In the absence of written languages, the decorative motifs on their colorful costumes served as one of the main means for Taiwan's aboriginal tribes to preserve and hand down their traditions. After a lost generation starting in the 1960s, efforts to revive the old crafts have recently been bearing fruit.
On the Western Plain, up amid the peaks of the Central Range, and along the East Coast where the mountains approach the sea, Taiwan's indigenous peoples of Austronesian origin established tribal societies that enjoyed bountiful blessings from nature. They believed that winds blew in color, that smoke carried messages, and that the sun colored the sky each evening in order to rush people home before it rested. They looked to the spirits of ancestors as their eternal guardians, watching over them at all times. Male aborigines aspired to become warriors, believing that a brave heart endowed men with pride and dignity. Tribeswomen, capable hands in the house and on the farm, were especially skilled in weaving and needle work. None of the tribes developed a writing system to record their days--perhaps none was needed when life carried on the way it always had. Talented singers and artists by birth, the aborigines passed on their heritage through their music, rituals, and story-telling--and in the designs of their hand-woven garments.
Legends from their folklore provided the core of the aborigines' beliefs and the main point of reference for their artistic creations. While making clothes to attend to their families' basic needs, the tribeswomen made use of stitching, embroidery, and weaving to translate their peoples' old tales into arresting images for decorating garments and headdresses. Without realizing it, these women turned their work into a medium for preserving the aborigines' cultural legacy.
That heritage continued even as new materials came into use. As agriculture advanced, many of the aboriginal groups learned to replace bark and animal skins with ramie as the main ingredient of their clothing. Although each tribe developed its own motifs for the narrative designs on its costumes, their mode of dress all shared the feature of geometric simplicity and symmetry in a vivid color scheme of red, yellow, green, black, and white. Instead of buttons, the tribespeople used straps to fasten their simple-cut, well-woven, square-shaped clothes.
Such commonality amid individual differences reflects the cross-tribal cultural influences that occurred due to their geographic proximity. The ten tribes officially recognized today--the Ami, Atayal, Bunun, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiyat, Thao, Tsou, and Yami, along with eight other subgroups referred to collectively as the Pingpu--each existed as a mature tribal society, creating striking cultural diversity on an island of only 36,000 square kilometers. They each performed their respective rituals at different times during the year. On ceremony days, the tribespeople would dress up in their formal finery to sing, drink, and dance as they paid respect to the ancestor spirits or celebrated the harvest.
Among the tribes, only the Paiwan and Rukai maintained a hereditary noble class, which led to the development of more sophisticated designs in costumes and accessories. The Paiwan noblewomen had more time than commoners to polish their skills in needlework, and their accomplishments became a mark of their social class. According to legend, the founding chieftain was actually a snake--a hundred-pace sharp-nosed viper--in human form and was born in an earthenware pitcher from a teardrop that fell from the sun. At sunrise on the day of his birth, two vipers turned up to guard the newborn infant. The story gave good reason to the Paiwan people to respect snakes as their protectors, and they repeatedly used the tale as a decorative element on their garments. The head of the hundred-pacer and the diamond shape on its skin were also popular motifs. Another popular ornament was seashells, seen as the symbol of money.
The Atayal people, on the other hand, saw the hundred-pacer as a good friend but not divine. The diamond shape on their dresses had a different origin--a representation of the eyes of the ancestor spirit. The Atayal people tattooed their faces with striped marks so that the ancestor spirit could tell them apart from others when it received them on the rainbow bridge in heaven. Atayal garments therefore tend to emphasize stripes (from the rainbow), in addition to beaded ornaments. For their part, the Puyuma people preferred the elegance of cross stitches, together with a multi-layered diamond shape. They considered it important for clothing to indicate the wearer's age group as a sign of one's place in society. Young people were supposed to dress and live simply until they came of age and were ready to marry.
"What makes the traditional costumes of the aborigines so precious is that they reflect the cultural background and social structure of the people," notes Saalih Lee, chief of the National Palace Museum's Education and Exhibition Department and the author of several books about the traditional costumes of Taiwan's indigenous peoples. "It's amazing to see how the aborigines have been able to carry on their traditions so well for so long. A good explanation may be that they truly know how to live a good life, and how to incorporate aesthetics and artistic creations into daily life."
Lee suggests in her books that the aborigines' traditional costumes reveal much about the structure and customs of the tribal societies. The garments served the function of representing the owner's social stratum and recording any personal feats. They also reflected social norms, such as the Atayals' insistence that women learn weaving skills before they could get married and have their faces tattooed. In addition, the process of garment-making followed a strict division of labor, in which men made tools and helped in picking and treating the ramie, but were prohibited to touch or even walk past the looms while the women were weaving. The costumes also reveal the extent of cultural interchange with other population groups, as evident in the types of material used, and they are conspicuous displays of tribal aesthetics and artistic development. Lastly, they symbolize the aborigines' identity, which has grown increasingly important as traditions have become more vulnerable to the pressures of social and political changes.
The aboriginal societies on Taiwan had long remained undisturbed until the number of settlers from mainland China began to increase in the seventeenth century. Sinification started to occur but at a slow pace. After the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895, the indigenous people tried to resist the colonizers' efforts to exert control, staging frequent uprisings. But neither those battles nor the fifty-year Japanese occupation of the island that followed ever came close to uprooting their traditions. The aborigines learned to speak Japanese but did not forgo their tribal languages. Tales that had been told millions of times over centuries continued to stir the hearts of the tribespeople. And the dexterous hands of mothers and wives never stopped weaving for their loved ones. Many Japanese scholars who came during the colonial period to study the aboriginal cultures shipped home large amounts of handmade costumes bought or taken from the villagers.
After the Chiang Kai-shek government retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the aborigines entered a period of extensive assimilation and migration to urban areas. In the five decades since then, most aborigines have adopted much of the lifestyle and culture of their Chinese neighbors. "The practice of traditional aboriginal rituals almost came to a stop during the 1960s and up to the 1980s," says Sun Ta-chuan or Pa'labang in the Puyuma language, associate professor of philosophy at Taipei's Soochow University. "That gap caused the loss of a huge number of traditional costumes. Many went to private collectors, while a small portion became part of museum collections. More have disappeared without a trace." As the older tribeswomen skilled in costume-making pass on, preservation of this crucial part of the aboriginal heritage has become an increasingly urgent matter. "The solid studies [of aboriginal arts] that the Japanese scholars undertook during the colonial period constitute a much greater accomplishment than anything we have been able to do in the past fifty years," Sun maintains. "If we could establish a research mechanism under the coordination of the relevant government agencies, academic institutions, and museums, we might be able to recover the aborigines' material culture from the past century or even longer ago."
Over the past decade Taiwan has seen new interest in aboriginal culture as one of the outcomes of increased respect for social diversity. Aboriginal music and vocalists have gained a broad audience, and Amei, the most popular female pop singer currently on the scene, is of Puyuma origin. An increasing number of female aborigines are picking up weaving and needlework, though some old skills have perished with the past generations. Saalih Lee estimates that about 400 to 500 aboriginal art studios are operating across the island. "Almost all the artistic creations of daily objects that those studios are producing borrow patterns from the traditional costumes," she notes. "What has resulted is a cultural movement of the aborigines as a whole. The native people no longer need to fight for human rights--they're enjoying their rights fully. Their concerns about the future are directed at their economic and cultural prospects."
The Aboriginal Affairs Commissions in various county governments are operating training programs in twenty-three aboriginal townships to equip people with weaving skills, and the programs are steadily gaining popularity among young aborigines. According to Chang Hsien-sheng, head of the cultural division of the central government's Aboriginal Affairs Commission, his agency spent almost NT$8 million (US$232,000) last year on promoting the traditional crafts and on subsidies to various training programs carried out by private art studios. As they become more familiar with modern business practices, more aborigines are finding ways to utilize their tribes' distinctive images for commercial advantage. Motifs derived from the ancient legends are now making an appearance on a broad range of products from dresses to handbags, cell-phone covers, pendants, cushions, and many others.
Computer technology has made mass production and marketing easier to achieve, lowering costs but sacrificing authenticity. Costumes and handicrafts made entirely by hand can command a rather high price. A handmade Paiwan wedding gown, for instance, may cost at least NT$150,000 (US$4,350), according to Lin Shih-chih, manager of the Aboriginal Culture Park in Pingtung. Products decorated with computer-made appliques are more affordable, but Lin dismisses those machine-made pieces as "emotionless." When it comes to profit potential, however, the lack of human touch in the products may pale in importance. Sun Ta-chuan does not regard that trend as wholly negative. "Commercial opportunities provide great motivation for carrying on traditions that would otherwise be relegated to museums," he observes. "Artistic creations that are useful and associated with daily life constitute a worthy continuation of tradition. What deserves our attention is how we can build up and stabilize the market for these products."
The new designs are based on the ancient models but with a modern twist. "What these art studios are doing is highly innovative," Saalih Lee says. "They may use unconventional color schemes and patterns in their creations. This changes but doesn't contradict tradition. The best way to promote a culture is to live the culture." Sun Ta-chuan shares that view but cautions that the transformations adopted in the process of innovation must be carefully recorded. "The purpose of documenting the shifts and the concepts behind them is to build a path for successors to trace their way back to the originals," he says. "That way we can create a contrast and a dialogue between the traditional and the modern, and we can achieve both cultural preservation and dynamic development."
Sun is preparing to launch an ambitious new project if funding comes through--cataloging all the scattered collections of traditional aboriginal costumes in Taiwan and Japan, then preparing a comprehensive printed guide with photos. He is also championing the idea of researching and recording every aspect of the traditional workmanship, from the cultivation of ramie down to the completion of a garment, and making the findings available to those operating related businesses. Sun further suggests that licensing and apprenticeship systems be organized to secure the continuation of true traditional craftsmanship. The government would be asked for some monetary assistance, for example for purchasing land for plantation, and to help devise a guiding cultural policy.
Behind those practical proposals lies a philosophical foundation. "Many dreamers like me long for a life of refinement," Sun says. "But only a dramatic improvement in the island's overall cultural development will be able to transport us to that dream world." The irrepressible vitality that has been enabling aboriginal traditions to stay alive and fresh may be just one of the engines for that journey.