Danhu Pasavi’s Bunun tribe has lived in the mountains of Kaohsiung County for more than three centuries, but now he fears Typhoon Morakot could tear them from the land of their ancestors.
Like most of the typhoon’s victims, he is a member of one of the nation’s Aboriginal tribes who lived here for thousands of years before the Han Chinese came in the 17th century — and whose spiritual attachment to the land runs deep.
“That’s why some of our older villagers would rather risk their lives staying behind than leave the village,” Pasavi, an elder in his village of 400, said at a Buddhist temple being used to shelter homeless typhoon victims.
PHOTO: PETER PARKS, AFP
Most Aboriginal typhoon survivors want the government to assure them they can ultimately return home, Pasavi said.
“Forcing us to relocate to the city permanently is no different from killing us,” said Pasavi, who had to flee from his village of Nanshalu (南沙魯) to neighboring Cishan Township (旗山). “Our ancestors arrived here even before the Han did. We deserve the right to preserve our land, our culture, history and way of life.”
Taiwanese Aborigines are ethnic Austronesians with linguistic and genetic ties to the people of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Oceania.
Elsewhere in Cishan at a rescue center, 20 members of Dakanuwa Village (達卡努瓦) spent the day pleading with relatives still on the mountain to leave.
“Please, you must come down. Don’t worry, the government has promised that we will have a place to stay here,” a teenager on a mobile phone said to his father.
Rescue workers said their helicopters were ready whenever the stranded villagers accepted their help. But more than a thousand have declined.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), already under fire over his handling of the typhoon, faces a new minefield with the Aborigines’ resettlement.
Economically disadvantaged before, Aboriginal communities are now even poorer, said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Kung Wen-chi (孔文吉), an Aborigine.
The government’s only option is to pay to resettle them as close to their original villages as possible, Kung said.
“Some people have no homes, no jobs and even no family after the typhoon and they can’t pay back loans,” he said, adding that 921 Earthquake resettlement projects failed when developers lost money because victims had no cash.
Pasavi and many others blame a four-year-old government project to divert water from the Laonung River (荖濃溪) over 14.5km to the Tsengweng Reservoir for the mudslides that destroyed their villages.
The claim, however, was rejected by Water Resources Agency Director-General Chen Shen-hsien (陳伸賢), who said the water channel and mudslides were not linked.
Pasuya, a former director of National Museum of Prehistory and a member of the Tsou tribe, said Aborigines have long been neglected because of prejudice and lacked a voice in elections. At 490,000 people, they represent about 2 percent of the population.
But he said Aborigines must also acknowledge their cash crops — tea, betel nuts and wasabi root — contributed to soil erosion that may have made the mudslides even more deadly.
“Forests were cut down in the mountains so the Aboriginal people could grow more profitable crops to meet the demand of city dwellers, which hurt the ecology,” he said. “Aboriginal people should learn a painful lesson not to violate their cultural principles and hurt their land.”
At a separate setting yesterday, the KMT caucus urged the Executive Yuan to merge the nation’s 30 mountainous townships into one special mountainous district and reserve part of the land for Aborigines.
The special district should be put under the jurisdiction of the central government, which could then control land preservation and disaster relief in the townships, the caucus said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY FLORA WANG
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