Though not yet a “certified” medicine woman, Djupelang began to put her skills to use during and after Typhoon Morakot in August, which brought severe flooding and mudslides to Taiwan, killing more than 600 people.
“I was not experienced, but I bought a bottle of sorghum liquor, and I chanted incantations. The floodwaters rose to my knees. I drove my car to higher ground. After I got to safety, a mountainside collapsed and buried a third of my house,” said Djupelang.
A total of 117 homes in her village in southern Pingtung County were washed away by floodwaters, but no one died. She and another shaman from her village used traditional chants of their indigenous Paiwan tribe to comfort villagers who lost their homes and possessions.
“Because of the typhoon, people became more interested in this tradition as they saw that our culture also has a way of comforting people in distress,” Djupelang noted.
The mother of three grown children, who prefers to use her Paiwan name, is among some 10 women enrolled in a class sponsored by the Executive Yuan’s Council of Indigenous Peoples to train shamans.
Many of Taiwan’s 14 recognized indigenous tribes, which had inhabited the island for thousands of years before the majority Han arrived from mainland China, have a tradition of shamans and mediums, who played important roles as their community’s spiritual guides in the past. The Paiwan tradition of shamanism was particularly strong.
Each village’s shamans, who were mostly women, would communicate with and seek guidance from spirits, including the spirit of Pingtung’s Dawu Mountain, family ancestors’ spirits, and gods of agriculture, life, the tribe and the village, during important ceremonies, such as before a hunt or crop-planting.
However, the spread of Christianity and pressures to assimilate into mainstream society led the Paiwan and other tribes to forsake their own traditions.
The Paiwan tribe, which now numbers about 86,000 members, had about 100 shamans half a century ago, but there are only about 20 now. Most of these 20 are now in their 70s and 80s and only about 10 can really practice their craft, said Weng Yu-hua, a Paiwan community leader who organized the class after obtaining funding from the CIP.
“If they don’t pass it on to the next generation, it will die out,” said Weng, whose mother is also a shaman. According to Paiwan tradition, it is the older shaman who chooses the person from the next generation to whom the skills will be passed on.
As many shamans have passed away, students for the Pingtung class are selected if they have relatives who were mediums, shamans or village chiefs.
Djupelang was chosen by her grandmothers, who were both shamans, out of all the girls in her family because they thought she was different.
“My mom gave birth to me after three days of difficult labor. They thought my mom would die, so they prayed using their spiritual powers that she would be spared even if it meant losing the baby,” said Djupelang.
After she was born, mother and child were both fine.
“They thought my birth was very mysterious, and that I was very special,” Djupelang said. This continued after she became older. “Whenever I went out of the house with them, everything seemed to go unusually smoothly,” Djupelang said. “For instance, if we needed a ride someone would just happen to show up and offer us a lift.”
She was 15 or 16 years old when her grandmothers wanted to pass on their skills to her.
“They told me not to go to high school,” recalled Djupelang. “My parents also really wanted me to learn to be a medicine woman. They said, ‘You will always have enough to eat and you’ll be on good terms with everyone.’”
But she refused.
Indigenous children born in the late 1950s and 1960s like Djupelang all went to Christian schools opened by missionaries outside their villages because there were no public schools in the villages. After school, there would be many activities, such as Friday Bible study, and Djupelang had little time or interest in learning about shamanism.
“You have so many friends and you want to fit in,” she said. Missionaries also frowned upon the practice.
“They wanted to suppress it. They tried to use material goods like clothing and food to tempt the elders to go to church and to persuade them to stop practicing shamanism. They debased it. They criticized our practices, so I tried to hide the fact I was from a family with medicine women,” she said.
Djupelang studied hard so she could win scholarships and go to school far away from her village. After graduating, she went to work as a nurse in Christian hospitals, partly to show her grandmothers she could still help people without being a shaman. Before too long, however, things began to fall apart.
“In my 30s, after my grandmothers had passed away, my marriage failed, my husband had affairs. I fell ill with cancer after getting a divorce and couldn’t work. I then returned to my village and asked a shaman for advice,” she said.
The medicine woman told her she should have been a shaman.
In May this year, she joined the class. The students in the class are mostly housewives in their 30s and 40s, who learn the various chants to communicate with the spirits from the teachers, who are elder shamans, some of whom can no longer sing, but only chant. The course has proved very popular, and more such courses are planned, according to Weng.
Older generations of medicine women memorized the chants by heart since traditionally there was no written script for the Paiwan language. Only in recent years did the tribe begin transcribing the chants using Romanization and translating them into Chinese.
Relearning her culture now, Djupelang said shamans are people with the ability to connect with the spirits. However, they otherwise dress and act just like other villagers.
“It’s not fortune telling. Some of them can see things, but not all can; it depends on their ability to sense the spirits,” she said.
“What touch me the most are the songs and chants.”
“They have a very artistic way of saying things. Instead of ‘I really miss you,’ they say ‘At that time, we were doing this and that, your every expression and every movement left an imprint on my heart,’” said Djupelang, quoting the songs.
The chants involving the spirits are also unique.
“Regardless of whether the sky falls or the earth cracks open, I will be with you because you believe in me,” goes one chant to the god who accompanies shamans.
For Djupelang, who is trying to memorize enough chants to become a full-fledged shaman, being a medicine woman is about helping others.
“In the future, when I become a full-fledged shaman, if people ask me to help, I can’t turn them down. If it’s for a funeral, I’ll do it. If it’s for a harvest, I’ll do it,” said Djupelang. “I really want to learn these incantations, memorize them and have our religious traditions be accepted by society.” (THN)
—Cindy Sui is a free-lance writer based in Taipei.
Copyright © 2009 by Cindy Sui
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