Taiwan Culture-Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, Their Folklore and Customs-Harvest Festival of the Amis People

Taiwanese Culture-Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples, Their Folklore, and Customs-Harvest Festival of the Amis People

The Amis people have two great festivals in a year, the Sowing Festival and the Harvest Festival, which is especially grand and lively. The harvest festival of the Amis people is also known as the Harvest Festival or Bountiful Year Festival, also known as the "Meilishin Festival", which is held in the eighth month of the lunar calendar every year when the harvest season comes to Taiwan's mountainous areas. Therefore, it is also called the "August Harvest Festival". It symbolizes the sending off of the old and the welcoming of the new, and is full of hope. They call this festival "Molanu Marasta", which means to offer sacrifices to the spirits of the ancestors in order to seek a good harvest and prosperity for human beings and animals. Therefore, they call it "harvest festival", roughly equivalent to the Han Chinese New Year, in general years, the celebration for about ten days. In a normal year, the celebration lasts for about ten days. If there is a good harvest, the officiating priest can decide to extend the festival for a month, until the end of August. The Ami people who live in the Nantou area wait for the men of the community to go to Sun Moon Lake to catch fish before the Harvest Festival is finally over. The night before the festival (comparable to New Year's Eve for the Han Chinese), the men who went hunting stayed in their small houses on the mountains or on the roofs of their cowsheds, while the women went to dance in the squares of their villages and communities. The men are careful to restrain themselves, while the women have fun.

The activities of the festival are varied and colorful, and many of them are held separately for men and women. This practice has always been observed. It is easy to see that the Amis people still have the customs of the primitive society. The first day of August of the Amis people, like the first day of the first month of the Han Chinese, but also than the Han Chinese compatriots have a special. On this day, every family put down the civilization of the age of matches do not use, and line drill wood for fire. This is a strange custom. Early in the morning, the man in the house with both hands tightly clamped a handful of small wood, in another piece of rectangular wooden board, the rapid Shi turn, so that it into the sparks, a kind of grass called Lambazi burned, and will be burning fire used to cook glutinous rice, steamed glutinous rice cake, roasted vegetables ....... The women then put it in a sacrificial basket and bring it to the place of sacrifice to perform the ritual. The sacrifice is very solemn and is presided over by several witches (usually five). After the sacrifice, the women perform the "pestle and mortar music" to the ancestors and the gods; the men carry bows and arrows, knives and spears, and relevant hunting equipment, and hold hunting ceremonies, usually shooting the head of a beast, in order to pray for a successful hunt. The second day, women continue to focus on ancestor worship, men to the mountains to hunt. The men carry the hunted prey to the home of the person in charge of the calendar in the village community and hold another hunting ritual of shooting the head of an animal with a bow and arrow. The chief of the village community then distributes the meat from the hunt equally among the households. During the hunting ritual, women may go to receive the meat, but they are not allowed to touch the bow and arrows, which are forbidden to women at this time. On the third day of the lunar month, the entire community performs the "chiseling of teeth" under the auspices of the chief priest. All children between the ages of eight and thirteen, male and female, are required to chisel the crowns of the two canine teeth of the upper jaw at this time, and after the chiseling of the teeth, the parents drink and celebrate, and then the children are gathered together, resting during the day, and then going to the plaza at night to watch the women dance. This is done until the end of the festival.

Starting from the night of the third day of the night all night long, people held a bonfire dance in the square for several nights, the girls dressed in festive costumes, tied on the head of a variety of grass leaves and a variety of flowers made of headdresses, wearing shells around the neck of the shells carved into a string of beads. The boys put on short clothes and skirts made of buckskin, with a few colorful bird feathers on their heads. People come to the bonfire in groups, and couples sit side by side, chatting and drinking sweet rice wine together. All young men and women sang and danced around the bonfire, people expressed their nostalgia and respect for the achievements of their ancestors in developing the island and building their homeland with joyful moods, and they looked forward to the future with their dancing steps, wishing for a good harvest and a prosperous career in the coming year. Lovers also praise their lovers with songs and dances. Lovers bring their hearts closer together and end up as lovers through the Harvest Festival.