Kavalan Erotic

The Kavalan are the people the Yilan Plain is named for. Before Han settlement they held that flat, river-cut land in Taiwan's northeastern corner, dozens of villages between the mountains and the sea, and the name they use for themselves marks the distinction that mattered to them: people of the plain, as against the people upslope. They fished the rivers and the coast, farmed, and traded with ships working the northern coast long before anyone drew a border around them. Their language sits in the Austronesian family, in its East Formosan branch, closer to Amis and to the vanished Basay than to the mountain languages spoken next door. Taiwan is the Austronesian homeland, the island the whole family sailed out from, so Kavalan is not a transplanted tongue but one of the deep roots of a family that reaches to Madagascar and Hawaii.

What came after is compressed and brutal. In 1796 an expedition under Wu Sha broke into the plain, Han settlement followed fast, the Qing set up a subprefecture in 1812, and within two generations the land was gone. Families moved south down the east coast into present-day Hualien, and in 1878 the Kavalan at Kaliawan joined the Sakizaya against Qing troops, lost, and scattered again. Many survived by living quietly inside Amis villages, which is why the state counted them as Amis for most of a century. Formal recognition as a distinct people came only in 2002, the eleventh name on Taiwan's official list, and fewer than two thousand people are registered under it. The largest settlement is Xinshe, Paterongan in Kavalan, on the Hualien coast, where women revived weaving with banana fiber: the pseudostem stripped, dried, and split into thread fine enough for a backstrap loom, a technique that nearly died with the last weavers who held it. Ritual authority here has long run through women, the mtiu who handle healing and the dead, and the year-end Palilin rites for ancestors are still kept in households that never let them go. Most Kavalan today are Christian, Presbyterian or Catholic, and most speak Mandarin. The language has almost no fluent speakers below the oldest generation, and the village classes are in a race with it.