**3. TEK among Amis Freediving Spearfishing Men**

A'tolan (Dulan) is a village located in Taitung County on the southeast coast of Taiwan; it was originally inhabited by indigenous Amis people, but today, they make up only half of the total population of the village. For the Amis, the community can be understood on two different levels: one is the administrative village including all the residents in the village and its governing institutions, mostly created by the Taiwanese government, and the other is mostly based on the relationships among the local indigenous people—niyaro' (tribe) in the Amis language. The following descriptions are based on the notion of niyaro'. A'tolan is a coastal community, and the marine area is very important to local Amis culture. Gathering food from the tidal flats and ocean fishing are closely connected to Amis society and culture, and the people possess comprehensive marine knowledge. Generally speaking, the gathering activities at the intertidal zone, called "lakelaw", are mostly practiced by women and involve picking up edible seaweeds and shellfish. Sometimes, men also catch crabs or other edible marine life. As for fishing, the Amis have three traditions. They are mitilu (gill net), tafukul (throwing net), and micinko/mipacin (spearfishing) [3] (p. 2). All three kinds of fishing require substantial knowledge of the local marine life. The environmental understanding of both the intertidal zone among Amis women and the inshore open water among Amis men are fundamental to understanding the broader marine context of natural-resource management. In this paper, I focus on the freediving spearfishing men as one of the key TEK holders to start the discussion of local marine management, due to the other TEK practices needing further research in Taiwan. Since the Japanese colonial period, freediving spearfishing has been a popular and important fishing method, especially for men aged 25 to 50.

I am going to briefly describe the local marine TEK that is practiced by A'tolan Amis spearfishing men based on the four TEK categories described above [16].

#### *3.1. Knowledge of the Local Marine Area*

Local marine knowledge is comprehensive compared to the government's, ocean scientists', and environmental NGOs' data, which is parallel to some desertification research showing that external expert knowledge is based on questionable evidence and that it has been privileged over local knowledge primarily for political, economic, and administrative reasons that do not take indigenous ecological knowledge into account [22]. For example, after a reef-check project carried out by the NGO the Taiwan Environmental Information Association from 2010 to 2013, they announced that many fish species were disappearing from the Taitung area (where A'tolan is located) or, at least, that there were no data on them [23]. However, local Amis spearfishing men have a different understanding of the situation. The reason for the different perspectives is the different methods used to recognize fish species. The NGO performs the reef check only once a year and takes only one day for it; although they use a scientific method to collect the data, their knowledge simply cannot compare with that of the local spearfishing men who dive daily as long as the conditions are good enough. Therefore, local Amis spearfishing men are familiar with the local marine area and have developed marine knowledge that the scientists or the NGOs cannot match due to discrepancies in scientific methodologies, the inadequate temporal scales that frame scientific observations, and the dismissal of the regular observations by generations of local indigenous resource users. This could be compared to Hobson's conclusion in the Canadian Arctic, where the absence of scientists from winter environments limited observational data across seasons [24].

Local marine knowledge among A'tolan Amis spearfishing men can be briefly described as follows.

#### 3.1.1. Fish and Other Edible Marine Life

The names of reef fish are an important index in fishing culture among the A'tolan Amis. The fish species that are frequently speared are listed in Appendix A, Table A1.

Among the reef fish in Appendix A, Table A1, there are some features that make the local knowledge different from general biological knowledge:


#### 3.1.2. Traditional Marine Territory as a Complex System

Taiwan is the state governed by the Han Taiwanese settlers. The indigenous peoples of Taiwan only account for slightly more than 2% of the total population of Taiwan. In the colonial history, indigenous peoples lost most of the traditional land-tenure rights. The authority formally signed "A New Partnership Between the Indigenous Peoples and the Government of Taiwan" in 2002, signed by the president and representatives of the indigenous peoples. Since that year, the government and academia have jointly initiated survey projects for the traditional territories of indigenous peoples. Since then, the authority has gradually developed a legal framework in the traditional territories of indigenous peoples. However, it focuses merely on lands and excludes private lands from indigenous traditional territories. There is only one indigenous region of the indigenous peoples that has been recognized by the government from 2002 to 2020, and most of the rest of the traditional indigenous territories still cannot be legally recognized by the state.

Since 2000, due to many large-scale tourism-development projects led by the government or consortia on the east coast of Taiwan, there have been conflicts with the local indigenous peoples [25]. The A'tolan Amis did not follow the legal regulation established by the authority but proclaimed their traditional territory by their own cognition on 28 February 2017, which not only includes the land territory but also the marine area (see Figure 1 for the traditional marine area). A'tolan is the first indigenous community to proclaim the traditional marine territory in Taiwan. The traditional marine territory has been identified since 2003 and has been modified several times by the A'tolan Amis. Based on the map in Figure 1, we can see that the coastal naming system is much more complex than the governmental administration's naming system. The names on the map mostly reflect social memory and geographical or marine features (for example, the current). However, the administration's naming system is much simpler, mostly following the administration villages such as Jialulan, Fushan, Dulan, Xingchang, Xinglung, Lungchang, etc. (see Appendix A, Table A2).

**Figure 1.** A'tolan Amis' traditional marine territory, italics are Chinese or Japanese names. (source: Google Maps at https://reurl.cc/b5N8V6) [26] (pp. 27–28).

1. According to the map in Figure 1, the closer to the village, the more complicated the names for coastal areas; away from the village center, the names for the marine area are fewer and simpler.


**Figure 2.** The currents and underwater landscapes around Dulanbi (source: based on Google Maps).

Furthermore, each spearfishing man has his favorite and least-favorite spots; the favorite one would be a "secret base", mostly because the spearfishing man had caught some big game in this area. As for the least-favorite spots, these would mostly be such because they are associated with bad memories, e.g., someone they were close to drowned there.
