indi geno u s a rts
lost treasures Taiwan’s Atayal Facial Tattoos
Kimi Sibal with Atayal elder, Jian YuYing (簡 玉英), who has since passed away.
Sylvia Dean
U
nder a clear mountain sky, an Atayal boy of 13 prepares to transition into a man by way of a painful ceremony passed down by his ancestors. Like many boys his age, he has proven his valor by mastering the art of hunting. In another village, a girl of similar age awaits her own passage into maturity after mastering her craft of weaving. Both wait as a mixture of charcoal and pine tree oil is prepared, applied, and slowly injected into their cheeks and foreheads, a ritual that is part of the most significant coming of age ceremony for the Atayal, one of Taiwan’s 16 recognized Indigenous Tribes. Often referred to as a cultural treasure, the custom of facial tattooing was banned, and subsequently began to disappear, during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan from 1895–1945. “My grandmother had facial tattoos and they were very beautiful,” said cultural advocate and historian Kimi Sibal in a recent interview. Distributed on both sides of Taiwan’s central mountain range in northern Taiwan, as well as the mountainous areas of Yilan and Hualien, the Atayal Peoples constitute the second largest Indigenous group in Taiwan with a total population of about 90,000 people. Atayal communities are organized into four groups: Tribal organizations (dealing with leadership and property), sacrificial groups (preparing sacrifices and leading ritual proceedings), gaga (a system of ancestral teachings and enforcement of societal norms), and hunting teams. “The most distinctive part of the Atayal culture are facial tattoos. While men’s tattoos symbolize adulthood and bravery, women’s tattoos symbolize skilled weaving,” says JunYu Lin (Atayal), a 33-year-old music teacher in Yilan. The Atayal Tribe uses ramie, a flowering plant in the nettle family, as raw material for weaving. These days, most people use wool to weave due to its convenience and color diversity, so the traditional use of ramie is gradually declining. “A girl who cannot
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weave and has no tattoos would likely not be able to find a husband in the Tribe,” explains Lin. After the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese war, the Japanese signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki and rose to power. In an effort to exercise authority over a group seen by colonizers as savage, Indigenous communities living in the mountains were driven to flatter land, where they were easier to regulate and control. Once the Japanese fell from power after World War II, Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), a major political party in Taiwan, filled their position of sovereignty. With the goal to create a strong national Chinese cultural identity, the new authoritarian administration continued the pattern of oppression and maltreatment towards Indigenous Peoples. Japanese schools were replaced by those run by the KMT, and due to education reform regulations, all Indigenous people were required to learn Mandarin. However, the Chinese were not required to learn any of the Indigenous languages. Not long after, all Indigenous languages, as well as Japanese, were banned from public use. It was not until after the lift of KMT martial law in 1987 and the subsequent democratization of Taiwan that those languages that previously faced systematic oppression began to resurface. In the midst of numerous pacification techniques and prolonged persecution, sacred practices such as facial tattooing were prohibited. After years of oppression, Sibal’s grandmother had been conditioned to be ashamed of the markings on her face. As a Hualien native and a member of the Truku community, Sibal did not learn about his heritage until much later in life. He recalls an incident involving his son when he first began school that awakened him to the importance of learning about his background. The boy got into a fight with his classmates because they targeted his heritage, sneering that the tattoos worn by his ancestors made them look like monsters, and that he was from a bloodline of savages. Sibal resolved to discover the story behind his own ancestry, and to share the true meaning behind the custom of facial tattooing.
