< Overview >
Taiwan is a small island located in the southeast of the Asian continent, west of the Pacific Ocean with rich resources. Special cultures and traditions are the most striking points in Taiwan. Indigenous people were the first group of people that settled in Taiwan. Nowadays, there are 16 indigenous groups left in Taiwan. The Amis, Paiwan, and Atayals made up most of Taiwan’s indigenous population. They each have different cultures due to the different physical features of their land. All groups of these indigenous people are facing the same problem; cultural loss and their traditions aren’t being passed down to the next generation successfully.
The indigenous people were the earliest people who settled in a country or land. They are divided into different nations based on their living areas and traditions. In Taiwan, there are 16 indigenous nations, and the Atayal are the ones we are going to focus on. Among the 16 others, the Atayals' distribution is the largest, covering one-third of the mountains in the middle and north of Taiwan. Like all other indigenous nations, they also have the tradition of weaving, represented by their unique patterns and meanings. At first, they weave because the technology wasn’t developed, so they needed to make their daily needs by themselves. Their technique has become great, which allows them to create their own kind of art. But as technology is developing, people no longer need to weave by themselves. Meanwhile, this tradition is being forgotten.
Few people still want to replicate their traditions. We are going to interview Yuma Taru, who wants to bring the Atayal weaving culture back to the public. She started to work in this field at 29 and now it's been almost forty years. She has always been trying to bring the weaving tradition back into life. To understand more about the distinctive weaving culture of the Atayals, we are going to explore their specialized crafting mastery in this project.
Our percentage of using the internet at home is more than 80%. We often use it for research. We have 7 workstations with internet access in our classroom. Our connection speed in our classroom is 10.58 mpbs. The speed of downloading is 2 mpbs. We connect to the internet more than six times in our classroom.
After deciding our topic, we searched for a lot of information about the Atayal weaving tradition online, including who we could interview. We successfully found Tr. Yuma Taru, who was famous in this field, and tried to contact her. We found plenty of information about her and found her email. We sent an email inviting her to the interview. We sent 3 emails to her, but she didn’t reply to any of them. To overcome this problem, we decided to call Tr. Yuma Taru. We called her based on the contact information online, but it turned out to be all wrong. To overcome this problem, we looked at videos and articles about her and found that she worked at Liang studio. Therefore, we called the studio and finally were able to contact Tr Yuma Taru.
Participating in the international cyber fair means allowing ourselves and others to learn about a topic that is important to our community but that we rarely explore. We may learn about Taiwan and individuals who have sacrificed to make the community a better place, and we can share that information with others, allowing the tradition of action to be passed along.
The process of choosing a topic, researching, interviewing, and organizing the information we get is different from the school’s original way of teaching. We learn from the procedure until we finish our course work. It was a precious experience. Teamwork had taken up a big part of our project. We were able to collaborate and work on different parts each of us was good at, and splitting jobs made the whole process of finishing the project easier. The internet provides a huge amount of information, so we can ask more detailed and direct questions about the procedure and process of weaving. We also had an opportunity to interact with Yuma, the interviewee, from setting up interview questions to asking and taking notes of the answers. This made great memories and connections with people, not only with the internet and already written information. These interactions are not found in our normal curriculum, but in this competition. The surveys revealed that students and adults do not have the chance to learn about traditional weaving mastery, and we were able to share the wisdom of Atayals as learners, provide information and knowledge, and achieve certain standards of work and advanced tasks.