Kanakanavu Erotic

For most of the twentieth century the Kanakanavu were filed under someone else's name. Japanese colonial ethnographers put them in with the Tsou, the mountain people of Alishan, and postwar Taiwan kept that label for decades. It did so even though Kanakanavu speech and the Tsou language are separate languages, and the Kanakanavu keep a ritual calendar of their own. They number only a few hundred people. They live in the upper valley of the Nanzixian River in the mountains of Kaohsiung, mostly in the villages of Takanua and Maya in Namasia District. In 2014, after a long campaign from within the community, the government recognized them as a distinct indigenous people. They became the sixteenth people on Taiwan's official list, recognized alongside their neighbors the Hla'alua.

Language was central to the case. Kanakanavu is a Formosan language, part of the Austronesian family, which has its oldest branches on Taiwan. Linguists long grouped it with Tsou and Saaroa as Tsouic, though some now question that grouping. Nobody questions how endangered it is: only a handful of elders speak it fluently. The Bunun, who settled the valley over generations and now far outnumber the Kanakanavu, have shaped daily life here. After years of intermarriage, many Kanakanavu speak Bunun and Mandarin more easily than their own ancestral language. Keeping the language alive now depends on recording elders and teaching children in community classes.

Most Kanakanavu today are Christian, and church life sets the rhythm of the week. The older ritual year has come back as a public statement of who they are. Mikong, the millet ceremony, gives thanks for the grain that once fed the villages and brings the community together. Kaisisi Cakuran, the river ceremony, honors the Nanzixian and the fish it provides. It is a reminder that the people of the valley fished as much as they farmed and hunted. The river has also brought disaster. In August 2009 Typhoon Morakot sent landslides through Namasia, cutting roads, burying fields and pushing some families into resettlement housing in the lowlands. Rebuilding and recognition came in the same years. For a people this small, both raised the same question: whether the valley could stay home.