Taiwanese indigenous peoples

Taiwanese indigenous peoples, formerly called Taiwanese aborigines, are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, with the nationally recognized subgroups numbering about 600,303 or 3% of the country's population. This total is increased to more than 800,000 if the indigenous peoples of the plains in Taiwan are included, pending future official recognition. When including those of mixed ancestry, such a number is possibly more than a million. Academic research suggests that their ancestors have been living on Taiwan for approximately 15,000 years. A wide body of evidence suggests that the Taiwanese indigenous peoples had maintained regular trade networks with numerous regional cultures of Southeast Asia before Han Chinese settled on the island from the 17th century, at the behest of the Dutch colonial administration and later by successive governments towards the 20th century.
Taiwanese indigenous peoples are Austronesians, with linguistic, genetic and cultural ties to other Austronesian peoples. Taiwan is the origin and linguistic homeland of the oceanic Austronesian expansion, whose descendant groups today include the majority of the ethnic groups throughout many parts of East and Southeast Asia as well as Oceania and even Africa which includes Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, Philippines, Micronesia, Island Melanesia and Polynesia.
For centuries, Taiwan's indigenous inhabitants experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, inter-marriage and other intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. For example, of the approximately 26 known languages of the Taiwanese indigenous peoples – collectively referred to as the Formosan languages – at least ten are now extinct, five are moribund and several are to some degree endangered. These languages are of unique historical significance since most historical linguists consider Taiwan to be the original homeland of the Austronesian languages and all of its primary branches except for Malayo-Polynesian exist only on Taiwan.
Due to discrimination or repression throughout the centuries, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan have experienced economic and social inequality, including a high unemployment rate and substandard education. Some indigenous groups today continue to be unrecognized by the government. Since the early 1980s, many indigenous groups have been actively seeking a higher degree of political self-determination and economic development. The revival of ethnic pride is expressed in many ways by the indigenous peoples, including the incorporation of elements of their culture into cultural commodities such as cultural tourism, pop music and sports. Taiwan's Austronesian speakers were formerly distributed over much of the Taiwan archipelago, including the Central Mountain Range villages along the alluvial plains, as well as Orchid Island, Green Island, and Liuqiu Island.
The bulk of contemporary Taiwanese indigenous peoples mostly reside both in their traditional mountain villages as well as increasingly in Taiwan's urban areas. There are also the plains indigenous peoples, which have always lived in the lowland areas of the island. Ever since the end of the White Terror, some efforts have been under way in indigenous communities to revive traditional cultural practices and preserve their distinct traditional languages on the now Han Chinese majority island and for the latter to better understand more about them.

Terminology

Collective

The Ming Dynasty sailor Chen Di, in his Record of the Eastern Seas, identifies the indigenous people of Taiwan as simply "Eastern Savages", while the Dutch referred to Taiwan's original inhabitants as "Indians" or "blacks", based on their prior colonial experience in what is currently Indonesia.
Beginning nearly a century later, as the rule of the Qing Empire expanded over wider groups of people, writers and gazetteers recast their descriptions away from reflecting degree of acculturation, and toward a system that defined the indigenous relative to their submission or hostility to Qing rule. Qing used the term "raw/wild/uncivilized" to define those people who had not submitted to Qing rule, and "cooked/tamed/civilized" for those who had pledged their allegiance through their payment of a head tax. According to the standards of the Qianlong Emperor and successive regimes, the epithet "cooked" was synonymous with having assimilated to Han cultural norms, and living as a subject of the Empire, but it retained a pejorative designation to signify the perceived cultural lacking of the non-Han people. This designation reflected the prevailing idea that anyone could be civilized/tamed by adopting Confucian social norms.
In English, these peoples have also been called Formosans, Native Taiwanese, and Austronesian Taiwanese. The name Gaoshan is also the official label for all indigenous Taiwanese in the People's Republic of China, though indigenous Taiwanese people dislike this label as Gaoshan means high mountain and it disregards plains indigenous.

Tribes

As the Qing consolidated their power over the plains and struggled to enter the mountains in the late 19th century, the terms Pingpu and Gaoshan were used interchangeably with the epithets "civilized" and "uncivilized". During Japanese rule, anthropologists from Japan maintained the binary classification. In 1900 they incorporated it into their own colonial project by employing the term for the "civilized tribes", and creating a category of "recognized tribes" for the indigenous who had formerly been called "uncivilized". The Musha Incident of 1930 led to many changes in indigenous policy, and the Japanese government began referring to them as Takasago people.
Gaoshan peoples included the Atayal, Bunun, Tsou, Saisiat, Paiwan, Puyuma, and Amis peoples. The Tao and Rukai were added later, for a total of nine recognized peoples. During the early period of Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang rule the terms Shandi Tongbao "mountain compatriots" and Pingdi Tongbao "plains compatriots" were invented, to remove the presumed taint of Japanese influence and reflect the place of Taiwan's indigenous people in the Chinese Nationalist state. The KMT later adopted the use of all the earlier Japanese groupings except Peipo.
Despite recent changes in the field of anthropology and a shift in government objectives, the Pingpu and Gaoshan labels in use today maintain the form given by the Qing to reflect indigenous' acculturation to Han culture. The current recognized indigenous are all regarded as Gaoshan, though the divisions are not and have never been based strictly on geographical location. The Amis, Saisiat, Tao and Kavalan are all traditionally Eastern Plains cultures. The distinction between Pingpu and Gaoshan people continues to affect Taiwan's policies regarding indigenous peoples, and their ability to participate effectively in government.
Although the ROC's Government Information Office officially lists 16 major groupings as "tribes", the consensus among scholars maintains that these 16 groupings do not reflect any social entities, political collectives, or self-identified alliances dating from pre-modern Taiwan. These divisions did not always correspond to distinctions drawn by the indigenous themselves. The earliest detailed records, dating from the Dutch arrival in 1624, describe the indigenous as living in independent villages of varying size. Between these villages there was frequent trade, intermarriage, warfare and alliances against common enemies. Using contemporary ethnographic and linguistic criteria, these villages have been classed by anthropologists into more than 20 broad ethnic groupings, which were never united under a common polity, kingdom or "tribe". However, the categories have become so firmly established in government and popular discourse over time that they have become de facto distinctions, serving to shape in part today's political discourse within the Republic of China, and affecting Taiwan's policies regarding indigenous peoples.

Atayal	Saisiyat	Bunun	Tsou	Rukai	Paiwan	Puyuma	Amis	Yami	Total
27,871	770	16,007	2,325	13,242	21,067	6,407	32,783	1,487	121,950

Since 2005, some local governments, including Tainan City in 2005, Fuli, Hualien in 2013, and Pingtung County in 2016, have begun to recognize Taiwanese Plain Indigenous peoples. The numbers of people who have successfully registered, including Kaohsiung City Government that has opened to register but not yet recognized, as of 2017 are:

	Siraya	Taivoan	Makatao	Not Specific	Total
Tainan	11,830	–	–	–	11,830
Kaohsiung	107	129	–	237	473
Pingtung	–	–	1,803	205	2,008
Fuli, Hualien	–	–	–	100	100
Total	11,937	129	1,803	542	14,411

Recognized peoples

Indigenous ethnic groups recognized by Taiwan

officially recognizes distinct people groups among the indigenous community based upon the qualifications drawn up by the Council of Indigenous Peoples. To gain this recognition, communities must gather a number of signatures and a body of supporting evidence with which to successfully petition the CIP. Formal recognition confers certain legal benefits and rights upon a group, as well as providing them with the satisfaction of recovering their separate identity as an ethnic group. As of June 2014, 16 people groups have been recognized.
The Council of Indigenous Peoples consider several limited factors in a successful formal petition. The determining factors include collecting member genealogies, group histories and evidence of a continued linguistic and cultural identity. The lack of documentation and the extinction of many indigenous languages as the result of colonial cultural and language policies have made the prospect of official recognition of many ethnicities a remote possibility. Current trends in ethno-tourism have led many former Plains Indigenous peoples to continue to seek cultural revival.
Among the Plains groups that have petitioned for official status, only the Kavalan and Sakizaya have been officially recognized. The remaining twelve recognized groups are traditionally regarded as mountain indigenous people.
Other indigenous groups or subgroups that have pressed for recovery of legal indigenous status include Chimo, Kakabu, Makatao, Pazeh, Siraya, and Taivoan. The act of petitioning for recognized status, however, does not always reflect any consensus view among scholars that the relevant group should in fact be categorized as a separate ethnic group. The Siraya will become the 17th ethnic group to be recognized once their status, already recognized by the courts in May 2018, is officially announced by the central government.
There is discussion among both scholars and political groups regarding the best or most appropriate name to use for many of the people groups and their languages, as well as the proper romanization of that name. Commonly cited examples of this ambiguity include and.
Nine people groups were originally recognized before 1945 by the Japanese government. The Thao, Kavalan and Truku were recognized by Taiwan's government in 2001, 2002 and 2004 respectively. The Sakizaya were recognized as a 13th on 17 January 2007, and on 23 April 2008 the Sediq were recognized as Taiwan's 14th official ethnic group. Previously the Sakizaya had been listed as Amis and the Sediq as Atayal. Hla'alua and Kanakanavu were recognized as the 15th and 16th ethnic group on 26 June 2014. A full list of the recognized ethnic groups of Taiwan, as well as some of the more commonly cited unrecognized peoples, is as follows: