My People, the Indigenous Taiwanese - by Peggy Wang

Taiwan is an island live with many different races of people. There are Taiwanese, Chinese, Hakka, and aborigine. The Taiwanese, Chinese, and Hakka were originally from Mainland China, only the aborigine was really indigenous to Taiwan. There are thirteen officially recognized peoples of Taiwanese aborigine; one of them is called Amis which is where my father came from. In this essay, I am going to talk about three aspects of Amis: history, ceremony, and social structure.
Amis, who is a largest group of Taiwanese aborigine, has 160,000 of the population. And most of them live in the Pacific coastal plain eastern; therefore, we eat a lot of sea food such as fish, spiral shells, and seaweed, etc. But we also have a special recipe for pork; it is marinate the raw pork with a lot of salt which you only can have in our ceremony.
Talk about our ceremony, every year we have a very important traditional ceremony in July which is called Harvest Festival. However, the marinated pork is that we eat most during the festival. Usually the ceremony would continue for 3 days, and we sing and dance all day long to show the people’s thanks and appreciation to the Gods and to pray for harvest in the next coming year. So, no matter where we are, we always go back to our village to celebrate it.
Another aspect of Amis is about our social structure. Amis is a matriarchal society; therefore, the family affairs are decided by the woman or the eldest daughter, and also they take the responsibility of family. But the guys take care of rest of the stuff such as hunting or fishing. In our society, when people get married, the man would become a son-in-law and lives in the wife’s home. But the time has changed and it doesn’t happen now.
So, this is my ethnic identity. Even though I am only have half blood relationship of Amis and didn’t grow up in the village, I am still learning about our traditional cultures, and I am very proud of my heritage.