**3. Taiwanese Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Revitalization: Six Case Studies**

*3.1. Indigenous Food Power: Participatory Action Research on Indigenous Agriculture and Edible Heritage*

The ongoing project, "Farm to Table", uses participatory action research (PAR) methodology to reinforce community-university partnerships. Yeh has been working with college students to grow Taiwanese traditional indigenous crops such as millet and Formosa quinoa on NDHU campus since 2012. The NDHU Millet Farm is not only the first farm in Taiwan to develop indigenous farming knowledge and food culture in a university setting, but this farm also connects food, culture, and community to create a cultural landscape where indigenous elders and students are working and learning together to pass on their cultural heritage [13]. At the same time, Yeh and her student team-food, agriculture, tourism, and sustainability (FATS) are working with the local Amis Ceroh community and the elementary school to cultivate their own millet farm so "lost" traditional foods could be brought back to the table.

The farming process has helped students to develop skills in working with community, discover indigenous values, cultures, traditions, and heritage [14]. The project aims to engage with the Amis Ceroh indigenous community in Hualien and its elementary school's agriculture and food education. Yeh stresses the importance of using cultural knowledge, culinary traditions, and agricultural resources to develop indigenous peoples' ability to exercise and implement empowering opportunity to promote their food heritage and sharing economy. Encouraging meaningful participation by all parties, she jointly explores how agriculture and food turn into edible heritage and become multiple resources for local economic development and education. The initiative emphasizes indigenous peoples' capacity for adaptability, resilience, and restoration of traditional agriculture and food use, as well as food production in response to changing conditions.

Food is commodity and culture too. For indigenous peoples, food can be the basis of a collective social movement to make culturally appropriate foods visible, and exercise indigenous heritage.The project considers the ways in which edible heritage is identified, experienced, and brought into the present. It also examines the role of tourists as consumers of edible heritage. By engaging in PAR processes, the local people and students articulate and examine how their knowledge is produced, reproduced, and experienced. Out of those articulations, locals and student groups jointly implement action plans that address issues salient to them. Edible heritage matters because indigenous peoples' right to agriculture and food is inseparable from their rights to land, territories, natural resources, culture, and self-determination. Yeh argues that the community-campus food projects can begin as "incubators", pioneering new nodes in an alternative food chain for the local region. At the same time, experiential learning in indigenous agriculture and foodways deepens connections to place, integrates values beyond those embedded in conventional food system, and fosters new ethical choices, both for the cultural industry and for community participants.

### *3.2. Cultural Revival of the Kebalan Tribe—Heritage and Re-Creation in Historical Practice*

This research explores how Kebalan Tribe continues to practice its culture and rituals in the context of modern society. The development of intangible culture is manifested in the accumulation and the transmission of memories. Traditional beliefs, regardless of origin, have a dual nature. They are collective traditions or memories, but they are also concepts or customs derived from the understanding of the present [15]. Memories may be translated into an idea or symbol, and acquire a meaning, becoming an element in the system of social ideas. This is why tradition and current ideas can coexist [15].

The ethnic group revival movement of the Kebalan Tribe started following the "Fakong Night" performance at a sarcophagus exhibition in 1987. For nearly 30 years, certain cultural traditions, such as myths, ritual activities, songs and dances, tribal language learning, banana silk cloth, traditional skills, food, and clothing, have been restored or created. In addition, ethnic totems such as *gasup*, *saur*, and others have also been created, displaying

the spirit and cultural values unique to the tribe and drawing recognition for the local tribal people. In the first year of the project, the most representative sea rituals and harvesting ceremonies were explored. When the contemporary social environment underwent change, people of Paterongan and Kodic took into account historical memory and traditional customs. They sought from within solutions and ways of holding events, such as the regeneration of new and old sea ritual sites and hosting events through traditional cross-ethnic *mipaliu* (mutual aid and trade). They engaged in spontaneous operations, formed alliances, and represented meanings.

In the transmission of rituals or making of products with ethnic characteristics, the Kebalan Tribe's cultural and social response can be found in that the tribe chose to use meaningful space and historical memory as the starting points for identity, thus reorganizing culture for the contemporary era. The new practices allowed memory "appear" to the present. As for the distinctive cultural products integrated into myths (legends) and historical memory, these products were endowed with images that could be recognized by the public as being characteristics of Kebalan Tribe. Our research found that the adapted rituals or commodities emerged out of the interaction between the Tribe and the larger society.

The study was intended to develop specific implementation models to serve as examples for other ethnic groups. These models demonstrated flexibility, as they strategically used traditional methods to achieve cultural heritage. During the 30-year revival process, vanishing cultures on the brink of extinction revived crafts (e.g., banana silk weaving, wood carving, and bamboo weaving), rituals, and agriculture and fishery practices. Studies and analyses showed how contemporary adaptations and reorganization were integrated into the myths of the tribe, how historical memory generated characteristic products for economic development, and how these actions strengthened tribal identity, and enabled the tribal communities to become a "living traditional culture".
