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Why the Brand Is Named TALUMA

2026-07-09

In the Amis language, TALUMA means "to return home."

But honestly, this name has always been a little complicated for me — because for a very long time, I didn't know where my home was.

It sounds sentimental to put it that way. Yet as a description of an inner sense of belonging, it's actually quite precise.

When I was studying in the textiles department, the department head knew I had Amis heritage and said to me, "Oh! Then you could do this as your graduation project." My only thought was: Why should I have to carry this subject? And why are you the one assigning it to me?

It isn't that I look down on my own people. It's that the phrase "cultural revival" is far too heavy — I didn't feel I could shoulder it. Honestly, I still don't feel I shoulder it, and I feel even less entitled to speak on anyone's behalf. It's only that, as I've grown older, I've begun wanting to comb through all those things I understood only in part.

But "figuring it out" was harder than I imagined.

Many people interested in Indigenous culture assume, as a matter of course, that I must know where I come from. But I don't. I really don't.

Indigenous peoples had no writing and no genealogies; somewhere along the line, in some generation, the culture was simply severed. To know where you come from, there was never a ready-made archive to leaf through.

Nor is it something you can solve by asking family — at least not for me. People often say, "Then just go back to your tribe and ask the elders." But I have no tribe to return to. By my grandmother's generation — perhaps earlier — we were no longer living in one. So even the elder closest to me doesn't know most of these things.

So I had to use the clumsiest method, reconstructing it piece by piece: from a handful of remembered word-sounds, the styles of traditional dress passed down in the family, the places my elders lived as children — and so on — assembling an answer: I am, most likely, Nanshi Amis.

The way I reasoned it out — the process of discovering my own origins — went like this. At first I didn't know where I belonged at all. I only knew:

  • My mother lost her father when she was three. My illiterate grandmother, now the family's sole provider, took my mother from Ji'an up north to Taipei County (today's New Taipei City) to find work.

  • My grandmother was born in Ji'an in 1945.

  • They told me I was Amis.

Until I was fifteen, that was all the information I had.

At fifteen, my family learned of the Indigenous-language certification policy and hoped I would sit the exam. But the registration form asked you to check which branch you belonged to. I asked the elders in my family; not one could answer. It wasn't that they wouldn't say — they genuinely didn't know. My grandmother had never lived in a tribe herself; she didn't even know her own Han Chinese name until she was sixteen. All she could give me were scattered clues. In the end, using the few words I knew and cross-checking them against an online Indigenous-language dictionary and its pronunciations, I confirmed that I am Nanshi Amis — only then could I take the exam.

Only later did I realize that even the branch "Nanshi Amis" was never defined by Indigenous people ourselves, but was a classification made by Japanese scholars. In 1935, several anthropologists divided the Amis into five regional groups — Nanshi, Xiuguluan, Coastal, Malan, and Hengchun — and this scheme later became the standard version.

But its basis is shaky, drawn mainly from geography and migration history, on inferential ground that isn't solid. The origins and migrations of the Amis are complex, hard to divide cleanly into fifths. And the reason those lineages are so tangled has everything to do with war and colonization: under outside force, the tribes were mostly scattered against their will.

Take Cikasuan (七腳川). In 1908, amid conflicts over forced labor and treatment, the Japanese colonial government launched a large-scale military and police operation against the Cikasuan community. A settlement that had stood for centuries was broken apart, its people dispersed to other villages and even removed to Taitung. The original site was rebuilt into Japan's first state-run immigrant village in Taiwan — Yoshino Village — today's Ji'an in Hualien, the very place my grandmother grew up.

I suspect I may be a descendant of Cikasuan. But I can't confirm it; I have only a few clues left to piece together. My grandmother was the 12th of my great-grandmother's 13 children. Estimating roughly one birth per year and counting back, my great-grandmother would have had her in her twenties. Counting back again, my great-grandmother's own birth may have fallen only a little more than a decade after the Cikasuan Incident of 1908. In other words, she may well have been among the first or second generation to grow up on that land right after the incident — land just seized, just renamed "Yoshino Village."

I know that estimating by "one child per year" is crude, with a margin of error of several decades. But even if we widen the timeframe, my great-grandmother's era still sits close to the event. It's just that our family kept no clan name to check against, and I can't prove whether her generation, or an earlier one, ever migrated. So "I belong to Cikasuan" remains, in the end, a conjecture.

There are two layers of absurdity in this.

The first: I am using a weakly-grounded framework, defined by outsiders, to search for my real roots.

The second: I plainly have Indigenous blood — yet because my last three generations never lived in a tribe, I'm the one who has to prove my own identity. It's like an innocent defendant in court, made to prove they didn't do it.

So, as you can see, everything I know of my own origins rests on books, papers, and my own inference. This is why TALUMA is called TALUMA — Amis for "to return home." My design process is my journey back to my roots.

That process does make designing harder than the usual workflow. Anyone in design knows the "mood board": before starting a project, you gather piles of material, photos, and references and collage them onto a board. Back in design school we really did assemble these by hand; now most people use Pinterest. But when I work on TALUMA, what's often in front of me is just a pile of question marks — the material is so scarce, and my own experience so fragmentary, that I usually have to read a paper or a whole book before I can even begin to think about what to design.

And yet, in less than a year of running TALUMA, I've been given many precious gifts.

First: the northern Amis practice name-inheritance. At 32, I inherited my great-grandmother's name — Fo^nok.

Second: after launching TALUMA's first collection, 尋草蒔歲 (Planting Seasons), I gave my grandmother a printed bag of my own design.

We can never recover our roots — but through forms like these, we anchor who we are. We need no family house, no clan name, and we are still one family, still Amis.

A settlement scattered in the physical world is, through symbolic means, drawn back together — my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and me, four generations reconnected.

I will no longer feel small over a life I never got to live. I will no longer pretend to come from a tribe in order to prove I'm "pure" enough. I no longer believe that only purity earns the right to tell Indigenous stories — because it is precisely the Indigenous people of the 21st century who wear many faces.

TALUMA is the process of a rootless person who, following a single name, learns as she walks, makes as she learns, and stitches herself together along the way. I am on the road. And I believe that on this road, I am not the only one.

References

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