Gateway: Twelve Paiwan Villages in Sandimen, Pingtung

Gateway project completed 7.51% (56 out of 746).

746 refers to the number of indigenous villages officially ratified by Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) from 2010 until 2015. Entrances is a personal project for me to visit every village on the list.

There are eight indigenous townships in Pingtung County. Sandimen sits at the northernmost corner bordering Maolin District Kaohsiung City. In Sandimen, twelve indigenous villages under ten tsuns (state administration unit) are ratified; ten of them are Paiwan with a  number of  6,875 residents and two are predominantly Rukai with a number of 860 residents. Most villages are reachable via Pingtung County Highway 185 (better known as Highway Along the Foothills), but those closer to the offshoots of Central Mount Range require a route combination of Provincial Highway 24 (also known as Wutai Highway) and Pingtung County Highway 31.

Gateway: Ten Paiwan Villages in Majia, Pingtung

Gateway project completed 5.9% (44 out of 746).

746 is the number of indigenous villages officially ratified by Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) from 2010 until 2015. Entrances is a personal project which brings me to every village on the ratification list.

On the map, Majia Township is  the smallest among the eight indigenous townships in Pingtung Taiwan. Yet, it is home to big state projects including Taiwan Indigenous Culture Park and Rinari Permanent Housing Program as well as a large Paiwan population at the number of 7,138 residents living in ten Paiwan villages under six tsuns (administration unit). 

Gateway: Eight Rukai Villages in Wutai, Pingtung

Gateway project completed 4.56% (34 out of 746).

746 is the number of indigenous villages officially ratified by Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) from 2010 unil 2015. Entrances is a personal project by which I hope to visit every village on the ratification list. 

Wutai is the only non-Paiwan dominant township in Pingtung Taiwan. The eight indigenous villages under six tsuns (administration unit) are home to Rukai, a group that was once considered a sub-tribe of Paiwan in the 19th century. According to CIP ratification list, there are totally 1,046 Rukai families and 3,448 residents in these villages, equivalent to roughly 26% of the total Rukai population (13,340) on the island. 

Edward H. House’s Formosans in 1874

(Source: Stone Gate in Mudan Township Pingtung Taiwan)

"The Formosa enterprise", says Edward Howard House (1836-1901), a journalist covering Japan for New York Tribune in the 1870s,  "was prompted by a fine impulse of humanity, and was carried through with unvarying resolution, spirit, and, at the proper moment, calm discretion".

And the world owes thanks to the young nation Japan for demonstrating "excellent qualities of diplomatic capacity and statesmanship", and for "performing a signal service to the community of nations...[by ridding] the Pacific Ocean of a scourge which threatened the safety of mariners" (The Expedition to Formosa, 224 &212; my italics).

What is this Formosa enterprise? What is the scourge to be chastised and rid off by Japan?

Red Ink (2012)

Lopenzina, Drew. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. SUNY, 2012. 

Are indigenous peoples, Native Americans included, peoples without literary traditions? This is the drift of the book. And the answer it provides is an exact no.

Not because "in all Mayan languages there is no linguistic or semantic differentiation among the words for painting, drawing, and writing" (p. 43), indicating a history of writing without words; nor because indigenous penmanship is too small to be significant; but because in history colonists often deliberately 'unwitnessed' - "the largely passive decision to maintain a particular narrative structure by keeping undesirable aspects of cultural memory repressed or inactive" (p. 9) - indigenous achievements in order to legitimize conquer and conquest.

"Natives had, in fact, picked up the pen in America for nearly two hundred years" (p. 6).

If 'unscript' is an indigenous way to deconstruct colonialism in Sarah Rivett's Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (2017), 'unwitness' in Lopenzina's Red Ink (2012) refers to one colonial strategy that contains indigenous presence by

* destroying every aspect of Native civilization that affronted them (Spanish) (p. 39);

* considering Native writing to be grotesque, devilish script (French) (p. 39);

* acknowledging Native inscriptions as the remnant of a loss civilization rooted in Western systems of knowledge (English) (p. 40).

Interracial Marriages in 1650-1661

(Source: Marriage of Aboriginal Natives, Corranderk, by Frederick Grosse (1828-1894))

This wood graving is borrowed to usher us into a similar scenario on Taiwan/Formosa between 1650 and 1661. At this time, the island was under the Dutch East India Company (better known as VOC, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), which had been ruling it for entrepot trade since 1624.

The Council of Matrimonial Affairs with four elected commissioners was entrusted regulating marriages between couples on the island. To become officially married, couples must:

(1) apply for 'marriage banns' at the Council with two or more relatives or friends;

(2) pass the interviews/investigations by commissioners to be qualified;

(3) have the banns put up in a church for three consecutive Sundays to see if there was objection;

(4) become officially married.

The Silk Roads (2015)

Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage, 2017. (Hardcover published by Bloomsbury London in 2015.)

"[Pulling] multiple strands together in a single work", Frankopan's The Silk Roads "spans centuries, continents and cultures" ( "Acknowledgements", pp. 508-509). Indeed, very ambitious.

Very solid too, supported by the sheer range of secondary and primary references listed in "Notes" (pp. 511-625): English, German, Russian, Dutch, Italian, French, Persian, Latin, Spanish, Scandinavian, and some more. Plus memorable historical events delivered in an accessible language; there is little wonder about the numerous praises heaped upon the work, such as

"This is deeply researched popular history at its most invigorating, primed to dislodge routine preconceptions and to pour in other light."- New York Review of Books

Remembering Sapiens (2011) and Homo Deus (2013) published just a few years before by another Oxford trained historian, Yuval Noah Harari, I couldn't help but second Oxford may very well be the best place to study and write history, especially the kind of history that encompasses a whole lot.

Unscripted America (2017)

Rivett, Sarah. Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation. Oxford, 2017. 

"The untranslatable aspects of indigenous languages have a disruptive impact on universal truths of either Scripture or Enlightened taxonomies...I refer to this disruptive impact as a process of unscripting." (Rivett, p. 11)

On the whole, this research speaks more about non-indigenous missionaries, fathers, philosophers, scientists and writers than about indigenous peoples. In the first six chapters, it traces chronologically the efforts of Anglo-Protestant missionaries and French Jesuits harvesting souls from their own fields in North America; in the last two chapters, President Thomas Jefferson's indigenous language project and Author James Fenimore Cooper's literary creation about Native Americans feature as themes.

Perhaps that's why the book is labeled 'literary criticism', and I felt I was back at the Department of Foreign Language and Literature when reading it.

Having said so, what's there for a reader like me looking for specific publication about indigenous peoples?

Gateway: Fifteen Paiwan Villages in Shizi, Pingtung

Gateway project completed 3.49% (26 out of 746).

746 is the number of indigenous villages ratified by Council of Indigenous Peoples Taiwan from  2010 until 2015. A complete list of all villages can be downloaded from the CIP website.

Gateway is a personal project by which I hope to visit these villages and take back as witness a photo either of the arch gateway or of any decorated monument at the village's entrance.

After Sinevaudjan and Manju, I moved on Wednesday, July 11, 2018 northwards towards Sisetu Township.  A large part of Sisetu marks the traditional territory of a powerful Paiwan chiefdom Tjakuvukuvulj since the Dutch Period until Japanese Occupation. Among the current seven administration areas, Paiwan inhabitants of the region can at least recognize (and have the government ratified) fifteen traditional villages. In total, Shizi is now home to 15 Paiwan villages, 1,721 households and 5,348 inhabitants.

Seven Books on the English Language

I know the title sounds ambitious. As I practice to write in good English, the English language inevitably draws me to itself per se. I wonder about its history; I am curious to know its lexicon; and I desire to acquire  or develop a good style. So, I gorged on the following seven books about English on my shelf, and here are some of the things I learned.

Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. Haper Perennial: 2001.

First published in 1990, my copy was a reissue by HaperCollins ten years afterwards. A sign of the book's longevity.

Bryson is very prolific; The Mother Tongue is only one of his three books on the English language. Consulting  at least 112 pieces of publication, he dabs by chapter on the history, vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation, style, lexicography, variety, status and future of the English language. Every chapter  can be (and has been) blown into a big volume by different authors, which renders Bryson's quite fit for a beginner on the subject matter. I picked up this copy at the airport and read it on the plane.

As Bryson explains, the English language is "order out of chaos", whose felicities include fusion (like trusteeship consists of  a Nordic stem trust, a French affix ee and an Old English root ship), democracy (common usage is preferred to authoritative dictate) and global presence empowered by entertainment, business, tourism and so on. Guess what language does the Belgium National Football Team use in the dressing room? English.