Taiwan recognises the Siraya as its 17th Indigenous group

Taiwan's cabinet recognised the Siraya as the island's 17th Indigenous group on 30 July 2026. The decision restores a status the state had denied a people for centuries.

The Siraya are the first of the Pingpu peoples to gain it. Pingpu communities lived on Taiwan's lowland plains and coasts, where colonial administrations pressed them hardest to assimilate. Because they were judged well assimilated, they were long refused not only Indigenous status but also the legal protections, funding and language support given to highland groups, Mongabay reports.

"I've officially announced in a Cabinet meeting that the Siraya are a legally recognized Indigenous group in Taiwan," Premier Cho Jung-tai said on 30 July, to cheers from community members. Wan Cheng-hsiung, who founded the Tainan Siraya Cultural Association, shouted in the Siraya language: "We've finally come home!"

The legal route opened on 17 October 2025, when the legislature passed the Pingpu Indigenous Peoples Status Act, according to the Taipei Times. The Council of Indigenous Peoples said it filed the application only after academic review, public consultation and consensus-building inside the communities. Eligible Siraya can apply to their local government for the official membership register from the middle of August 2026, then complete their status registration at household registration offices.

Three decades of courts and campaigning

The Siraya are traditionally matrilineal and live mainly in and around the southern city of Tainan. Their language, Sinckan, survives partly because Dutch missionaries wrote it down in romanised form during the colonial period between 1624 and 1662, Global Voices reports. Qing rule, Japanese rule and then Kuomintang rule each pushed the community to drop that language and adopt Han names and customs.

The activist Uma Talavan filed an administrative lawsuit in 2010 seeking recognition. Lower courts rejected it repeatedly. In November 2022 the Constitutional Court ruled that excluding Pingpu communities from Indigenous status was unconstitutional, and it gave the legislature three years to write a law.

The numbers involved are substantial. Tainan had registered more than 11,800 Siraya as of 2016. Siraya activists and academics estimate that 250,000 to 350,000 people across Taiwan claim Indigenous identity without official recognition. The Ministry of the Interior counts 629,000 people registered as of Indigenous descent, about 2.7 percent of the population.

Jolan Hsieh, an Indigenous studies scholar at National Dong Hwa University who also goes by her Siraya name Bavaragh Dagalomai, told Mongabay the effect "could be profound, but recognition itself is only the beginning". What follows, she said, depends on political representation, education, language revitalisation and land questions.