Pan Ying-chieh (潘英傑) and Wang Pan Mei-yu (王潘美玉) were honored for their poetry yesterday at a ceremony for outstanding literary works written in romanized Aboriginal languages — something they said they could not dream of five years ago.
“The treasure of a culture can only be found in its language, while the essence of the language is hidden in its literature,” Minister of Education Chen Jei-cheng (鄭瑞城) said at the ceremony. “The purpose of this competition is to preserve and promote Taiwan’s rich Aboriginal languages and cultures.”
Out of 107 works that were entered in the competition held by the Ministry of Education, a total of 49 pieces — poetry, short novels, essays and translations written in Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Sediq and Pazeh — were selected to receive the award.
Among them, Wang Pan and Pan’s works in Pazeh were the most eye-catching.
The Pazeh are an assimilated plains tribe that used to inhabit regions in Taichung, Changhua and Nantou counties before the Chinese migrated to Taiwan in larger numbers about 400 years ago.
Over the centuries, the Pazeh have gradually disappeared from those areas because of marriages with non-Aboriginals or cultural assimilation.
The great majority of Pazeh have adopted Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) as their native tongue.
However, about five years ago some Pazeh who did not want to see their language and culture become extinct began efforts to save the language.
“In the 1990s, many academics predicted that the Pazeh language would completely die out,” said Lai Kuan-yi (賴貫一), a linguist who played an important role in saving the Pazeh language. “It’s a miracle that they [the Pazehs] brought it back to life.”
“I knew I may be an Aborigine, but I didn’t know which tribe until someone told me about five years ago,” Pan, 60, said. “There’s only 94-year-old Pan Chin-yu [潘金玉] in Puli [埔里] — where I live — who is able to speak Pazeh, so I learned from her.”
Wang Pan, who is now 70 and also lives in Puli, began to learn Pazeh five years ago from Pan Chin-yu as well.
“Right now, there are about 200 regular students who attend Pazeh classes offered by Pan Chin-yu in Puli,” Lai said, adding that classes with fewer students also exist in Miaoli and Taichung.
OVERHAUL NEEDED: The government should improve its agricultural processing capabilities and expand to new markets to limit its reliance on China, an expert said China’s ban on Taiwanese pineapples was “unsurprising,” and Taiwan should have years ago altered its produce export strategies and target customers, experts said. China on Friday abruptly suspended imports of pineapples from Taiwan, saying that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful biological entities” on the fruit. Calling it an “unfriendly” move, the Council of Agriculture (COA) said that 99.79 percent of the pineapples sent to China since last year have met China’s import standards. Chiao Chun (焦鈞), the author of Fruits and Politics — A Recollection of Cross-strait Agricultural Interaction Over the Past Decade (水果政治學：兩岸農業交流十年回顧與展望), said that China’s announcement is clearly targeting
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
DECADES OF INFLUENCE: Over the past 20 years, China has made inroads with Aborigines, funding political campaigns and trips, a legislator said Lawmakers have called on the National Security Bureau to investigate claims of pervasive Chinese influence among Aboriginal communities. Legislators pointed to a surge in communist propaganda and Chinese-funded projects over the past few years, which they say are aimed at infiltrating and buying political influence among Aboriginal communities. “China has for decades carried out wide-ranging ‘united front’ tactics and propaganda campaigns targeting Aborigines,” said Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Ying (陳瑩), a member of the Puyuma community in Taitung County. “Now, they are influencing elections for local councilors and village chiefs, offering money for candidates to mount their campaigns, and to
DISSATISFACTION? If the referendums collect more than 700,000 signatures each, they would have gotten the most signatures in the shortest time, the party said The Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) two referendum petitions — one on banning the importation of pork with traces of ractopamine and the other on holding referendums on the same day as national elections — had as of Thursday gathered 691,398 and 674,497 signatures respectively, the party said yesterday. If the petitions collect more than 700,000 signatures apiece, they would have garnered the most signatures in the shortest time since the Referendum Act (公民投票法) was amended in 2017, party officials said. The KMT proposed the “anti-ractopamine pork” or “food safety” referendum just days after President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) announcement on Aug. 28 last
RSS