On June 22 (2024), NPUST held a special graduation ceremony for its indigenous students to celebrate their culture and provide them with warm memories as they move into the next stages of their lives. During the ceremony, millet was used for the “tassel turning” ceremony to represent their academic harvest and achievements, and each graduate also received millet wine to symbolized blessings for the future. Wearing colorful handmade sashes, the graduating students stood tall as they welcomed the new challenges and opportunities that are awaiting them in the future.
The graduation ceremony was jointly organized by the NPUST Indigenous Student Resource Center and Indigenous students from the school. As early as March of this year, Indigenous students were invited to help prepare for the event by brewing millet wine and collecting different types of millet from the tribes’ crops to create millet bundles to present to the graduates. In the culture of the Rukai and Paiwan peoples, millet is a very representative crop, symbolizing rich harvests and blessings. The venue where the ceremony was held was also decorated with cultural elements of the local tribes, and the participating graduates and current students all wore their traditional costumes.
Since its establishment in 2016, the NPUST Indigenous Student Resource Center has been providing support to indigenous students on campus, not only giving concern to the students’ academic studies, but also to their campus lives in general. At the graduation ceremony, the graduates shared some of the valuable experiences they had during their time at NPUST, hoping to encourage younger students to be proactive and have fun, so that their campus lives and the university as a whole can be more colorful.
