Seediq Erotic

The Seediq are a mountain people of central Taiwan whose name means simply people, and whose separate identity was for most of the twentieth century folded into that of their Atayal neighbors. Taiwan formally recognized them as a distinct group in 2008, the fourteenth of the island's official indigenous peoples. Their homeland is the steep forested country of the Central Mountain Range: the upper Zhuoshui watershed around Ren'ai Township in Nantou County, and the eastern valleys of Hualien County, settled by families who crossed the ridge generations ago. Roughly ten thousand people identify as Seediq today. Their language is Austronesian, in the small Atayalic branch found only in Taiwan, and it has three dialects, Tgdaya, Toda and Truku, that double as the names of its three communities. The split matters. The Truku on the Hualien side won recognition as a separate people in 2004, and whether Truku speakers are a Seediq subgroup or a nation of their own is still argued in both counties. Fluent speakers are concentrated among the elderly, though revitalization programs run through local schools and churches.

What held Seediq society together was gaya, a body of ancestral law covering marriage, hunting rights, hospitality and revenge. Breaking gaya invited misfortune from the utux, the ancestral spirits, and setting it right could demand a sacrifice or a headhunting raid. Facial tattoos marked adulthood: a man earned the chin tattoo by taking a head, a woman earned cheek tattoos by mastering the backstrap loom, and only the tattooed could cross the rainbow bridge to join the ancestors after death. Japanese colonial authorities banned both practices in the early 1900s. Most Seediq today are Presbyterian or Catholic, and church life sits alongside a revived interest in gaya as cultural rather than religious law. The defining historical moment is the Wushe Incident of October 1930, when the Tgdaya chief Mona Rudao led six villages in an attack on a Japanese school athletic meet, killing around 130 Japanese. The colonial army answered with aircraft, artillery, poison gas and rival Seediq auxiliaries. Hundreds of Seediq died, many by hanging themselves in the forest rather than surrender, and the survivors were confined to a riverside settlement now called Qingliu. The 2011 film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale brought the story to a mass audience and made Seediq Bale, meaning true person, a phrase most Taiwanese now recognize. Women's weaving, in red and white ramie patterned with diamond motifs said to be the eyes of the ancestors, remains the most visible living craft.