Animism is the ancient belief that spirits reside in nearly all features of the natural landscape. Do latent traces of this religion still persist among the tribes of eastern Taiwan? That is the question that I wanted to answer on a recent visit to Hualien County. A friend and I set out to meet members of the secretive Sakizaya tribe, a group of just 10,000 or so aborigines who from 1878-2007 merged with the Amis tribe in order to hide their identity from a Japanese military out to punish them for their resistance imperial rule. The Sakizaya were supposed to be the most “superstitious” of Formosa’s fourteen tribes, and this appealed to me. We drove down Highway 11, heading south along the Pacific coast toward the town of Shuelien, a small enclave in the coastal mountains
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