ADDRESS TO RICCI SOCIETY

Christian faith and a laywoman dedicates her life to the Indigenous Peoples

in human development

Temi Nawi （曾瑞琳）

政大民族系兼任講師

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is an honour for me to address the Ricci Society today and I thank you for the opportunity.

I have been asked to talk to you this morning about my activities and my experience as a woman coming from one of the indigenous groups of so called “mountain people” who has spent a good part of her life working for the human and social promotion of the indigenous people of Taiwan.

My name is Temi, Temi Nawi of the Seediq people, part of the Atayal Group, who have for centuries inhabited the mountain area around Puli in the province of Nantou in central Taiwan. I am the first of seven children, five girls and two boys, born to my parents Awi Tado and Rabe Tado, both of the same Seediq people.

My mother was a very traditional woman of her time, practising to a high degree of proficiency the weaving skills of our people and, for the rest, devoting herself completely to her husband, to the duties of the home and the rearing of her children..

My father, on the other hand, was quite a strong character. He was a famous hunter and in the days of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, even as a young boy, he took part with his uncle Puhuk Wallis in the struggle for liberation, including his presence as a witness at the famous Wushe massacre.

Awi, however, never liked to dwell on those days and subsequently never encouraged any of his family to become involved in political activism. He built his home and tilled his fields and, as a young girl and the first child of the family, often took me with him to help out in the small tasks I could then accomplish.

In fact, this may be the moment to underline that neither do I take any part in political

activism nor will I in today’s talk dwell on the political situation in our country, beyond perhaps some passing and grateful references to the growing readiness of our Government to promote and help finance the progress of the indigenous peoples.

Back then to my father, who had a great pride in the history of our indigenous group and a profound knowledge of all its best traditions, as well as a deep sadness about the official discrimination and the self-inflicted weaknesses that held back their progress up to recent times.

I think it was my father’s influence above all that gave me from a very early age a growing desire to work for the social promotion of my own Seediq group and of all the indigenous peoples of this island.

It is no secret to many of you here, but perhaps a surprise to some of you, that for the first twenty-five years of my adult life I was a nun. In my early teens it seemed to me that the best way to serve my people was to become a nun. Oh of course I had visions of myself in a neatly pressed nun’s habit and I was idealistic enough to want to love and serve God, and as the scriptures advise, to love and serve my neighbour for God’s sake.

There was one small difficulty about all that. It was made clear to me that I could not become a nun since I was not a Catholic and there were then no Catholics in my family.

So I became a Catholic. It wasn’t really difficult. I suppose we were what today would be called “animists” but my father had given us very clear teachings from his own tradition about one Supreme Being to whom we owed respect and obedience.

After Senior High School I began to implement my “master plan” by entering the Noviciate of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Tienchung. In due course the Superiors sent me for higher studies to the University of Tainan, from which I graduated with a B.A. in English and Spanish, which qualified me to teach in the government Senior High School in Peitou, Changhua, and later in Holy savior Senior High School run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Tienchung.

After three years teaching my life took another turn. Along with two other Sisters of the Sacred Heart, I was recruited to undertake secretarial and domestic duties in the Apostolic Nunciature in Taipei, which is the Embassy of the Vatican to the Republic of China and also the Representation of our Holy Father the Pope to the Bishops and the Catholic Church in our country.

My own duties for the eight years I served at the Nunciature were mainly secretarial, using my English and my modest knowledge of Spanish to acquire some proficiency in the Italian language in which almost all of the correspondence with Rome was conducted.

This experience in the Apostolic Nunciature doubtless gave me a wider appreciation of the Universal Catholic Church but also made me proud of that Church when I became aware of the great generosity of Caritas Internationalis and Catholic institutions in many lands. Misereor and Missio in Germany, APHD in Australia, MIVA in Austria, CEBEMO in Holland, CRS in the USA and many others, as well as the Pontifical Mission Societies in Rome, helped to sustain the minority Catholic Church in Taiwan and contributed not only to its religious and educational works but also to a whole range of social development projects.

Towards the end of my service at the Nunciature I was offered a scholarship for further studies in Rome. While there my academic mentors encouraged me to pursue a degree course in Missiology and I duly qualified with a Masters in that subject which, apart from its strictly missionary purpose, has also a large component of social development. In fact my written work for the Master’s degree dealt essentially with the educational or social works of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart in Taiwan.

Then I was recalled to Taiwan by my Religious Superiors with the idea that I should teach in one of our High Schools or perhaps even in Fu-jen University. However, I still had the burning desire to work for the human and social promotion of my mountain people and somehow persuaded the Superior General to send me to work in one of the mountain parishes.

I was very happy in this work at first, and especially in the contact with the people, but soon found that the multiplicity of parish duties and demands of community life left little time for the development work I craved and this eventually led to my leaving the Sisterhood.

I apologise for this rather long diversion about my own life as a nun. But before leaving the subject I want to add one word. I was very happy as a Religious Sister and I still keep a deep veneration for Mother Juventia, the first Superior General of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. I am also grateful to the Sisters for giving me my early University education and I greatly admire the continued work of the Congregation as well as maintaining lasting friendship with several of the Sisters who were my contemporaries.

Very fortunately for me, I found ready understanding for my “change of plans” from the Authorities in Rome, from the temporary Administrator of Taichung Diocese Monsignor McCabe and the new Ordinary, Bishop Joseph Wu Yu-rung, and from some of the diocesan and missionary clergy. This enabled me to really become a full-time social activist as a consecrated lay person with the blessing of the local Bishop. In passing I add that at that stage I made a conscious decision to remain, even without vows, as an unmarried woman. For heavens sake I was already forty five years of age and who would have me! Seriously though I did see my single state as a facilitating charism which would enhance the prospect of dedicating myself completely to the service and development of my people as a whole rather than to a family of my own. I add as a small tender P.S. that due to the family circumstances of one of my brothers I later found it possible and desirable to adopt legally as my own daughter his infant of two years to whom I gave the new name Keiti. Now sixteen years of age and well on in Senior High School she frequently drives me half crazy but is still the joy of my life.

From my own experience I was convinced that the first requirement for social progress was access to higher education for girls as well as boys. Up to my time very few indigenous boys and absolutely no girls from the mountain area had access even to secondary level schooling.

Personally, I won a government scholarship to the High School for Girls in Taichung, the first school that admitted pupils from the mountain area. Even then, however, it was the commitment of my parents and my father in particular that made that possible. With six other children to feed he still had to find the means of paying for school uniforms, transport and some pocket money to keep me in boarding school.

From this middle school in Taichung I went, still on government scholarship, to Chunghua Girls Senior High School, the first such institution open to girls in Taiwan where I found myself to be the only indigenous pupil.

But years later, back to my native mountains as a would-be social developer, I realised that all the young people would not be so lucky. There were some poorly equipped schools in the mountain villages but not all parents were willing or could afford to send their children to the better equipped boarding schools in Puli of the other urban centres.

My first endeavour then was to open in Puli a hostel where girls and boys from mountain villages could be housed, fed and supervised in their studies while attending as day pupils in the local Primary, Middle or Senior High Schools.

This I believe was the first such initiative in favour of students from the mountains and it has since been implemented in similar style by all the indigenous groups in Taiwan. It was very difficult in the beginning and only survived by the generosity of my parents in providing me free of charge with sufficient rice and beans to feed the students.

After some time, however, Bishop Joseph Wang became aware of what I was doing and proposed that I put the hostel, as well as other social works of which more later, on a formal basis under his protection. He told me frankly that neither he himself not the Diocese of Taichung disposed of funds for these purposes but he was quite prepared to recommend my projects to Catholic funding agencies abroad.

Thus came into being CARPRS (Catholic Association for Rural People, Research and Service) as a Catholic non-profit organisation. It was of course an NGO, a Non-Governmental Organisation, but I am delighted to tell you that after four years the Government Ministry of the Interior, with very little formality and in a very short time accorded CARPRS formal recognition, which made us eligible also for funding from Local and Central Government sources.

Even with the small fees paid by parents and all this outside support, it was never easy to sustain the hostel programme and fully eight times, due to economic circumstances

or even ultimately destruction by the earthquake of 1999 we were obliged to “move house”, each time renting new premises and generally increasing our intake capacity at each move.

During the past fifteen years more than two hundred students from rural villages have completed their secondary education from the CARPRS hostel. At present some 25 of them have graduated or are about to graduate from Universities in the various branches of Arts and Sciences, Law and Accountancy or from Technical Colleges with ongoing degree programmes in nursing and other medical specialisation’s. Perhaps most significantly of all nearly half of these graduates or graduates-to-be are girls.

Inevitably, I suppose, all of these developments led to a certain public image, not to say notoriety, for Temi Nawi, the former Sister Catherine. I was singled by “ 1994 American Resourceful Women Award of Merit “ to receive a monetary prize from the legacy left by her late foundress , and “a National Social Worker Award of Merit” of the Executive Yuan Yuan-chu-ming Central Committee for Indigenous Peoples in 1997.

After a first report on my work to an international meeting in Taipei I was urgently pressed to become a member of ASPBE (Asian South Pacific Bureau for Education), an organisation backed by the United Nations through UNESCO. This led to much exposure and foreign travel in attending ASPBE annual meetings in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia and New Zealand.

I found these meetings interesting and useful in terms of broadening my own views and comparing them with others but ultimately decided to withdraw from active participation due to pressure of work at home and also in the hope, so far unfulfilled, of convincing some younger person to take up that representational role for CARPRS and for the indigenous peoples in our country. I did however accept an invitation from the Executive Yuan to attend a meeting of the Central Committee for Indigenous Peoples held in Geneva, Switzerland, on the occasion of the UN Year of Indigenous Peoples.

But after all that “big foreign stuff”, let me get back once more to the “nitty-gritty” of social work in the mountain villages. Missionaries like Father Wang S.J. in Taipei and Mr. Wang of PPI (Populorum Progressio Institute) in Taichung had already extended the Credit Union Movement to teach and help our Mountain People to budget their meagre resources and save something for future needs, including the development of their land, crops and housing.

These Credit Unions held regular meetings but I saw the need to supplement them with evening classes for adult men and women, in all the villages in turn, on human development and social issues.

For the men these classes dealt with such subjects as how to work together in peace for the progress of all the community, how husbands should treat their wives and how to discipline their children with better and more Christian methods than some of the harsher practices that had crept into a more gentle tradition of the past. For both men and women there were lessons about the dangers from abuse of alcohol which unfortunately had become a prevailing weakness of the Mountain People.

For women in particular there were lessons on personal hygiene, child and home care and the better use of local produce in the preparation of food instead of over-dependence on expensive tinned goods and other pre-prepared foods of poor nutritive value.

All of these classes are continuing today each year with a fresh enrolment of eager adult “pupils” but now with the added attraction of language courses in the Seediq, Atayal, and Bunun and also using these native languages as the medium of instruction for social teaching. But more about this language question later.

One thing I found that was still alive and practised among our women-folk was the traditional art of weaving, though it had greatly deteriorated from the glorious traditions of the past. Thus began a conscious effort, aided by my mother and some of the older women, to rediscover all of the ancient traditional patterns and methods of weaving cloth and works of basketry and to teach the younger women, and for basketry also some of the young men, how to put them into practice.

For these purposes, I set up in my own home in the village of Chingliou a fully equipped workshop and established two month training programs in weaving and basketry, followed by eleven month practical work sessions producing table cloths, bags and other woven materials as well as all kinds of basketry in bamboo and rattan. Initially we also had an exposition room to show and sell these products to passing tourists but later the Government agreed to underwrite the cost of the two-month training sessions and to pay the trainees a small salary during the eleven month work sessions, which was greatly appreciated especially in the terrible dearth of any paid employment after the devastating earthquake of 1999. The Government also gave us free advertising for the products of our workshop on national television, thus enabling us to receive wholesale orders from merchants interested in selling them. In short this program has been an economic success and I hope, again with Government subsidy, to expand our “cottage industry” into a regular factory in due course.

I would stress, however, that behind and beyond any economic incentive, my personal aim in all of these undertakings was to recover the great traditions of our past, to restore and revitalise the dignity and self-esteem of a society, which had lost all confidence through earlier discrimination and was still prone to excesses in the use of alcohol, with the inevitable consequences of many fatalities through traffic accidents, and even more frequently among young men and boys to what the people call “man-hsing tze-sha” which would translate as “suicide through slow decline into liver disease and death “ as a result of joblessness and depression.

As I have already hinted, I finally came to the conclusion that no permanent progress could be made in the process of restoring the self image of a once proud people without an earnest effort to save our native language. From my father I was aware that our Seediq people had a very rich culture, which had been handed on through an oral tradition of instructive story-telling, recounting our history and passing on our principles of right conduct and the best of our customs from one generation to the next. Now with the pressure from the dominant Chinese languages of Taiwan and particularly from the ubiquitous and invasive presence of the mass media of radio and television that oral tradition was being lost. It was urgent, before the older people of my father’s generation passed on, to collect from them all those stories and traditions and, if at all possible, to record them in a written form of our own native language.

So began a whole new task for me. First of all I had to learn the language more systematically myself and then begin to transcribe taped folk-stories and traditions in a written form of the Seediq language. Our Missionaries had already begun to translate scriptural and liturgical texts into Seediq and the other indigenous languages but I found that their Japanese inspired system of romanization, which does not distinguish between “r” and “l” sounds was not really adequate to the task. I preferred to use the phonetic system of romanization that had been elaborated by Professor... peter Lee Jen-kui of the Academica Sinica at the request of the Ministry of Education.

The first task in recording and then writing down the tales of our old folk was to establish a consistent vocabulary, with all the nuances of gender differences in nouns and the moods and tenses of verbs. It seemed to me that best way to do this was to produce booklets on all the essential elements of indigenous life, food and its stories, shelter in the form of house building and decoration, the traditions of weaving, of animal husbandry and of agriculture. So far two of these booklets have been published with full colour illustrations and three others in black and white versions. Simultaneously we produced five manuals of instruction in the Seediq language.

After the first of my published booklets, Seediq Folk Tales 1996, had been given a prize by the Ministry of Education, I was invited to lecture on the Seediq language in National Chen-chi University and I have now been doing that for six years, commuting from Puli for two days every week of the academic year. For one year I also gave tutorials to the Professors of Advanced Language Studies in National Taiwan University on the special characteristics of the Seediq language.

But, my dear listeners, you have been very patient with me. Allow me at the end to share with you my final ambition which, even if I live for another ten or twenty years, is likely to absorb most of the waking hours of the rest of my life. That is, to complete the compilation of a comprehensive dictionary of the Seediq language. May I count on the help of your prayers to sustain me in that Herculean task.

In conclusion, please don’t get the idea that I think of myself as another Matteo Ricci bringing Christian values to the Mandarins of his time by his profound study of their own culture. No, if I have had any over-all source of inspiration, apart, I repeat, from the example and love of my parents, it comes from the enormously rich Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church which teaches us the dignity of every human being and hence the urgent need to work for Justice and Integral Human Development. This is particularly true when we work in solidarity with the poor, or with those who for any reason have been deprived of full participation in the banquet of life that is God’s gift to mankind. When wars and rumours of wars are once more disturbing our planet it may be worth while to consider again those memorable words of Pope Paul VI in his Encyclical Letter “Populorum Progressio” when he states that Development, as the full accomplishment of a human person, is “the new name of Peace”.

Thank you for your kind attention.