several times, spending at least two days each visit to mine this rich Paiwan cultural resource, tape-recording and videotaping everything during their interviews. "We can always find something new every time we talk to her and get her to recall the old days. During these talks, she just instinctively sings ballads she might have not thought of in years," says Lin.

Starting in December last year, the job of collecting Paiwan ballads from the aboriginal woman has now been largely completed. The next step is to preserve them in digital form and eventually turn them into audio publications. Actually the music and songs of the Puyuma, another of Taiwan's aboriginal tribes, collected by Lin last year, will soon be published, according to National Museum of Prehistory, which commissioned the professor to undertake their collection.

The emergency rescue of aboriginal cultural legacies in these cases has been successful. But Voyu Poiconu is afraid that there may be numerous cases of elderly aboriginals with a profound knowledge of their culture fading into history without being able to pass that knowledge on, if only because there are no widely known written forms of aboriginal languages while many old masters have difficulty speaking Mandarin and communicating with the wider society. "And some are simply not interested in telling their stories," he says.

Assimilation Threatens Heritage

The effort to preserve the unique characteristics of aboriginal cultures takes place at a time when aboriginals themselves--about 2 percent of the population--are being rapidly assimilated into mainstream society. The task is important not only for cultural anthropologists, but in order to provide these indigenous people with links to their roots and a stronger sense of self.

One major recorder and promoter of aboriginal legacies is SMC Publishing Inc., which started to publish works on Taiwan's aborigines in the mid-1970s. Its first publication was a reprint of data and information collected by the Japanese during the colonial era (1895-1945). "A lot of research on aborigines in the past was done by the Japanese, and it stopped after they left the island following the end of the Second World War," Wei Te-wen, general manager of the company, says. The results of Japanese research are hugely important even today in providing information on all aspects of aboriginal societies.

Similarly the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines has been translating texts written by Spanish and Dutch colonists during their stays on the island in the 17th century to have a more complete understanding of aborigines in earlier times. Currently the privately-run museum, established in 1994, is commissioning scholars searching for and translating data in historical archives in The Netherlands, such as log book entries and commercial letters recording details and events relating to Taiwan's aborigines recorded during the 40-year period of Dutch occupation of southern Taiwan.

The interior of Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples Resource Center, a new government-funded unit with a mission to collect written, audio or video material related to Taiwan's aborigines. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)

"Such data usually involves a lot of names, including place names. You have to check and verify them one by one. So the scholars have to be experts in Taiwanese history in that period as well as in Dutch language and culture," Lin Wei-cheng, the museum's supervisor, says of the difficulties of the task. Starting almost 10 years ago, Lin adds, the project will result in four volumes of findings, of which three have already been published.

Publications based on foreign-language materials aside, those by Taiwanese are on the increase. This phenomenon has much to do with the rise of anthropological study in the 1970s and the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s, Wei says, which gave people freer access to the mountainous regions where most aboriginals reside, but which had long been off-limits to outsiders, to do field studies on indigenous tribes. Government promotion of Taiwanese indigenization in the 1990s also encouraged such research.

That is when Shung Ye opened and Wind Music started to release a collection of albums featuring aboriginal ballads. Starting with The Songs of the Bunun, which debuted in 1992, the collection records ballads from Taiwan's major aboriginal peoples. Six years later the record company separately published an eight-album series that records the ballads of the various plains-dwelling aboriginal tribes collectively known as pingpu aborigines. "This was a big cultural event in Taiwan," says Yu Su-ying, marketing director of the record company. Through cultural assimilation, she said, "the pingpu have almost disappeared on the island, but we spared no effort to find those who still know how to sing traditional songs. You know, sometimes you find them but none of them can sing, as was the case with the Ketagalan people."

Innovation

As aboriginal cultures and issues gain more attention, related publications are correspondingly becoming richer in content and style. Aboriginal songwriters have started to create new works, often combining aboriginal and non-aboriginal elements by, for example, using Mandarin and aboriginal languages alternately, to a guitar accompaniment. One major publisher of this kind of new work is Taiwan Colors Music (TCM), which has been dedicated to producing indie music since its establishment in 1998. Vincent Cheng, manager of the record label, says the company not only promotes new work but also is serious about paying its respects to tradition. "Sometimes we have to ask for help from older aborigines. We send to them recordings of songs performed in aboriginal languages by young aboriginal singers for pronunciation correction."

Meanwhile, comic books and picture books depicting aboriginal legends and events have appeared. There is also a wider range of topics discussed by books on Taiwan's aborigines, from education to environmental protection, although arts and culture remain the major issues, according to the Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples Resource Center (TIPRC). "Discussion of the theory that Taiwan is the origin of Austronesian cultures since the early 1990s has led to an increasing number of related publications too," Juan Shao-wei, librarian at the acquisitions department of National Taiwan University's (NTU) library, and a helper at TIPRC. "And now aboriginal literature is enriched by more and more works by aborigines themselves."

However, despite growing concerns for aboriginal issues and the effort to promote aboriginal cultures, related publications usually do not have a high commercial value. "Their market performance is not strong," Yu Su-ying says of the sale of albums featuring traditional aboriginal ballads. The Songs of the Bunun sells better, because the administration of Yushan National Park, home to many Bunun people, purchases copies on a regular basis to stock the national park's souvenir outlets. Yu estimates that 80 percent of the albums are purely recordings of unaccompanied singing by elderly aboriginal people, because it is hard to find young people who can do the job and the repertoire of traditional musical instruments used by Taiwan's aboriginal peoples is rather slim. Many people find listening to such songs somewhat dull. As a result, these productions are unlikely to be profit-makers, and the government and the Shung Ye Museum, in fact, sponsor many of them.

Mission, not Mammon

"The publication of books on aboriginal people is significant more in its cultural value," says Wei Te-wen of SMC Publishing, noting that the company will continue to publish this kind of book as long as it can afford to. Currently they account for about one-fifth of SMC's catalogue, and most of them sell only a few hundred copies each.

There are exceptions, like a comic book on aboriginal legends which sold several thousands copies while The Ocean, created by a Puyuma singer-songwriter, has been the most popular album featuring aboriginal flavor released by TCM, selling tens of thousands of copies since its debut in 2001. Even so these are not big hits compared with mainstream works.

To put it simply, publishing materials regarding aboriginal cultures and issues needs a sense of mission, not a love of mammon. "We're a non-profit organization in the first place," says Lin Wei-cheng of Shung Ye Museum. Aside from producing its own publications, the museum promotes those released by other publishers from time to time and makes special editions for exhibitions it holds annually focusing on aboriginal-related themes.

Meanwhile the government is collecting publications and establishing a digital archive of everything aboriginal. Established in July 2006, TIPRC is an agency commissioned by the CIP which currently has collected nearly 7,000 items, mostly books and periodicals, as well as "grey literature," unpublished works such as theses and dissertations. "We try every means to collect and organize information provided in these valuable items scattered here and there facing the risk of disappearing," says Chen Hsueh-hua, co-director of the center. "Our goal is to make people think of this center when they want to do research in this field," says Chen, concurrently professor of NTU's Department of Library and Information Science.

Since mainstream Taiwanese society began to show more concern for the aborigines, related print publications have become richer in content and style. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)

From the experience of Juan Shao-wei, the NTU librarian who also helps out at the center, it is easy for publications on aborigines to be out of print; frequently they are no longer available for sale only one year after publication. Thus, the center has to rely on book dealers, whether in Taiwan or abroad, to search for these rare and endangered publications in second-hand bookstores. It is no less difficult to acquire an unpublished item, of which there might only be five copies in existence before the center finds and makes more copies of them. "It's challenging to find those written in the past, but we won't miss any put out in the future," says Chen.

A digital archive of materials related to indigenous people is growing, especially now that the CIP is taking part in the National Digital Archive Program, launched by the central government in 2002. The CIP's Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Park Administration is now responsible for a five-year project of collecting, filing, digitizing and preserving information on tangible aboriginal legacies such as cultural artifacts and intangible ones like aboriginal legends and medical knowledge.

New Ways of Writing

Meanwhile, the CIP is systematically undertaking an even more challenging mission. In the long term, it hopes that publications on aboriginal peoples can be written in a romanized system that directly represents the sounds of aboriginal languages instead of the widely used Chinese characters. To achieve this goal, the CIP announced romanized writing systems for the various aboriginal languages in December 2005. As of this year, young aboriginal students can score 10 percent higher on senior high school or college entrance examinations, if they can pass a language test in their mother tongue.

There are already publications written in romanized script, such as the Amis-edition Bible Tukung Sra's friend gave to him in 2005. "Whenever I see it, I feel thrilled. It reminds me that we aboriginal people can have books written in our own languages," says the director of the CIP's Department of Education and Culture, who is of Amis origin, the largest aboriginal people in Taiwan in terms of population. While it is not easy for romanization to be widely accepted--and maybe this is not going to happen at all--but at least the CIP is moving in that direction.

Years ago Yu Su-ying once witnessed a change of attitude in a young aboriginal man toward the ballads sung by his elderly female relative. "Originally he dismissed them as boring," says Yu. One day, out of curiosity he went to see her sing for one of the albums produced by Yu's company. Obviously, when listening attentively, he came to realize the significance of recording her singing voice. "He was so moved that in the end he wept," she says. It might not be always profitable to publish aboriginal ballads albums or books written in a romanized alphabet, but aboriginal legacies are always worth recording for their uniqueness.

Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw