*3.3. The Bio-Cultural Diversity of Millets in the Context of Tayal People*

When Pagung began to grow millets at home in 2016, she had little experience and received many skeptical eyes from the villagers. The village Tbahu like many other indigenous villages in Taiwan has gone under the influence of market economy which means farmers got used to growing cash crops. Tbahu is a famous and an important site for growing tomatoes to supply the urban area like Taipei, the capital. Few villagers would recognize the value of growing back the traditional crop, millet, because they do not find it worthwhile in terms of income. Traditionally, millet is their staple food, but the cultivation habit has been replaced by rice paddy since Japanese colonized Taiwan in 1895, in order for the government to fix them in one single location and prevent them from migrating. Therefore, this village has abandoned millet growing for quite a long time. Under such circumstances, Pagung's millet dream was hard to realize; nonetheless, she managed to find millet seeds collected by researchers from other Tayal territories and preserved in the government's seed bank. She also found a piece of land and began to grow them.

She received little attention until one day an old woman visited her millet field. Pagung was surprised by her appearance and asked her why she was here. The old woman started to tell stories about millet, reminding her of many childhood memories. She began to tell Pagung knowledge related to millet including the long- lost vocabulary about the names of different millets, rituals, and agricultural practices to take care of the millet field. Pagung started to interview the elders in the village, including her own father, and recorded their knowledge about millet. Table 2. Ethno-classification of millets known by Tbahu villagers shows the vocabulary of millet varieties.

Seven different varieties of millets have been identified, each carrying an indigenous name, based on their colors and other characteristics. Indigenous peoples preserve them by growing and caring them in their environment and everyday practices rather than in the seed bank as the main-stream bio-science does. In this in situ way, language and culture of the millet accompany the biological diversity. Pagung witnessed the whole process of recovering Tayal millets in the past 5 years, at different stages of growing millet, for example, clearing the field by slashing and burning, seeding, weeding, thinning, bird-repelling, and harvesting. Pagung's people start to plant the seeds by observing the blossoming of mountain cherry trees around February but the phenology is now seriously challenged by the climate change. Moreover, while slashing and burning practices used

to be regarded by colonial Japanese experts as out-of-date agriculture, they recovered sophisticated knowledge through their practices, which we will explain later in the migratory section. Rituals at different stages represent indigenous people's relationship with the land and more broadly their cosmology. Knowledge related to naming, resources usage technology and skills, social institution, spirituality, belief, and worldview are richly embodied through Pagung's long-term social practice by growing millet. The cultural and social life surrounding millet would not be possible if millet seeds were only preserved in the low-temperature refrigerator under the scientific project of a seed bank for biological diversity.


**Table 2.** Ethno-classification of millets known by Tbahu villagers.

Pagung's initiative of recovering millets has gained support from a small grant of Ministry of Culture as well as collaboration from the universities. Over the years, one plot of land has grown up to ten plots and become a significant landscape of millets in the village. Attracted by the landscape, more villagers came to serve as volunteers, especially the older women. They revealed stories about millets. Story-telling then becomes a common way of life when there are significant rituals held for millets such as seeding or harvesting. These stories include villagers' collective memory and knowledge related to millets. It also constitutes and reconnects the relations of the villagers to their traditions surrounding the land and their ancestors.
