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Love of Taroko, Dance of the Taroko Tribe of Taiwan

In my random informal study of indigenous tribes, I want to further learn more about the different indigenous tribes of Taiwan where I seek to trace them to the Philippines. Another tribe is known as the Taroko tribe in Taiwan. There's the Taroko National Park which may remind Filipinos of places like the Mountain Province in Nueva Ecija. There's the Out-of-Taiwan theory which says many of the Filipino natives came from Taiwan. The travels of the Austronesians aren't so easy to trace. The song in the video is called å¤ªé­¯é–£ä¹‹æˆ€ (Tài lÇ” gé zhÄ« liàn) meaning Love of Taroko in English. The song mixes Mandarin and the Taroko language. 

I find the song to be rather enchanting. The beats would feel similar to Filipino indigenous dances. A post I wrote compared Filipino aborigine songs with Taiwanese aborigine songs. The song uses some very indigenous language like li mei su la yo. I think la yo here is spelled as layo. Layo is also a word that appears in several Filipino languages. The video I shared spelled out the native language in the English alphabet while Chinese is spelled in Chinese characters. 

An interesting note about the Taroko people from a government site in Taiwan says:

The Taroko(Truku) tribe is one of Taiwan's 14 aboriginal tribes. The Taroko developed from the Atayal tribe. The Atayal is divided into Atayal Proper and Sedeq Proper. Sedeq Proper is in turn divided into the East Sedeq group, inhabiting Taroko, and the West Sedeq group. Somewhere between A:D. 1680 and 1740 the Taroko people, who then lived near the upper reaches of the Zhuoshui River, found broad wilderness to the east of the Central Mountain Ranges. They then crossed the mountains and settled in the valley of the Liwu River and its tributaries, where the sites of 79 old Taroko villages have already been found. After 250 years of separation from the Atayal, the Taroko(Truku) language has developed differently. The Taroko tribe was officially-approved in 2004 January and became the 12th indigenous tribe in Taiwan.

The Taroko people had a fairly advanced culture. They mainly practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, fishing and gathering. After Taiwan was recovered from Japan in 1945, the Han people introduced the Taroko to rice farming, but the mountain people preferred millet, corn, sweet potato and hill rice. When fighting with other tribes, Taroko people used to cut off their enemies' heads, after which the members of the tribe celebrated with reveling and drinking as a means of promoting the solidarity and safety of the tribe. This custom was abolished many years ago, as have the initiation rituals of facial tattooing and tooth-filing.

The Taroko people's weaving skill was highly developed. Both men and women wore homemade gunny with tea-brown stripes on a white background, and also wore ornaments on their heads, ears, necks, and feet. The craft skills of the Taroko tribe (weaving, gunny spinning, working with wood and rattan, and net knotting) was among the best in Taiwan. Taroko people usually chose small terraces in the mountains on which to establish their villages.

The dance steps would really be very similar to Filipino dance steps. Whoever says that Filipino culture is "purely unique" has to be dreaming. Exploring the evolution of Filipino culture would show that the Philippines is a cultural melting pot.  

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