The Talavan Family's Bridge: How Taiwan's Siraya Reclaimed Their Name After 350 Years

In September 2017, a photographer took a picture of the Talavan family at Green Valley Siraya Park in Tainan. The family stood on a simple bridge made from water pipes and bamboo that stretched over a pond. The bridge moved and sank a little under each person's feet. When the photographer asked to take a family picture on the bridge, Cheng-hiong Talavan, who was 85 years old, said yes immediately. The whole family walked carefully onto the swaying bridge—daughter Uma Talavan went first, then the grandchildren and grandparents, all holding hands. Three generations of the Talavan family were working together, just like in the picture, to bring back Sirayan culture.

Nine years later, on July 30, 2026, something important happened. The Siraya people of Taiwan became the island's 17th official Indigenous group. This was the first time a plains Indigenous people—people who lived on flat land—had received this official status. Taiwan's Premier Cho Jung-tai approved the recognition. This happened just before Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples' Day on August 1. Parliament had passed a new law about this in October 2025.

The Siraya people have a long history. They belonged to the Austronesian family and spoke a language called Sinckan. Dutch missionaries wrote down this language using a special alphabet system between 1624 and 1662. Like other Indigenous groups in Taiwan, Siraya society was led by women. The word "Taiwan" itself comes from the Siraya language—it comes from a place called Dayuan, which is a Siraya word.

But hundreds of years of foreign rule almost destroyed everything. After 1683, when China's Qing Dynasty took control of the Siraya area, the Sinckan language slowly disappeared. The government forced Siraya people to stop speaking their own language, to cut their hair in a new style, to learn Chinese, and to use Chinese family names and customs. Later, from 1895 to 1945, Japanese rulers divided the Indigenous peoples into two groups: plains people like the Siraya, who lived on flat land, and mountain people, who lived in the mountains. The mountain people were divided into nine different groups.

The plains people were seen as "well assimilated" and did not receive official Indigenous status. They did not get legal protection or special help from the government. The government said that plains people had married Chinese people and become part of Chinese culture. Officials also worried that recognizing more Indigenous people would mean more people could get special government help and reserved seats in Parliament.

Things began to change in the early 1990s when Taiwan became more democratic. Indigenous rights groups started to push for change, and the government made new policies. In 1994, the government stopped using a bad word for Indigenous people and used "Indigenous peoples" instead. In 1995, people no longer had to use Chinese family names. In 1996, the government created a special office to help Indigenous peoples. In 1997 and 1998, the government gave Indigenous peoples more rights, including the right to education. But plains people still could not get official Indigenous status because their land was flat and could be developed for business.

The real change came through the courts. In November 2022, Taiwan's Constitutional Court said it was wrong for the government to refuse to recognize plains people as Indigenous. The court told Parliament to write a new law within three years. Parliament finally passed the law in October 2025, and in July 2026, the government officially recognized the Siraya.

The story of bringing back Siraya culture is the story of the Talavan family. Cheng-hiong Talavan started the Tainan Pepo Siraya Culture Association in 1999 to save Siraya history and culture. He spent his whole life helping Siraya descendants remember who they were.

Bringing back the Sinckan language was very difficult. In 2006, researchers at Taiwan's Academia Sinica announced that they had understood about 80 percent of 187 old documents written in Sinckan from the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch missionaries had learned the Siraya language and created a way to write it using the alphabet. They taught Siraya people to read and write this way and translated the Christian Bible into Sinckan. Some of these old documents still exist today.

Cheng-hiong's daughter Uma Talavan and her husband Edgar Macapili worked together to understand Sinckan. Edgar Macapili is from the Bisaya Indigenous people in the Philippines. He was a musician but became a language expert. They translated an old Christian text word by word from Sinckan into English, Dutch, and Bisayan, a language similar to Sinckan. Macapili compared the old Dutch writings very carefully, but this was very hard because Dutch spelling was not the same in the 1600s as it is today.

Macapili worked for more than seven years to finish his Siraya dictionary. It has more than 3,000 Sirayan words. He said that Sinckan is like the mother or older sister of Bisayan and that it is purer because it has not been changed by many foreign words. After Macapili finished his dictionary, people could write textbooks and teach Sinckan in schools. In 2016, Sinckan classes started in schools for the first time in over 100 years.

With the language coming back to life, the Talavan family wrote children's books and songs in Sinckan. They taught young people words that had been lost for so long. The third generation—sisters Euphony and Lici Talavan—learned Sinckan from when they were small children. They have worked hard to bring back Siraya culture and teach others about it. Cheng-hiong taught the younger generation to sing an old Siraya song, and this was filmed and shared on YouTube.

Since 1999, the Tainan Pepo Siraya Culture Association has done many projects. One important project is writing poetry in Sinckan, Mandarin, and Taiwanese. This helps children learn about the Sinckan language.

The path to official recognition was not easy. Some Siraya groups did not want a separate category for plains people. They worried that this would give them fewer rights and benefits than other Indigenous groups. The number of plains people is not clear, but some say there are about 980,000, which is about 4 percent of Taiwan's population. Over 10,000 people in Tainan County said they were Siraya and waited for official recognition.

Starting in mid-August 2026, thousands of Siraya people in southern Taiwan could finally register their true ethnic identity on their national ID cards. A mother and daughter in Tainan were the first to complete their registration. The mother, Mai Fang-chi, and daughter, Shih Ya-hsin, registered at the government office, and their names now officially show they are Siraya on their ID cards—something that would have been impossible just weeks before.

To register as Siraya, people had to show that they or their ancestors were registered as plains Indigenous people during Japanese rule and lived in Siraya areas at that time. The loss of Siraya identity was not because people married and mixed with other groups, but because the government made rules that erased their identity.

One Talavan family member posted on social media about the meaning of this recognition. The message said: "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 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."

A scholar named Jolan Hsieh, also known by her Siraya name Bavaragh Dagalomai, studies Indigenous peoples. She said that official recognition is only the beginning. She explained that the real work is to restore the relationship between the government and the Siraya people whose identity was erased.

Another Indigenous group, the Sakizaya, became official in 2007. They said they had 15,000 members, but by 2015, fewer than 900 had registered. This shows that official recognition does not mean everyone will register. The Siraya may face the same problem.

The Siraya are not the only plains people working for recognition. Eight other plains groups—Kavalan, Ketagalan, Taokas, Pazeh, Papora, Babuza, Hoanya, and Makatau—are also trying to get official status. Eight other plains groups have already sent in their applications.

The official recognition is bringing big changes to culture and education. The National Museum of Taiwan History will have special exhibitions in 2027 about how the Siraya brought their culture back to life. President Lai Ching-te, who helped the Siraya when he was mayor of Tainan, called this moment historic. On August 1, Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples' Day, he wrote that the recognition was "an important milestone in the pursuit of historical and transitional justice for Indigenous peoples."

Now in schools in Tainan, children learn Sinckan alongside Mandarin and Taiwanese. Teachers trained by the Talavan family teach students to speak and read the language. For the first time in more than 100 years, Sinckan is not just an old language in old books—it is a living language that children are learning in school. These children carry Siraya blood and are learning to claim it as their own.