Taiwan’s Council of Indigenous Peoples is promoting the adoption of indigenous names for the country’s Aborigines, according to the Taiwanese Central News Agency. The council is asking Taiwanese aborigines to formally adopt their indigenous names during the periodic process of renewing identification certificate cards, which will occur this year from January 1 to December 31. In an interview with the Taipei Times, Mayaw Biho, an Amis tribe member and a central figure in the name-rectification campaign, commented, "After more than 20 years since the launch of the first name-rectification campaign, many Aborigines are still reluctant to change their names. The limited space for filling out names in most of the forms is inconvenient for Aboriginals, whose names are usually longer than Han ones. Some officers would ask people to delete one character or two to have their name fit in the space, which is ridiculous and rude."
With 12 different tribes and nearly 426,000 people, Taiwan’s aborigines compose nearly two percent of the country’s population. However, according to Lin Chiang-yi, a council official and an Amis tribe member, only 1,000 Aborigines have adopted their own names thus far. Lin Chiang-yi says his council is making a request to organize a "one-stop window" in regions with large aboriginal populations to streamline the process. While many Aborigines, such as Mayaw, would like the name-rectification campaign to continue until all Aborigines have reclaimed their original names, the council has tried to set a reasonably attainable goal of 10,000 by the end of this year.
