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Since I was born, I carried the name “Atayal” for nearly twenty years and regarded the story of Atayal as my forebears’ striving story on the land of Taiwan. Once I thought that I am a member of Atayal, treated the rainbow with respect and regarded the rainbow as a “rainbow spirit bridge” with deeply spiritual significance for judging whether you are qualified for crossing through this bridge to receive the pride that forebears give by your behavior before you die. But five years ago, my ethnic identification changed from Atayal to Truku, a foreign name, however representing the familiar myself and having the familiar rainbow myths. I felt confusion because of the smattering of knowledge and being foreign to Truku. Just as feeling “the face of Truku” by touch in the dark, I seem to feel ‘its existence” but can not see “its features” clearly. In this situation, how could I construct the imagined communities about Truku? How could I found the ethnic identity of myself to Truku? Therefore, I found the motive to study the process of the identity movement of Truku. I started to search for the record of Truku in the history record, and to find out the reason of why the name of my ethnic group disappeared in the history and the answer of what caused the onset of indefinite discrimination between Atayal and Truku. Moreover, I tried to know how my ethnic group struggled in the process of losing the name of ethnic group and whether the success of identity movement activated their imagined communities and ethnic identity anew. Truku can not be absent from the history of Taiwan. Because in the fields of Taiwan, Truku strive to live for themselves, I would like to tell a story, one about Truku, to show the important and indelible role of Truku in the history of Taiwan. This story describes the valiancy and intrepidity of Truku, the importance of their existence, their pain when they faced their ethnic traditional culture that would disappear, and their striving process for being unwilling to let the name of ethnic group hided in the stream of history. In this thesis, I constructed the story of Truku from the point of view of Sociology to see how Truku livened in the history of Taiwan, and tried to understand the transition of ethnic consciousness of Truku by the view of Hermeneutics and why the transition finally evolved into the imagined communities that Truku must construct today. Moreover, this thesis will lead readers to thoughtfully think the meaning of the identity movement of Truku and the meaning of Taiwan indigenous people to Taiwan history and culture.
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