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

In September 2017, a photographer documented the Talavan family at Green Valley Siraya Park in Tainan, positioned between mountains and water. A simple floating bridge constructed from water pipes and bamboo spanned the pond, sinking several centimeters beneath each footstep and creating a palpable sense of precariousness. When asked to photograph the family on the bridge, Cheng-hiong Talavan, then 85 years old, consented immediately. The entire family stepped cautiously onto the swaying structure—daughter Uma Talavan leading, grandchildren following grandparents, all holding hands for a family portrait. On the pathway to revitalizing Sirayan culture, three generations of the Talavan family were working hand in hand, just as in the photograph, toward shared objectives.

Nine years later, on July 30, 2026, the Siraya people of Taiwan became the island's 17th officially recognized Indigenous group through executive decree. This marked the first time a plains Indigenous people—known as Pingpu—had achieved this status. Taiwan Premier Cho Jung-tai approved the official recognition, which affirmed 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 path to that moment spanned decades of legal struggle and cultural revival. The Siraya belonged to the Austronesian family and spoke a distinctive language known as Sinckan, which was recorded through romanization by missionaries during the Dutch colonial era from 1624 to 1662. Like other Indigenous tribes in Taiwan, Siraya society was matriarchal. The very name "Taiwan" itself derives 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.

Yet centuries of colonial rule nearly obliterated all of this. After the port in the Siraya area was annexed in 1683 by Qing Dynasty China, gradual acculturation led to the Sinckan language falling out of use. During the Qing period, the government compelled Siraya people to abandon their mother tongue, submit to Manchu rulers by shaving their hair, learn the Chinese language, 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 major 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 unique ethnic groups.

The Pingpu were regarded as "well assimilated" with the Han Chinese population and were largely denied not only official Indigenous status but also legal protections, resources, and other benefits. The government's refusal to recognize Pingpu peoples as Indigenous was justified by claims that they had been assimilated into Han Chinese through intermarriage and that an influx of new Indigenous members would expand the pool of privileged citizens, as Indigenous peoples in Taiwan are entitled to reserved seats in the legislature, as well as social and educational benefits through affirmative action.

The space for Pingpu to fight for recognition opened only after Taiwan began democratizing in the early 1990s. Waves of Indigenous rights movements emerged and brought substantial policy changes. The derogatory term "mountain compatriots" was replaced with "Indigenous peoples" in 1994; the mandatory Han surname registration system was dropped in 1995; a cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples was established in 1996 to coordinate related affairs; the collective rights of the Indigenous were codified in 1997; and Indigenous peoples' right to education was codified in 1998. Yet Pingpu descendants' claim for Indigenous status had been deferred as their ancestral lands are flatlands with developmental potential.

The breakthrough came through the courts. After a series of rejections by lower courts and appeals by Siraya groups, the Constitutional Court ruled in November 2022 that it was unconstitutional for the government to exclude the Pingpu communities from official Indigenous status. The court gave the legislature three years to draft legislation on the matter. Parliament finally passed the long-awaited law in October 2025, and it took another nine months before the executive branch conferred official status on the Siraya.

The story of Siraya cultural revival centers on the Talavan family, whose dedication spans three generations. Cheng-hiong Talavan founded the Tainan Pepo Siraya Culture Association in 1999 to reconstruct Siraya people's historical legacy and preserve their culture through oral history and collection of relics. He devoted his entire life to encouraging the descendants of Pingpu Aborigines to awaken to a sense of their identity.

The recovery of the Sinckan language rested on historical documents. In 2006, Taiwan's Academia Sinica historians and linguists announced that their team of researchers had deciphered up to 80 percent of the 187 so-called Sinckan Manuscripts, a set of documents from the 17th and 18th centuries written in the language spoken by the Siraya people using a system of romanization introduced by the Dutch. In order to convert the Siraya to Christianity, Dutch missionaries had studied the Sirayan language, devised a romanized script in which to record it, taught the Siraya people how to use it, and begun translating the New Testament into the Sirayan language. Copies of the Dutch missionaries' translation of the Book of Matthew into Sirayan have survived, and several of the manuscripts are bilingual, with side-by-side Sirayan and Chinese versions of the contents.

Cheng-hiong's daughter Uma Talavan and her husband Edgar Macapili, who is a member of the Bisaya Indigenous people in the Philippines, set out to decode the Sinckan language through word-by-word translation of a Sirayan translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew written by early Dutch missionaries into English, Dutch, and Bisayan, an Austronesian language similar to Sinckan. Macapili, originally a musician, transformed himself into a linguistics scholar. He compared texts in Dutch, English, Sirayan, and Bisayan word by word and phrase by phrase, confronting a fundamental obstacle: when the Dutch wrote down 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, burning the midnight oil on countless occasions, 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 recalled 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 completed could there be textbooks, illustrated books, pocket books, audiobooks, the training of teachers, and finally the introduction of Sirayan language classes into the formal educational curriculum in 2016.

With the language partially recovered, the Talavan family began creating educational materials. They wrote children's books and songs in Sinckan, introducing the vocabulary Macapili had painstakingly reconstructed to a new generation who had never heard it spoken. The third generation, sisters Euphony and Lici Talavan, learned Taiwanese and Sirayan side by side from early childhood and have devoted themselves to revitalizing Siraya culture and spreading awareness. Cheng-hiong Talavan led the younger generation in singing an ancient Siraya song, a moment captured in a YouTube video that would later circulate among Siraya descendants reconnecting with their heritage.

Since its foundation in 1999, the Tainan Pepo Siraya Culture Association has been active in numerous projects. One activity of note is poetry writing, with most poems written in Mandarin or Taiwanese Hokkien but including words of Siraya, promoting awareness of the language among children.

The path to recognition was contested. Siraya civil society groups took a stand against a move from the KMT to create a new legal category called "Pingpu Indigenous," holding a press conference on the matter. The groups objected to what they saw as a separate and potentially subordinate classification that would distinguish them from other officially recognized Indigenous peoples, fearing it would limit their access to the same protections and benefits. The stakes of recognition extend beyond symbolic status. The estimated number of Pingpu people is unclear, though some counts place the number at 980,000, which is around 4 percent of the Taiwanese population. Over 10,000 individuals in Tainan County have previously self-identified as Siraya pending official status.

Beginning in mid-August 2026, thousands of eligible descendants in southern Taiwan finally possessed 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 lean heavily on precedent. Applicants or their direct ancestors have 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-extinction of the Siraya identity was not a matter of biological assimilation, but rather a deliberate administrative formatting spanning multiple colonial regimes.

One Talavan family member, under the username @miss5langs, articulated the significance of the recognition in a post on Threads, writing in Chinese and English. In English, the message read: "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 starting point. She said the impact of the recognition "could be profound, but recognition itself is only the beginning." Hsieh framed 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, provide a cautionary precedent. Although the petition with 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 gap between those eligible and those who actually register suggests that official recognition does not automatically translate into 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 awaiting review by the Council of Indigenous Peoples.

The legal recognition triggers profound cultural and educational shifts. The National Museum of Taiwan History has already announced specialized exhibitions slated 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 vanished is being spoken aloud again. The textbooks that Macapili's glossary made possible line 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.