An aunt in a Taiwanese film said: “Flying over this sacred mountain might disturb the ancestors’ spirits, right?” This suddenly made me curious—why would this mountain be sacred to indigenous peoples (Austronesian language speakers)?
I recalled an indigenous guide who appeared shortly after the film’s opening, saying that when his ancestors paddled boats looking for Dulan in Taitung, they spotted a mountain that looked like a pot lid, so they named it Old Man Mountain (or something similar).
Then it suddenly occurred to me: ==this mountain isn’t actually a sacred ancestral spirit place at all—it’s just a place where people paddling boats spotted land, saw a mountain and part of a plain, and decided to settle there.==
This group was clearly South China migrants of the Austronesian language family. Indigenous peoples aren’t really indigenous anymore—they’re just people who arrived in Taiwan earlier. So I genuinely don’t understand why Taiwan independence advocates love using indigenous peoples as sacrificial offerings for Taiwan independence.
So that aunt’s comment in the movie is really the same as asking whether flying over Yangmingshan might disturb ancestors in the First Public Cemetery.
Actually, Taiwan fundamentally has no indigenous peoples in the literal sense. We can only call them earlier residents. The government uses the term “indigenous peoples” as a catch-all label for people from different tribes, really just for convenience because no one can actually figure out who is who, and it’s impossible to determine.
Even the many ancient archaeological sites unearthed don’t necessarily relate to today’s indigenous peoples (Austronesian language speakers).
As for the various groups that now identify as this or that tribe, claiming differences from other tribes, they’re really just using present circumstances to define themselves retroactively.
The thinking that because something exists now, it must have existed from the past actually fundamentally violates basic logic for conducting research.
For example, the Changbin culture archaeological site unearthed at Baxiandong in Taitung has stone tools potentially dating back 50,000 years, but Taiwan at that time was essentially the east coast of mainland China. The Taiwan Strait wasn’t even a strait but an open plain you could freely walk across.
At that era, many organisms could migrate between populations, not just clouded leopards and Taiwanese black bears. Human migration then was more complex and impossible to trace. Unfortunately, this untraceable uncertainty has caused many ill-intentioned people to speak with unjustified confidence, openly lying.
Even if I proposed that modern Han Chinese gradually expanded from Taiwan into the mainland, this speculation actually has some possibility.
For instance, the recent discovery of ancient ruins on Liangdao Island between the Matsu Islands and Dongyin Island in Fujian Province further supports this theory’s possibility.
In reality, Taiwan’s so-called indigenous peoples are simply one branch of the Austronesian language family group.
As for why various tribes’ languages differ more or less, that’s the same reason Taipei and Kaohsiung’s Hokkien languages sometimes don’t understand each other well—especially when seeing other tribes happened rarely, maybe once every few hundred years.
So Taiwan has no indigenous peoples in that sense; only earlier arrivals of Austronesian language speakers.
Historical records even indicate that during the Three Kingdoms period, military ships were dispatched to Taiwan, but after the investigating general deemed it unworthy of development, the small indigenous minority at the time was brought back to the Central Plain to become part of Sinic civilization.