A Truku Aboriginal traditional ritual connected to the utux rudan (ancestral spirits) was on the verge of dying out with the tribal elders when 84-year-old shaman Chien Chin-mei (簡金美) found a young successor to pass her knowledge on to.
Chien is an eighth-generation shaman and has served the community in Hualien’s Taroko Gorge for more than five decades.
The shaman uses a small bamboo tube called a daran to ask ancestral spirits for their blessing, answer questions or heal people, Chien said.
Photo: Wang Chun-chi, Taipei Times
The ceremony itself is also named daran, she said.
Without the correct setting and proper ceremony, people cannot access the spiritual world through the daran, Chien said.
Daran ceremonies are used for a variety of different purposes, Chien said. For example, if a situation calls for multiple communications with the spirits, an animal is sacrificed, she said.
The sacrificial ceremony also requires seven cups of rice wine, seven cigarettes and seven betel nuts to appease the seven preceding generations of shamans and ask them to help drive away the source of disasters.
Chien said that because of her poor health and advanced age, she can only conduct simple ceremonies asking ancestral spirits for their blessing or to ask them questions, adding that she is not strong enough to offer healing rituals.
Chien said she had been increasingly worried that the age-old tradition would end with her, as she was getting older and had recently had a stroke.
However, her grandson, Ho Ying-hui (何盈暉), 14, discovered this year that he was able to communicate with ancestral spirits via the duran, Chien said.
Chien said she would now focus on passing on all her knowledge of the utux rudan to Ho in the hopes that he shoulders the responsibility for the sake of the Truku.
Ho said he is proud of his grandmother for helping people, and while he was not able to communicate with ancestral spirits every time, he is confident that with time and under his grandmother’s tutelage he would succeed her and become a ninth-generation shaman of his people.
Aboriginal culture and history academic Tien Kui-fang (田貴芳) said that he was happy to see the Truku shamanic tradition passed on to the next generation.
The connection between many Aboriginal people and their traditional practices is gradually being eroded, Tien said, adding that it is great news if the Truku people are bucking the trend.
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