(This is a very beautiful, yet very difficult song. I am singing it for those who are attending the 2015 Graded Indigenous Language Proficiency Test tomorrow [19th December 2015], like I myself. Though whether or how the Test helps language revitalization remains debatable, I pray the act will mean for each participant a true commitment to live with their mother's - or in cases now, grandmother's - language for life.)
Parkin was a journalist in Africa. She turned her observations into a novel about a woman named Angel, who had the ability to create happiness and hope for people around her with wonderful and tasteful cakes.
I worked on the Chinese translation of this novel in 2009 before I flew to the Netherlands for study. The final product was 幸福推手, published by Big Tree (Taipei) in 2009.
When I left Taiwan, I brought another translation contract with me. It was Sandra Dallas's Prayers for Sale.
This is a very different story. Set against the Depression during 1930s in a mountainous town called Middle Swan, Colorado, it tells about the unlikely friendship between two women set apart from each other by sixty years and also by very different life experiences. What binds them, however, is a shared woe over lost loved ones, which they try to tackle with by stitching blankets.
Working on this Chinese translation and my Dutch studies at the same time from 2009 until 2010 was really a tough time for me. After all, it was here: 我願為妳祈禱, published by Big Tree (Taipei) in 2010. And my Dutch grades were good enough to get me into an honor's college.
This is about one of my conversations with Ina (mom), one which I intend to remember forever.
Last weekend, I attended a two-day seminar called "Revisit Your Childhood"（走訪童年）. The lecture was great, so was the group of participants. In two days, we were shown how formative preschool years may shape a child's personality in the future:
Born~Year 1: Children learn to trust, to love and be loved.
Year 1~Year 3: Children learn about boundary and learn to respect boundary.
Year 3~Year 6: Children learn to tell from imagination to reality, from falsehood to truth.
Year 6~Year 12: Children learn about responsibility and cooperation.
In this interview, 'As luck would have it', the British American historian Jonathan D. Spence said, "History was somehow something that gave me an anchor in, admittedly, other people's lives", but he "wasn't prepared to generalise with no guidance...[he] wanted to have things shapeable...one could really organise these events of the past in a different way". And he made a wonderful presentation with his one and only case, China.
"A subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale", Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land beautifully interweaves two types of journey undertaken by the author himself.
One journey leads Ghosh to the country side of Egypt in the 1980s as a student of anthropology. His investigation erstwhile revolved around agriculture, though in In An Antique Land, readers see more of the villagers across a span of a decade than of the author's research subject per se.
Another journey shows Ghosh traveled from manuscript to manuscript, like a historian, hoping to reconstruct the life of a slave from the Malabar coast of India based on only few leaks from the letters penned by the slave's Jewish master Abraham Ben Yijû and his circle of mentors and friends.
The 2015 Fu Ssu-Nien Lectures （傅斯年講座） was awarded to Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian historian and a practitioner of microhistory.
This was his first trip to Taiwan. He stayed for ten days, gave two lectures, joined one symposium and agreed to a conversation with students and faculty from the History Department of National Taiwan University (NTU). Before taking the flight back to Europe, he visited Hualien.
Like a fan, I followed all of Ginzburg's talks in Taipei, at the same time feeding my hunger for knowledge by watching all his talks on youtube. Chances came that I was able to ask him several questions at the conversation about colonial archives and philology, and they not only earned me a pleasant dinner with him and several faculty members from NTU and Academia Sinica on the last day, but also put me into contact with fellow historians that take interest in my research.
How fortunate and grateful! Yes, I take it as a call from History.
This brief comparison between the national indigenous languages survey reports of Taiwan (made in 2012 & 2014) and the survey reports of Australia (made in 2005 & 2014) came out in Aboriginal Educational World《原住民教育情報誌》No. 63 (June, 2015). pp. 58-61.
My article argues that for a language survey report to be really useful, it should contain a detailed analysis of the language's current status based on both quantitative and qualitative survey results; it should generate localized endangerment and vitality factors from the detailed analysis; and it should also propose ways to redress that correspond to each distinct language endangerment case. There is definitely not one miracle pill for all types of loss.
To present survey results alone with numerous tables and statistic formulas is not helpful. Numbers are important, but it is the story of those numbers that truly enlightens.
It celebrates the island's indigenous cultures and remembers how indigenous rights came to be recognized by Taiwan's constitution since the Indigenous Rights Movement in mid-1980s.
1984 - Taiwan's indigenous peoples asked the government to call them by 'indigenous people' （yuan-zhu-min, 原住民 ）instead of the stigmatizing 'mountain tribe' or mountain fellow'（shan-bao, 山胞 ）.
1994 August 1- 'Indigenous People' made it into the constitution of Taiwan and replaced 'mountain tribe'.
1997- 'Indigenous People' became 'Indigenous Peoples', signifying the recognition of each indigenous group as a collective entity.
From 'raw savage', 'cooked savage' to 'mountain tribe' to 'indigenous people', this process marks our continuous fight against the naming power of colonizers. Nothing is by no means granted here.
For ILRDC, a center built to revitalize endangered indigenous languages, how else can we feel the meaning of the day other than speak our own languages and tell people not only do we have our own names, but we also have our own ways of saying them? We have our own languages; they too deserve to be recognized and used more in fact.
With that spirit, ILRDC launched 'Challenge Our Mother Tongues in Ten Seconds'（挑戰十秒說族語）, inviting people to film themselves speaking their own languages in ten seconds. By the end of 31st July, the center has 38 films from 19 language variations. Here they are.
Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day.
May indigenous languages continue to strive and stay alive.
