Galaigai Balasasau and her husband Yang Wensha

SNA (Kaohsiung) — For the past five years, the Kaohsiung City Government has been evicting residents of a community known as the city’s oldest indigenous settlement. But even though their houses have largely been torn down, some of the residents still refuse to move.

Most of the members of the Ljavek community are from the Paiwan, one of Taiwan’s sixteen official indigenous peoples who make up about 2% of the island’s population.

The Ljavek community began to take shape in the 1950s, when members of the Paiwan moved down from the mountains to seek work and settled along a canal. Ljavek is a Paiwan word that means “by the waters.”

As Kaohsiung developed, the canal was filled in and became a main road. The Ljavek and their corrugated houses stayed as the city changed around them, and members of other indigenous groups and the majority Han population also moved in. Today, outside the homes that are still standing, they can see the landmark Kaohsiung Eye Ferris Wheel at Dream Mall, Taiwan’s largest shopping mall, and they are a few doors down from IKEA and Costco outlets.

The Ljavek community’s roots go back three and even four generations, as families have grown up here, speaking the Paiwan language and performing ceremonial rites with their neighbors.

Galaigai Balasasau, who moved to the community as a young child in the 1960s, says she won’t move unless it’s to a place where everyone can continue to live together.

“We are a tribe; most of us are indigenous people,” she said. “If you really want us to leave here you need to have a complete plan in place for us to go somewhere else to live, because this is our hometown, we have taken root here, we are already attached to the environment, everyone being together.”

The Ljavek community is in a prime spot close to Kaohsiung Port and new landmarks such as an exhibition and convention center that are part of a big redevelopment plan. The municipal government declined to be specific about what the Ljavek land would be used for when asked by the SNA.

The Kaohsiung City Government considers the Ljavek buildings to be illegal, and three waves of demolishment took place from 2015 to 2018. Of the 41 households that lived there in 2015, only nine now remain, or about twenty to thirty people, said Lin Tung, director of the southern office of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, an NGO.

Most of the members of the Ljavek community signed agreements with the city government and have moved to two social housing complexes in other districts of the city. Their rental leases will run out after eight to ten years.

Lin says many of the residents were scared they would be left with nothing if they didn’t sign the agreements with the government. She said the compensation money they were given was not enough to buy a new home, or to pay even half a year’s rent in Kaohsiung.

The Ljavek work nearby in factories or in jobs such as teachers and train drivers, so have to travel further or find new work, said Lin. Their culture, including the wearing of traditional dress and an annual harvest festival to thank their gods is also affected, she said. “The elders won’t be able to teach all the children how to make the clothes or art.

“The young children will speak less and less of their mother language, because their neighbors will be Han, so they will have to speak Chinese,” she added.

The government said it is investigating the feasibility of the residents’ preferred “333 model.” This is based on a previous settlement plan for a 200-member tribe in Taipei in which the cost of building a new community was split three ways between community members, the government, and a bank loan. Kaohsiung’s government also said that if members of the Ljavek need financial help to buy a home they are eligible to apply for subsidies earmarked for economically disadvantaged indigenous Taiwanese from the central government.

Today, around half of indigenous Taiwanese live in cities, rather than in the traditional mountains or lowland homes of their tribes. They move for work, and are usually spread out in urban areas rather than forming their own recognized communities.

The Ljavek community began when members of three tribes from Pingdong, a rural county that borders Kaohsiung, set up home next to the canal in 1953, said Kang Yi-ren, the head of the Ljavek community committee. They came looking for work, and brought their own wood and other materials to build houses, because it was too difficult to travel from Pingdong to go to work every day, he said.

When Galaigai and her parents moved there in the 1960s, the Ljavek were hidden away next to the canal in an industrial area. “So few people knew we were here,” she said.

Even though the early days were tough because her family was poor, she has fond memories of the kindness around her. “When I was four or five years old, we didn’t have anything to eat. We would say ‘mother, I’m hungry.’ We would cry. The neighbors heard us crying and gave us food,” she said, crying again at the memory. She began working in factories at the age of thirteen.

Galaigai and her husband Yang Wensha live in a house full of traditional Paiwan wood carvings of human heads, snakes, and animals by Yang, who is an artist.

Galaigai says that the couple, who are both from the same village in Pingdong, can’t go back because they don’t have any land there. They said they would be willing to move if the government would rent out land to their community so they could all live together again.

“Living together is part of our culture,” said Galaigai, 59. “We are a tribe, a group of families. We have a common language, so that’s why we want to live in one place like this. We have the same culture and can share it with our children.”

One of their remaining neighbors is Lin Guan-chun, who is of the Pinuyumayan indigenous group from Taidong, on Taiwan’s east coast. Outside, his home has rows of plants and his registered house number is attached to the wall. Inside, he lives in a small space with a back seat of a car for his sofa. “This used to be where my fish pond was, and my bathroom and my trees,” said Lin. Two years ago, the main part of his house, where he brought up his three sons and three daughters, was demolished.

Lin Guan-chun

Lin, 70, came to Kaohsiung at the age of sixteen to escape poverty–as a child, his parents couldn’t afford to buy him shoes. He learned how to drive, and became a tourist bus driver. Now retired, in the afternoons, you can hear him from the road playing his keyboard and guitar and singing.

“I don’t like big buildings, I don’t want to live where they want to put us, on the third floor or fifth floor,” he said. He said he pays NT$23,000 (¥82,000) per year in land tax, despite the demolition of most of his home.

Lin, of the NGO, said they were still in discussions with Kaohsiung city government to press the case for the Ljavek to be resettled together. She said the destruction of the Ljavek community was also a loss for the whole city.

“In Taiwan, it is rare to see whole tribes living in the city, and this is one less opportunity for Han people to see their life and traditional culture,” she said.

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