In September 2017, a photographer captured the Talavan family at Green Valley Siraya Park in Tainan, positioned between mountains and water. A simple floating bridge made from water pipes and bamboo stretched across the pond. The structure sank slightly with each footstep, creating a sense of risk during the crossing. When asked to photograph the family on the bridge, 85-year-old Cheng-hiong Talavan agreed immediately. The entire family stepped carefully onto the swaying structure—daughter Uma Talavan leading, grandchildren following grandparents, all holding hands for a family portrait. On their journey to revive Sirayan culture, three generations of the Talavan family were working together, just as they appeared in the photograph, toward the same objectives.
Nine years later, on July 30, 2026, the Siraya people of Taiwan became the island's 17th officially recognized Indigenous group through an executive decree. This was the first time a plains Indigenous people—known as Pingpu—had achieved this status. Taiwan's Premier Cho Jung-tai approved the official recognition, which confirmed the Siraya's collective rights ahead of Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples' Day on August 1. The recognition came under the Pingpu Indigenous Peoples Status Act, which Parliament had passed in October 2025.
The journey to that moment involved decades of legal battles and cultural recovery. The Siraya belonged to the Austronesian family and spoke a distinctive language called Sinckan, which was recorded in a romanized form by missionaries during the Dutch colonial period from 1624 to 1662. Like other Indigenous groups in Taiwan, Siraya society was matriarchal. The name "Taiwan" itself comes from the Siraya language—an early 17th-century Dutch expedition fleet anchored at a place called Dayuan, a variant of "Taiwan," which originates from the Siraya tongue.
However, centuries of colonial rule nearly destroyed all of this heritage. After the port in the Siraya area was taken over in 1683 by Qing Dynasty China, gradual cultural assimilation caused the Sinckan language to disappear from use. During the Qing period, the government forced Siraya people to abandon their native language, submit to Manchu rulers by cutting their hair, learn Chinese, and adopt Han surnames, rituals, and culture. During the Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945, Japanese administrators continued dividing the Austronesian Indigenous peoples into two main categories: the plains Indigenous or Pingpu peoples, who, along with Han settlers, were considered natives; and the mountain Indigenous or Takasago peoples, which consisted of nine distinct ethnic groups.
The Pingpu were viewed as "well assimilated" with the Han Chinese population and were largely denied official Indigenous status as well as legal protections, resources, and other benefits. The government's refusal to recognize Pingpu peoples as Indigenous was based on claims that they had merged into Han Chinese society through intermarriage and that accepting new Indigenous members would expand the group of privileged citizens, since Indigenous peoples in Taiwan receive reserved seats in the legislature and access to social and educational benefits through affirmative action.
The opportunity for Pingpu to pursue recognition emerged only after Taiwan began democratizing in the early 1990s. Waves of Indigenous rights movements appeared and brought significant policy changes. The offensive term "mountain compatriots" was replaced with "Indigenous peoples" in 1994; the requirement to register with Han surnames was dropped in 1995; a cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples was created in 1996 to manage related matters; the collective rights of Indigenous peoples were formally established in 1997; and Indigenous peoples' right to education was codified in 1998. Yet Pingpu descendants' request for Indigenous status had been postponed because their ancestral lands are flatlands with potential for development.
The turning point came through the courts. Following a series of rejections by lower courts and appeals by Siraya groups, the Constitutional Court decided in November 2022 that it was unconstitutional for the government to exclude Pingpu communities from official Indigenous status. The court instructed the legislature to draft legislation on the matter within three years. Parliament finally passed the long-awaited law in October 2025, and it took another nine months before the executive branch granted official status to the Siraya.
The story of Siraya cultural revival is centered on the Talavan family, whose commitment spans three generations. Cheng-hiong Talavan established the Tainan Pepo Siraya Culture Association in 1999 to rebuild Siraya people's historical legacy and protect their culture through oral history and collection of artifacts. He devoted his life to encouraging descendants of Pingpu Aborigines to develop a sense of their identity.
The restoration of the Sinckan language depended on historical documents. In 2006, researchers from Taiwan's Academia Sinica announced that their team had deciphered approximately 80 percent of the 187 so-called Sinckan Manuscripts, a collection of documents from the 17th and 18th centuries written in the language spoken by the Siraya people using a romanization system introduced by the Dutch. To convert the Siraya to Christianity, Dutch missionaries had studied the Sirayan language, created a romanized script to record it, taught the Siraya people how to use it, and started translating the New Testament into Sirayan. Copies of the Dutch missionaries' translation of the Book of Matthew into Sirayan have survived, and several of the manuscripts are bilingual, with Sirayan and Chinese versions side by side.
Cheng-hiong's daughter Uma Talavan and her husband Edgar Macapili, who belongs to the Bisaya Indigenous people in the Philippines, worked to decode the Sinckan language by translating a Sirayan translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew—written by early Dutch missionaries—word by word into English, Dutch, and Bisayan, an Austronesian language similar to Sinckan. Macapili, originally a musician, became a linguistics scholar. He compared texts in Dutch, English, Sirayan, and Bisayan word by word and phrase by phrase, facing a major challenge: when the Dutch recorded the Sirayan language in the 17th century, their own spelling system had not yet been standardized, making it nearly impossible to know how the words actually sounded.
It took Macapili more than seven years of intensive work to complete his Siraya Glossary: Based on the Gospel of St. Matthew in Formosan (Sinkan Dialect), a Preliminary Survey, which contains more than 3,000 Sirayan vocabulary items. Macapili described his impression of Sinckan: "This language is like the mother or older sister of the Bisayan language—they have a family relationship. What's more, Sirayan is purer, having not been impacted by too many foreign terms." Only after Macapili's glossary was finished could textbooks, illustrated books, pocket books, audiobooks, teacher training, and finally Sirayan language classes in the formal educational curriculum be introduced in 2016.
With the language partially recovered, the Talavan family began producing educational materials. They created children's books and songs in Sinckan, introducing the vocabulary Macapili had carefully reconstructed to a new generation who had never heard it spoken. The third generation, sisters Euphony and Lici Talavan, learned Taiwanese and Sirayan together from early childhood and have committed themselves to revitalizing Siraya culture and raising awareness. Cheng-hiong Talavan led the younger generation in singing an ancient Siraya song, a moment recorded in a YouTube video that would later spread among Siraya descendants reconnecting with their heritage.
Since its establishment in 1999, the Tainan Pepo Siraya Culture Association has been involved in many projects. One notable activity is poetry writing, with most poems written in Mandarin or Taiwanese Hokkien but including Siraya words, raising awareness of the language among children.
The path to recognition was difficult. Siraya civil society groups opposed a proposal from the KMT to create a new legal category called "Pingpu Indigenous," holding a press conference to express their position. The groups objected to what they saw as a separate and potentially lower classification that would distinguish them from other officially recognized Indigenous peoples, concerned it would limit their access to the same protections and benefits. The importance of recognition extends beyond symbolic meaning. The estimated number of Pingpu people is unclear, though some estimates place it at 980,000, which is around 4 percent of the Taiwanese population. Over 10,000 individuals in Tainan County had previously identified themselves as Siraya while awaiting official status.
Beginning in mid-August 2026, thousands of eligible descendants in southern Taiwan finally had the legal right to register their true ethnic identity on their national identification cards. According to the Council of Indigenous Peoples, a ministry-level body, eligible Siraya could begin registering their Indigenous status in mid-August. A mother and daughter in Tainan became the first people to complete their official registration as Siraya after the government recognized the group. The mother, Mai Fang-chi, and daughter, Shih Ya-hsin, completed their registration at the Council of Indigenous Peoples office, their names now officially recorded as Siraya on their national identification cards—a document that would have been impossible to obtain just weeks earlier.
The eligibility requirements for Siraya registration are based on historical precedent. Applicants or their direct ancestors had to have been registered as "Plains" or assimilated indigenous peoples under Japanese rule, and they had to be registered as living in Siraya regions during that time period. The near-disappearance of the Siraya identity was not caused by biological assimilation, but rather by deliberate administrative decisions made across multiple colonial regimes.
One Talavan family member, using the username @miss5langs, expressed the significance of the recognition in a post on Threads, writing in Chinese and English. In English, the message stated: "The recognition of the Siraya's Indigenous status is not intended to exclude anyone or create division, but rather to ensure that the names once obscured by history can finally be seen again. I also hope that, through this [identity] restoration, more people will be willing to learn about the true history of Taiwan, understand the paths the Pingpu peoples have walked, comprehend why their languages and cultures have disappeared, and realize that these peoples did not suddenly appear — they have always been here. Even though I now live abroad, I will still proudly tell those around me: I am from Taiwan, and I am Siraya. This is not for any benefits, nor is it for any label — it is simply because this has always been my name."
Jolan Hsieh, an Indigenous studies scholar at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan who is also known by her Siraya name, Bavaragh Dagalomai, cautioned that legal status is only a beginning. She said the impact of the recognition "could be profound, but recognition itself is only the beginning." Hsieh understood official recognition primarily as a process of restoring a relationship between the state and a people whose identity had been erased.
The Sakizaya, recognized as Taiwan's 13th aboriginal group in 2007, offer a cautionary example. Although the petition through which the Sakizaya successfully gained recognition as a unique ethnic group in 2007 claimed a total of 15,000 members, fewer than 900 Sakizaya had registered by the end of 2015. The difference between those eligible and those who actually register suggests that official recognition does not automatically lead to widespread participation among community members, and the Siraya may face similar challenges as they work to bring descendants into the formal system.
The Siraya are not alone in their struggle. In addition to Siraya, Kavalan, Ketagalan, Taokas, Pazeh, Papora, Babuza, Hoanya, and Makatau groups are classified as Pingpu, and they are also working to apply for official recognition of their Indigenous status. Eight other Pingpu groups currently have applications waiting for review by the Council of Indigenous Peoples.
The legal recognition brings about significant cultural and educational changes. The National Museum of Taiwan History has already announced specialized exhibitions planned for 2027 to document the Siraya's contemporary revitalization efforts. President Lai Ching-te, who supported the Siraya's push for recognition during his earlier roles as Tainan's mayor and as vice president, called the moment historic. Writing on Facebook on August 1, observed as Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples' Day, he described the recognition as "an important milestone in the pursuit of historical and transitional justice for Indigenous peoples."
In classrooms across Tainan, children now learn Sinckan alongside Mandarin and Taiwanese, sitting at desks where a language that nearly disappeared is being spoken aloud again. The textbooks that Macapili's glossary made possible fill the shelves, and teachers trained by the Talavan family guide students through pronunciation and grammar. For the first time in more than a century, Sinckan is not merely a historical artifact preserved in 17th-century Dutch manuscripts—it is a living subject in a school curriculum, taught to children who carry Siraya blood and are learning to claim it as their own.