Two Pazeh Aboriginal writers were honored by the Ministry of Education with awards at an event in Hualien County on Friday for their efforts to revive and preserve their critically endangered language, which they said has been a very difficult task because the government does not officially recognize their people.
Award recipients Pan Ying-chieh (潘英傑) and Wang Pan Mei-yu (王潘美玉) are relatives from the Pazeh family clan, from the Ailan area (愛蘭) of Nantou County’s Puli (埔里).
Pazeh is one of Taiwan’s 10 Pingpu Aborigine groups, also known as lowland Aborigines. They say their language, culture and ethnic identity are disappearing because they are excluded from the benefits of official government recognition enjoyed by the nation’s 14 Aboriginal peoples.
Photo: Hua Meng-ching, Taipei Times
Pan Ying-chieh said the Pazeh family clans in Puli have organized an association to promote their culture and to resuscitate the language, with seminars and classes being held at the local Ailan Presbyterian Church on weekends and during holidays.
“Our people decided that we must do this, because our mother tongue is nearing extinction, with just a few elderly speakers still using the language. It is like a patient dying in a hospital emergency ward, with doctors and families trying their best to save its life,” he said.
Pan, 66, said Pazeh is listed by the UN as one of 18 critically endangered languages in the world, with only a few native speakers.
He said he is very disappointed at the government’s continual denial of the existence of the Pazeh Aboriginal people and their language, which belongs to the Austronesian linguistic family of the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asian regions.
Wang Pan, 81, has lived in Puli’s Ailan area for most of her life. The town is one of only three remaining towns in Taiwan with a native Pazeh population. There are only a few thousand Pazeh Aborigines left.
“I learned the Pazeh language during my childhood, but most of the time I spoke Hoklo [also known as Taiwanese]. This is because in those times Taiwanese society was prejudiced and looked down on us Pingpu Aborigines. Other people called us “fan” [番, a derogatory label for Aborigines]. Because of this discrimination, I did not learn our Pazeh language well,” she said.
She again started learning the language in 2007, when Pazeh elders organized weekly seminars and classes in order to preserve their culture, save their mother tongue from dying out and passing their customs on to the younger generations.
Due to her childhood familiarity with the language, Wang Pan advanced rapidly and became a Pazeh language teacher herself. She now presents classes to young people.
Wang Pan said the main reason for writing in Pazeh and competing for the ministry’s language awards is to make the government and the public aware of the Pazeh people’s determined efforts to revive their culture, and to save their dying language.
Pan Ying-chieh said that several members of their Pazeh community are writing literature, poems and narrative stories in the Pazeh language, using the romanized alphabet system that is used by all of Taiwan’s Aboriginal writers.
“This year we had five members eligible for the ministry’s awards for Aboriginal literature. We were excluded from participating last year, because the government does not recognize the existence of the Pazeh language,” Pan said.
He said the Pazeh Aborigines collectively applied to the Council of Indigenous Peoples in 2006 for restoration of their original “Indigenous” status, which they had held in the household registry system along with the Gaoshan, or highland Aborigine groups, during the Japanese colonial era and up to the 1950s during the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration.
“Despite our repeated efforts and lobbying the government, we are to this day still excluded and not recognized as an Aborigine group,” he said, “In any case, we will continue our efforts to save our Pazeh culture and language.”
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,
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) yesterday said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) “should not follow the Democratic Progressive Party’s [DPP] direction,” after KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) had said that China posed a threat to Taiwan. Chiang was quoted by Reuters as saying during an interview that China’s “one country, two systems” formula for an unification with Taiwan “has no market” in the nation. Chiang also described China as the major threat to Taiwan, Reuters reported. Jaw, who has expressed interest in running for KMT chairman this year and in the 2024 presidential election, wrote on Facebook that
RSS