In the second half of the 20th century, several western countries had responded positively to indigenous people’s claim on their subjectivity. International organizations such as the United Nations, had also paid much attention to the protection of the intangible cultural heritage. These international trends brought changes that affected Taiwan on two fronts, the government’s cultural and indigenous policies and the development of indigenous communities. In the second half of the 1980s, the dominant ethnicity discourse gradually shifted from Assimilationism to Multiculturalism. Policies enacted in the past that were obviously Assimilationist were seriously challenged. In this context, both the central and local governments have set up offices that oversee aboriginal affairs. On the one hand, disadvantaged ethnic groups are encouraged to actively participate in the enactment and execution of policies. On the other hand, the offices in question offer multiple resources for indigenous communities to improve their community landscape and revitalize their intangible cultural heritage. As a result, the indigenous peoples are able to gain more access to resources that help revitalize their traditional cultures (eg. rituals, languages, material cultures, etc.). And the government could assign cases of cultural heritage under legal protection. With the heightened sense of their cultural identities, the indigenous people also questioned the legitimacy of government’s longestablished ethnicity classification system. This subsequently led to the reconstruction of ethnic communities. The Kanakanavu people’s endeavor to revitalize their ritual tradition and establish an official identity would serve as an obvious example. Previously recognized as a subgroup of Tsou or Tsau, the Kanakanavu people have continued, for more than twenty years, to reinstate ritual traditions, rebuild assembly halls, set up associations for ethnic cultural development, and preserve oral tradition and handicraft. It was not until 2014 did they finally gain legal status as the 16th indigenous people of Taiwan. Their persistence in cultural autonomy and sense of wegroupness keep on impacting the national ethnic classification system. Even though there are disagreements, the Kanakanavu people’s success has reshaped their own perception of — as well as that of Tsou and Hla’alua — ethnic community and change the general public’s understanding of Taiwanese indigenous people. I base the present study on my ethnography research which has been accumulated from extended years of studies. I propose to integrate discourses on intangible cultural heritage, to explore and analyze how the Kanakanavu people reconstructed the “imagined communities (of Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, and Tsou)” by enacting two most important rituals — mikong and kaisisi cakulan/cakuran–in its local and social context. The new social structure and order that took shape subsequently carry different symbolic and actual meanings for the Kanakanavu people.