Mountain Hawk-Eagles in the Indigenous Culture

Like most of the indigenous people in the world, the indigenous culture in Taiwan connects deeply with nature and wildlife, with lots of emphasis on feathers of birds of prey.

To the Paiwanese, there are four stages of afterlife. When a member dies, his soul will transform into a Hundred-pace Viper, and then into a Mountain Hawk-Eagle, and ultimately turns into water after the Eagle dies. It is therefore believed that the triangular pattern on the Eagle’s primaries comes from the same pattern on the Hundred-pace Viper. These beliefs have been passed down verbally as stories and legends. Even till this day, the Vipers and the Eagles are being worshiped as the ancestral spirits, existing both in the wild and in the form of totem, paintings and other artwork.

As the last distinguishable form of a Paiwanese soul, Mountain Hawk-Eagle is a sacred bird, representing the beauty, braveness and holiness of an ancestral spirit. It is therefore that only the chiefs of a tribe and very few nobles who have a reputable status are allowed to wear the feathers of Mountain Hawk-Eagles.

A legend of Mountain Hawk-Eagle in Paiwanese culture (1)

During one of our interviews, a female elder from the alpha chief family₁ has told a more complicated version of the legend of Mountain Hawk-Eagle. In the story she told us, there was a young man named Adis. Adis was the first son of the “vusam mamazangiljan” – the alpha chief and chief woman. When Adis had come of age, his parents had in mind that he would marry a young woman who had an equivalent social ranking. But Adis was already in love with another young woman, who was from a lower social hierarchy, and so he ran away to escape from his unwanted marriage. He went deep into the forest and refused to return home. Helplessly, the alpha chief asked the young woman, whom Adis was so deeply in love with, to bring Adis home.

When this young woman walked up to Adis, Adis responded with a sad voice, saying that everything was too late. He then pulled away his cape that was his only clothing from his body, and the woman could see that Adis’ legs had already transformed into the tail of a Hundred-pace Viper. He turned into a Hundred-pace Viper in the end. As the years went by, his body thickened and shortened. At the very end of the story, Adis turned into a Mountain Hawk-Eagle.

₁”vusam mamazangiljan” is the alpha chief of a Paiwanese tribe. In the traditional social hierarchy, a tribe has three chiefs – let us refer to them as the alpha, beta and gamma. The ranking is passed down through generations, and so what is referred to the chiefs can also be referring to their families. The word “vusam” means “seed” and is thus an expression for the eldest son.