30-Second Overview: The Bunun millet rituals are not festivals staged only after harvest; they are arranged along the millet’s growth cycle, encompassing sowing, weeding, harvesting, storage, and singing. Millet cultivation was once interrupted by land management policies, crop shifts, and religious changes. Today’s revitalization reconnects crops, families, and memory by starting from seeds, schools, and village fields.
In the experimental forests of Xinyi Township, Nantou, there once was a small millet field covered with bird netting. In 2022, 28 local Nantou varieties were planted there, brought back to Taiwan from the US National Plant Germplasm System. This was not merely an agricultural experiment, but an entry point for Bunun youth and elders to reconnect with millet. 1
The same crop has more than nine corresponding names in Bunun life, each marking a different stage of growth. It serves as food, family wealth, a coordinate for social relations, and a marker of ritual order. 2 Paradoxically, the interruption of millet culture meant not just the loss of a grain, but the loss of a way of life that used crops to mark time.
Today, those who replant millet are not just recovering an ancient crop. They are asking: If rituals originally followed the growth of millet, when millet is no longer grown, can the people still sing that time back into existence using only songs on stage?
The Year Does Not Begin with a Calendar
The Bunun millet seasonal rituals cannot be reduced to a "cultural activity" in a fixed month. In the sowing ritual copy from Haiduan Township, the ceremony proceeds from prayer, trial sowing, exorcism, tool blessing, drinking, singing pasibutbut, to the actual sowing in the fields before dawn. It places people, land, tools, and millet within the same action. 3
The timing of the sowing ritual varies by village and geographical conditions. Hu Chin-fu, a cultural inheritor recorded in the Bunun Cultural Knowledge Preservation Database, notes that land clearing and trial sowing occur roughly between November and December, while the sowing ritual takes place around January to February of the following year. Decisions are based on plant growth conditions and dreams, not just the calendar. 4
This makes the word "festival" seem too small. What is actually arranged is the entire subsequent period of work: who enters the field first, who sows, who covers the soil, which animals must not see, whether tools can touch, and how a family cooperates on the same slope.
📝 Curator’s Note: We are accustomed to thinking of rituals as fixed days on a calendar, but the millet seasonal rituals challenge this assumption. It is more like a time system determined by plant growth, dreams, and family division of labor.
Before sowing, the chief priest takes millet seeds, a hoe, soapberries, and miscanthus grass to the fields before dawn. Soapberries symbolize abundant millet harvests, while miscanthus symbolizes vitality. During the trial sowing, the chief priest inserts ritual vessels into the land while praying for the millet to grow fast and well. 3
Next comes exorcism and tool blessing. Miscanthus is brought into the field, with prayers for diseases to leave. Family members sprinkle millet wine dregs on the roof and then bless the hoes. Tools are not mere accessories to work; they are placed within the ethics of farming, becoming objects that can be thanked and cared for. 3
Sowing itself involves division of labor. Hu Chin-fu’s records indicate that female heads of household usually scatter the seeds, while others follow behind to cover the soil and clear obstacles. Soil covering must be consistent, and hoes must not collide. These details may seem trivial, but they transform the field into a place of collective work rather than a production line where each person works independently. 4
As Millet Grows, Rituals Move With It
After millet sprouts, Bunun life does not enter a state of waiting. Hu Chin-fu records that thinning can be done about seven days later, followed by singing pasibutbut. This continues through the Ear-Shooting Festival, harvest festival, and storage festival, with even regulations on when new rice can be eaten. 4
From this sequence, pasibutbut is not an "indigenous song" detached from agriculture. It is embedded in the crop’s growth cycle, linked with rituals of sowing, weeding, harvesting, and storage. National Cultural Heritage Database records state that this song is only transmitted within the two Bunun communities of the Junshe (Shi) and Luanshe (Lalu) groups. The Gufeng Village in Hualien once restored the transmission after a period of interruption. 5
Hualien County Cultural Assets Registration Data further indicates that Gufeng Village’s singing style begins with a lead singer, with other singers gradually ascending from the main pitch, seeking shared resonance. This tradition has served the function of continuing heritage since the 1980s. 6
A 2022 English report from the Ministry of Culture describes pasibutbut as an eight-part polyphonic song of the Bunun people praying for a millet harvest, usually sung by about six to twelve adult men in a circle. The report also notes it was recorded by Japanese musicologist Takachika Kurosawa in 1952. 7
These sources point to an easily overlooked difference: the power of the harmony lies not just in the number of voices, but in the fact that it originally had a task to accomplish together. The rising voices were originally part of the same living scene as whether the millet would grow and whether the family could work together.
📝 Curator’s Note: When pasibutbut is moved to the stage, the most visible aspect is the sonic spectacle of "eight parts." Another easily overlooked aspect is that it was originally not an independent music program, but a joint action of agriculture, family, and praying for a harvest.
Interruption Did Not Happen Naturally
Millet has a long cultivation history in Taiwan, but the gradual decline of Bunun millet culture cannot be dismissed simply as "modernization causing the loss of tradition." English Spotlight from National Taiwan University records that policies during the Japanese colonial period and globalization changed crop choices. Nantou farmers later shifted to cash crops like vegetables, fruits, and flowers, and millet cultivation almost disappeared. 1
A 2023 English report in Taiwan Panorama indicates that the group relocation in the 1930s changed the original locations of Bunun villages, with rice replacing millet as the more important crop. The introduction of Christianity also disrupted seasonal agricultural rituals. This was not a sudden loss of cultural value by a generation, but a change in the land, crops, and systems of life. 8
Millet cultural ecology research uses Wangxiang Village in Nantou as an example, understanding millet within land interaction, farming methods, and traditional ecological wisdom. The research abstract notes that the Bunun have multiple names for different growth stages of millet, and millet serves as a symbol of food, family wealth, and social status. 2
Therefore, when millet fields were lost, what was lost was not just a dietary choice. The order of rituals lost its object, indigenous language names left daily work, and elders lost a common occasion to pass knowledge to the younger generation.
Revitalization Is Not Copying the Past
The revitalization in Xinyi Township, Nantou, began with a small flowerpot and a school garden. Taiwan Panorama reports that Jiumei Elementary School integrated millet planting and seasonal rituals into the curriculum, allowing students to understand the images on the wooden board calendar that originally required life experience to read—from sowing and care to harvesting and storage. 8
The key to this approach is not simulating a "traditional scene" in school, but making millet a life that students must care for. When crops are eaten by birds or affected by rain, the humility and gratitude described in rituals are no longer abstract nouns in a textbook.
The 2022 collaboration project at National Taiwan University addressed another scale of issue. US scholar Wayne Hazen Fogg collected nearly a hundred local millet varieties in Taiwan in 1977, 28 of which were from Xinyi, Nantou. NTU Professor Kuo Hua-jen reintroduced these germplasm resources to Taiwan in 2011, later collaborating with Xinyi villages for restoration. 1
These varieties are not sealing history in a refrigerator, but allowing people to face a concrete question: Which millet suits which land? How to sow? How to prevent bird damage? Who still remembers its name? When crops return to the fields, knowledge must be re-experienced through the body, not just remain in archives.
Taiwan Panorama reports that in the first year of the "Garden Program" in 2022, over 30 people participated. After returning youth planted millet, elders began actively discussing memory and cultivation methods, and family relationships drew closer through the shared care of the fields. 8
Here is a detail of failure worth preserving: Participants underestimated bird damage and rainfall, and nature took part of the harvest. Revitalization is not turning tradition into a guaranteed success process. It puts people back into farming where failure is possible, where one must restart, and where one must learn from others.
📝 Curator’s Note: Cultural revitalization is often measured by the number of events or participants, but millet pulls the question back to another scale. The true alternative is not holding another event, but whether next year someone is still willing to put seeds back into the same land.
From Ritual Songs to Shared Life
Activities data from National Taitung University indicate that pasibutbut has gradually become a song by which six Bunun communities identify their ethnic identity. The same data emphasizes that performances by the Zhuoxi Bunun add new sounds to existing singing, presenting contemporary imagination. 9
This reminds us that cultural transmission is not about viewing all changes as pollution. As long as the community can decide when to sing, why to sing, who can teach, and which content cannot be arbitrarily appropriated, new arrangements, courses, and performances can become tools of transmission.
But performances have boundaries. Ministry of Culture data places pasibutbut within the context of Bunun agricultural rituals and millet harvest. If it is only packaged as a "magical high-pitched choir," it is separated from sowing, labor, ancestral spirits, land, and family. 7
Similarly, the sowing ritual cannot be turned into a tourist itinerary. The Haiduan ritual records include dreams, taboos, tools, food, family division of labor, and actions before dawn. Remove any one item, and what remains is merely a stage that looks like a festival.
The importance of the Bunun millet seasonal rituals lies in this contradiction: On one hand, it must be preserved; on the other, it cannot survive solely through preservation. It needs to be planted, cooked, named, and sung, and it must allow different villages to arrange transmission methods according to their own land and history.
Millet Is Not a Single Past
When discussing Bunun millet rituals, we must also be careful of another simplification: thinking of the "Bunun" as having only one fixed version. The ritual names, months, song transmission, and village practices in the data are not identical. Hu Chin-fu explicitly reminds us that the land-clearing ritual is family-based, with no standardized process, adjusted according to land conditions. The National Cultural Heritage Database notes that pasibutbut exists only in the Junshe and Luanshe communities, and each Zhuoxi village has its own characteristics. 4 5
These differences are not inconsistent data, but traces of culture actually living. Mountain altitude, village migration, family division of labor, church history, and contemporary school systems all affect how a ritual is remembered, when it is held, and who can participate. Folding all villages into a single "Bunun tradition" erases those who are actually transmitting the culture.
The same pasibutbut should not be described only as a sonic spectacle. Hualien cultural assets data say Gufeng Village begins with a lead singer, with other singers gradually ascending from the main pitch. The Ministry of Culture English report records that adult men usually sing in circles of six to twelve people. 6 7 These inform us of form, but do not equal meaning. Meaning must return to the occasion of its appearance: before and after sowing, harvesting and storage, and the occasion of a group working, eating, and praying together.
Without this context, outsiders easily treat the Bunun polyphonic songs as performance segments that can be arbitrarily extracted. If there is only context without the voices of the villages themselves, researchers may turn living culture into completed specimens for the people. A more stable approach is to juxtapose official registrations, academic research, cultural inheritors’ accounts, and contemporary village activities, allowing different sources to be responsible for what they can prove.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons: File:Er nd 3021 TaiwaneseAborigines.jpg, page marked as public domain. The original image is not a Bunun field photo, so this article uses it only as historical visual material for Taiwan Indigenous millet labor, not to prove specific Bunun rituals.
Who Must Do Revitalization Together
Revitalization has another easily overlooked layer: it is not only restored within the village, but also renegotiated between different systems. Schools provide stable curriculum time, research institutions assist in preserving germplasm and cultivation data, and village elders provide names, taboos, and actions. The three have different tasks, but none can replace the others alone. The Jiumei Elementary School experience reported by Taiwan Panorama places classroom, field, and ritual in the same learning path. 8
This cooperation also changes the question of "who is the teacher." Millet culture knowledge exists not only in the narration of an expert, but in actions that must be completed together: identifying seeds, preparing land, waiting for sprouting, avoiding taboos, and moving the harvest into the house. Each action brings people of different ages to the same scene, making "transmission" a visible relationship rather than an abstract cultural slogan.
Millet variety names may be identified by elders, sowing gestures must be demonstrated in the field, and students may record the process and bring it back to family discussion. Culture is no longer saved only by formal textbooks, but dispersed among seeds, bodies, language, and land. This is why revitalization should not be understood as bringing back a fixed process: every replanting exposes new environmental conditions and new learning relationships.
Taiwan Panorama reports that youth participating in the Garden Program lost half their harvest due to bird damage and rainfall. This failure was not deleted, but instead made "planting again next year" a concrete and honest commitment. 8 For a culture that was once interrupted, the ability to withstand failure and pass experience to the next person may be closer to true continuity than a single successful demonstration.
This also explains why "revitalization" cannot be measured only by quantity. Planting a few more hectares, holding a few more events, attracting how many tourists can leave records, but does not necessarily mean knowledge has re-entered life. The question closer to the cultural core is: Do elders have the opportunity to say the millet’s name to the younger generation? Have children truly touched the seeds and land? Can families still allocate tasks in shared work? Are ritual songs sung in their corresponding agricultural time, or only scheduled for when the audience waits?
On the other hand, revitalization cannot push all responsibility back to the village. Millet fields need land, time, and stable care; youth may work in cities; schools have curriculum pressure; villages still face bird damage, rainfall, and crop markets. The collaboration between NTU and Xinyi villages, and the experience of Jiumei Elementary School putting millet into the curriculum, show that cultural transmission requires collaboration across villages, schools, research institutions, and public resources. 1 8
Image source: Wikimedia Commons: File:Seediq women pounding millet circa 1930.jpg, page marked as public domain. This photo shows Seediq women pounding millet, not a Bunun scene; this article uses it to supplement the historical comparison of Taiwan Indigenous millet culture.
Returning to that millet field in Xinyi Township, what is most worth remembering is not the number 28, but the work behind the number: finding seeds, identifying names, letting elders speak, letting students go to the fields, and then enduring bird damage and rain. These things transform a culture from "knowing" to "doing."
The Bunun millet rituals are therefore not a closed past tense. They were once interrupted by colonial governance, crop shifts, and religious changes, and precisely because of this interruption, today’s revitalization cannot be a simple replay. True continuity is making millet once again a present that a village must face together.
When the sower puts seeds into the soil before dawn, when the family covers the soil together, when adult men sing pasibutbut in the ritual, the song prays for not just harvest. It also confirms: This land still has people who remember how to begin, and next year there are still people willing to take over.
Millet cuts the year’s time into many segments that must be completed together: A dream may decide whether work can begin, a hoe must be blessed in ritual, a lyric must be sung in the wish of harvest, and after storage there are new rules. These segments may not appear in the same form in every village, but they jointly point to a relationship: People do not stand outside the land managing crops, but arrange their own lives within the growth of the crops.
Therefore, what the Bunun millet seasonal rituals truly leave behind is not a flowchart that can be followed by the book. What it leaves is a method of judging things: First look at the land, then look at dreams and seasons. First care for the people working together, then talk about harvest. First hand the seeds to the next season, then hand the songs to the next generation. When millet returns to the fields, time gains a shape that can be remembered together.
Therefore, understanding this ritual cannot only ask "how much is left now." The more important question is: Who is making it happen again, and is this happening still controlled by the village’s own language, boundaries, and right to interpret? Seeds can be preserved by research institutions, data can be made public by museums, and songs can be performed overseas. But only when the people put it back into the land, family, and next season, will this preservation not stop in archives. The return of millet is not a return to an unchanged past, but giving the Bunun the opportunity to decide in their own way how to remember themselves in the future, and teaching outsiders to listen to the village’s boundaries before watching, respecting different communities’ decisions about their own culture, ensuring this knowledge is not only collected, but continued to be used and sung by the next generation.
Further Reading
- National Palace Museum Online: Haiduan Hall - 2021 Festival Food X Seasonal - Haiduan Township Bunun Cultural Industry Special Exhibition Curatorial Copy - Sowing Ritual
- National Taiwan University: NTU and the Bunun Tribe Join Hands to Revive Millet
- Taiwan Panorama: Renaissance of Bunun Millet Culture
References
- National Taiwan University: NTU and the Bunun Tribe Join Hands to Revive Millet — NTU English school news records the context of local millet germplasm in 1977, reintroduction to Taiwan in 2011, and collaboration with Xinyi village for restoration in 2022.↩234
- Hsu Ya-hui: Research on the Cultural Ecology of Bunun Millet Culture—Taking Wangxiang Village, Nantou County as an Example — Thesis abstract analyzes Bunun millet names, planting methods, and their social and spiritual significance using cultural ecology and fieldwork.↩2
- National Palace Museum Online: Haiduan Hall - 2021 Festival Food X Seasonal - Haiduan Township Bunun Cultural Industry Special Exhibition Curatorial Copy - Sowing Ritual — Haiduan Township Bunun sowing ritual curatorial copy, itemizing prayer, trial sowing, exorcism, tool blessing, ritual songs, and sowing process.↩23
- Yenping Township Bunun Cultural Knowledge Preservation Database: Hu Chin-fu—My Understanding of Millet Culture — First-person data from a Bunun cultural inheritor, explaining ritual timing, dream taboos, family division of labor, labor exchange, and millet varieties.↩234
- National Cultural Heritage Network: Bunun pasibutbut Prayer Song for Millet Harvest — Cultural asset registration page data on the traditional Bunun polyphonic song, providing song name, transmitting communities, and historical preservation context.↩2
- Hualien County Culture Bureau: Bunun Music pasibutbut (Millet Harvest Song) — Hualien County cultural asset data explaining Gufeng Village’s lead singing and harmony methods, transmitting communities, and revitalization work since the 1980s.↩2
- Ministry of Culture: Taiwan’s Bunun people invited to perform in Paris — Ministry of Culture English article recording the 2022 Paris performance, the ritual significance of pasibutbut, six to twelve-person choir, and Takachika Kurosawa’s recording records.↩23
- Taiwan Panorama: Renaissance of Bunun Millet Culture—Growing Native Varieties Under the Garden Program — 2023 English in-depth report tracking Xinyi Township millet revitalization, Jiumei Elementary School curriculum, ritual restoration, and Garden Program returning youth participation.↩23456
- National Taitung University: Zhuoxi Bunun’s Original Sound Reappears and Contemporary Imagination — University activity data explaining the ethnic identity significance of pasibutbut, and the reinterpretation of Zhuoxi Bunun traditional music in contemporary performances.↩