*3.4. The Tayal Women's Position and Their Connection to the Land*

Millet culture is rapidly disappearing under policies that encourage the modernization and grounding of Taiwan's indigenous peoples. In losing traditional cultivation culture, the biggest problem is the loss of the connection to the land and adaptability to environmental changes. When we joined the INMIP's walking workshop seven years ago, we gradually felt the importance of the grassroots force and traditional ecological knowledge to the climate change response. Thus, we started the "Millet Ark" Initiative. This movement was started by Pagung in her own village, Tbahu, and is a preservation initiative regarding the bio-cultural diversity of millets.

Taiwan has over a hundred kinds of millets. Moreover, different villages have different traditional uses of millets. Millets can be steamed, made into congee or cakes, used for marinating meat or making wine; each village has their own methods. Pagung's village has not grown millets in over thirty years, mostly because the need for modern currency caused them to switch to cash crops. The traditional phrases, rituals and skills and social practices related to millets all disappeared when they ceased to grow them. The preservation of millets means physically growing them on their fields, not resorting to any scientific methods including freezing seeds. Upon return from Bhutan in 2014, our team has been focusing on bringing back millet cultivation, especially in Pagung's village. Pagung remembered that the seeds of different varieties were gathered from various Tayal village locations and stored by the government. So, the first step was to get these seeds back and find land in the village to plant the millets. Thus, the millets grew from one field to over ten different fields over the past years. The number of participants increases from one person into an entire group of indigenous cultivators.

Continuous support came from the elderly women. They were the first villagers to approach the millet field, and they were the ones who started to share their memories of millet growing with Pagung. They shared many words related to millet, including the names of different millet types, the words for different stages of cultivation, songs, rituals for sowing, harvesting, and storing, as well as millet-related stories. The participation and memories of these women added a lot of cultural and social meaning to our "Millet Ark" initiative. Traditionally, the Tayal's patriarchal society demands women to be less vocal in public, but this does not mean that they are not proactive in the society. The millet preservation movement not only let us realize that women have an active role in the millet cultivation process, but also that a lot of the ecological knowledge is demonstrated in their everyday practices. Table 2 discloses a part of this knowledge. More significantly, the efforts of the women have expanded the field of millets from one piece of land to a landscape of traditional food production (See Figure 8).

**Figure 8.** The restoration of millet foodscape by "Millet Ark" Initiative; (The yellowish part is millet field. Photo by Pagung Tomi).

The millet landscape is a soothing place, for it recalls the elderly women's cultural memories, which include many past feelings that were erased by modernization. Through physical labor and contact to the culturally-meaningful millet, the process brings forth an intimate connection between the individual and community, between people and the earth, and between people and the spiritual presence. This landscape is not "no human being's wilderness." On the contrary, the labor and participation of the people enriches the land with an emotional connection, adding to the meaning of "Tayal country." "Tayal country" basically refers to the socio-ecological system created through the Tayal people's interactions with nature. In this there are not just material but also biological and societal ecological services. This is the force that made the women willing to approach the millet field and gain a kind of healing. We have participated in Tbahu village's sowing, harvesting, and storing

process and simultaneously felt a kind of harmonious rhythm. The healing and affective impact of this millet initiative can never be overestimated. Unlike cultivating cash crops, millets bring smiles, laughter, and rest. This is because it is not done for monetary gain and these women forge a sense of community and a bond of common livelihood through the childhood memories that they rediscover and share. They plant step by step on a terrace field, and the sowing work is finished quickly (Figure 9). As a consequence, the mothers went to rest in the shade, and someone started to hum traditional tunes of rimuy-rimuy-rimuy-so and voices soon joined to make a chorus. This is a soothing scene, in which re-growing the millet balances out the stress of work and distance between people and the earth caused by the logic of a capitalist market. Traditionally, millet growing is accompanied with the rhythm of seasonal change, the ecological interaction of the land, soils, and non-human species, the collaborative work across the age and gender of all family members, and the rituals to connect humans with nature as a whole. In our millet narratives, women take the lead to restore knowledge about millets and by extension, usher the community into the sustainable and resilient future through the present action of "Millet Ark".

**Figure 9.** Tbahu women working in the millet field (Photo by Yih-Ren Lin).

The millet story comes to a symbolic performance when a food rights panel based on this millet initiative was presented in the 2019 annual meeting of the American Studies Association in Honolulu, Hawaii. The panel titled "Building Caring Solidarity Economies: Food Sovereignty, Community Solar, and Gastronomies of Place" conveyed indigenous perspectives in building caring "solidarity economies" around food and energy systems, with Pagung being the primary voice of indigenous vision and wisdom [26]. As a Tayal conservation initiative, the "Millet Ark" features indigenous self-determination and place-making and brings to life the traditional foodscape which would otherwise be consigned into oblivion.

The international conference is not merely an intellectual event but a long walk, which will be continued. This walk is about indigenous knowledge and its relevance to climate change, from the ancient to the contemporary. Our local efforts of almost seven years had a chance to be presented internationally (Figure 10). The purpose of sharing our story was to explain one thing, which is a variation of the average conservationist's slogan, "Think Globally, Act Locally." Our movement emphasizes that "Think Locally, Act Globally" is just as important. Global and local conservation efforts are mutually dialectical, and localized thinking shows the importance of traditional ecological knowledge. Our seven years of practical work has reaffirmed the value of

the ancient knowledge accumulated by Taiwanese indigenous peoples in regards to the current global crisis. In the face of environmental changes, people must adapt and learn in accordance with nature. Our initiative delivers not merely the biological or cultural characteristics of the millets, but how millet growing entails an understanding of the environment.

**Figure 10.** Pagung used Tayal language to illustrate the Millet Ark Initiative and was accompanied with the English translation by Yih-Ren Lin and Chia-hua Lin in the ASA meeting. (Photo by Hsinya Huang).

In Taiwan, millets are the flagship species of the Tayal people's traditional crops. Tayal elder and practitioner Pagung's experience exemplifies how the indigenous people in the trans-Pacific context forge practices that invoke the concepts of traditional knowledge, native science, resilience, and foodscape. In one of the walking workshops later held in the mountainous Tayal villages, Pagung sang, in indigenous words, a song about the migratory journey of her Tayal ancestors, a group of whom walked across the sacred mountains of Papak Waqa and settled in Mknazi as "those who come first." It is in this historical process of migration and settlement that Tayal people develop ways of knowing and understanding the complex Austronesian world of islands, mountains, waters, and food, which the later settlers from the Chinese continent began to appreciate only recently. This knowledge involves land management, relationship between human and non-human beings, foodways, ceremonies and rituals, belief and practices, as well as the connection between the place and seasonal forces in their everyday life, which provide an intellectual stimulus to this paper.
