One of the most illuminating moments in Scott Simon’s Truly Human comes with the account of a sister and brother on opposite sides in Taiwanese politics. Igung is protesting against the local cement factory, which is on tribal land. Her brother Kimi thinks that the cement factory is a good thing, because it gives him a job that helps pay for his tribal tattoo website, and the managers are happy to look the other way when he goes hunting, which is otherwise illegal on former Truku territory. Eventually, the sibling stand-off becomes so strident that both of them run for political office on rival tickets, fatefully splitting the local clan vote between two members of the same family.

The title “truly human” derives from the term seediq bale, a native term that can be unpacked in multiple directions. Simon begins his book with a kindly villager who points out that everyone is human, really, including the nice anthropologist. But this gesture of cordial friendship rather ignores that fact that almost all the Taiwanese indigenes have terms for themselves in their own languages that simply mean “people” – and woe betide those non-people from the next valley if they wander onto our hunting grounds. Simon gets a sense of this himself when villagers start feeding him morsels of food, joking that in times past they would be doing so as part of the ritual to welcome his disembodied skull.

In chapters that focus on several crucial terms of indigenous language, Simon investigates how they have been misunderstood by the Taiwanese government. Across seven decades under the Republic of China, indigenous people have shifted in state consciousness from being idle savages, to suspiciously Japanese-speaking yokels, to “mountain compatriots”, to an invisible underclass “passing” as Han Chinese, to a weaponised minority that helps bolster the voting register. Simon is particularly compelling on their voting record, pointing out that contrary to the image fostered by the media, many of them skew “blue” towards conservativism, on the grounds that only the Nationalist (KMT) party is Chinese enough to appease the People’s Republic, and hence keep them out of their hair.

Seediq Bale, of course, was also the title of the 2011 film better known abroad as Warriors of the Rainbow (pictured), an account of the 1930 Musha Incident in which aggrieved tribesmen massacred Japanese colonists at a school sports day. Simon winningly investigates the way that story has spun out, noting for example that being “truly human” for tribal youths meant finding an excuse to be worthy of their ancestors by taking a human head. “It is no longer practised,” observed Simon wryly, “and thus can no longer be directly experienced through participant observation.”

Such a belief is part of the indigenous habitus known in many native languages as gaya – the same set of beliefs and taboos that regulated hunting, tattooing, weaving, marriage customs and funerary rights. Simon is ideally placed to examine what gaya seems to mean, not only for historical Truku and Atayal peoples, but for their modern descendants, one of whom confides in him that it was “really terrible.”

At some level, Simon’s account sits uneasily within the frameworks of academic publishing. So much of this material might have been better presented as a memoir, rather than snippets of fieldwork, leavened with historiographical commentary. But this is a common factor of much writing on indigenous peoples – many of the books on my shelves about Australian Aborigines and Canadian First Nations struggle to defy the tropes and traditions of the Euro-American structures that have been imposed on them. The further to the philosophical left one goes, the more such dialectics turn into endless nit-picking and hand-wringing, but mercifully Simon steps back from a precipice of self-doubt that might have stopped him writing anything at all.

In the process, he refers to Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, which confronts the language of indigenous rights, noting that it is hardly a victory when native people win “concessions” from the state, since the very concept tacitly accepts that those rights were ever the state’s to concede. Simon applies this with particular value to the drawn-out spats over hunting in Taiwan, in which the Republic of China piously turned the Truku homeland into a national park (Taroko Gorge, spelled as per the Japanese mispronunciation) … and then announced it was illegal to hunt there.

Hunting is of vital importance to the Truku. As with many other indigenous people, it forms not only the basis of acculturation, but also a form of bonding, socialisation, and education – Simon’s accounts of the what he learns from the sounds (bird divination) and smells (there are cobras nearby) of a hunting expedition are a snapshot of thinning native knowledge, lost to a younger generation working in urban convenience stores and on factory assembly lines.

Forbidding the Truku from hunting deprives their menfolk of a rite of passage, emasculating them in the eyes of their potential brides. Nor is it a simple matter of telling the troublesome Truku to just go and hunt somewhere else. As Simon learns, hunting is not merely a matter of wandering through the forests taking pot-shots at deer. It is a matter of careful, long-term husbandry of the local environment – the carving of passages and blinds, even the local year-on-year cultivation of plants that will lure prey to specific spots.

Simon brings up several landmark cases in hunting law, particularly the cause celebre of Talum Sukluman, a 54-year-old Bunun man arrested in 2013 for poaching, but also for using the wrong sort of gun. It’s this latter charge that is the most illustrative, since as Simon points out, indigenous people can go hunting, but only if they use an antiquated and home-made musket design – which, as one tribesman points out, is technologically inferior to the matchlocks that the Dutch carried in 1634! Simon argues that such laws literally force indigenous people to place themselves in physical danger by using jury-rigged explosives.

Talum’s case was finally resolved when he was pardoned by the newly elected president Tsai Ing-wen in 2016. But his freedom did nothing to allay the frustrations and criminal charges brought again uncountable other hunters, nor the fact that many hunting laws were introduced in reaction to dwindling wildlife habitats and populations – a 1990s problem now at least partly resolved by eco-policies and rewilding. In one telling incident, a meeting flies into uproar when told that tourists in Taroko Gorge have complained about the sounds of occasional gunshots – “We are killing squirrels,” shouts an angry Truku tribesman, “not people!”

As a technological determinist, I was particularly won over by the way that Simon relates such issues to the evolution of available weaponry. In the good old days, he suggests, hunting of both heads and hogs was a visceral, dangerous, immediate experience. The colonial-era arrival of better-quality knives increased the efficacy and frequency of what were once “sustainable” once-in-a-life-time expeditions, while improved gun technology turned hunting trips into forest massacres. But it’s the imposition of outsiders’ law that has most transformed local life.

“In the past,” complains one elder, “they would bring back the animal openly, with loud calls of joy, to share the meat with their neighbours. Nowadays they must conceal the animal in a canvas bag, kill it secretly in their home, and share the meat only with the immediate family and most intimate friends.” I was struck by this comment, not merely for the image it presents of thinning tribal traditions, but of the way that criminalising such actions can drive such people into associations with true criminals. It is, after all, the bushmeat (ye-wei) trade that forms one of the cornerstones of organised crime across east and south-east Asia, and which has been implicated in recent years in geopolitical scandals that stretch far above the heads of mere forest hunters, even into the murky origins of the Covid pandemic.

There is much more in Simon’s book – my weightless Kindle copy of which belies a main text of over 400 pages. But I’ll leave you with one of his many illuminating insights into the world and life of Taiwan’s indigenous inhabitants. Much as the French began referring to British football hooligans as “les fuckoffs”, the Atayal and Seediq called the Chinese settlers kmukan (“motherfuckers”) on account of their readiness to refer to the taboo sexual activity of a relative in one of their most common swear-words.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. Scott Simon’s Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa is published by the University of Toronto Press.