Taiwan has officially recognised the Siraya people as the country's 17th Indigenous group through an executive decree issued on 30 July, making them the first plains tribe to gain Indigenous status under the Plains Indigenous Peoples Status Act passed in October 2025. The Siraya, an Austronesian matriarchal people who inhabited the southwestern plains of Taiwan's main island long before Dutch and later Qing Dynasty rule, saw their language and culture nearly erased through more than three centuries of forced assimilation under successive colonial administrations. The recognition caps a 30-year cultural revival movement, driven in part by advocates such as the Talavan family, whose three generations worked to reconstruct the ancestral Sinckan language and preserve Siraya traditions despite the group's long exclusion from Indigenous land rights and legal protections afforded to mountain-dwelling tribes.