Unlike other aboriginal peoples in Taiwan, the Bunun are widely dispersed across the island's central mountain ranges.

Whereas most other aborigines were quite sedentary and tended to live in lower areas, the Bunun, along with the Atayal and Taroko were constantly on the move in Taiwan's Central Mountain Range, looking for new hunting grounds and practicing slash-and-burn agriculture.

After an initial period of fierce resistance, they were forced to move down from the mountains and concentrated into a number of lowland villages that were spread across the Island.

The Bunun Aboriginals under Chief Raho Ari [zh] (lāhè· āléi) engaged in guerilla warfare against the Japanese for twenty years.

Raho Ari's revolt was sparked when the Japanese implemented a gun control policy in 1914 against the Aboriginals in which their rifles were impounded in police stations when hunting expeditions were over.

A settlement holding 266 people called Tamaho was created by Raho Ari and his followers near the source of the Laonong River and attracted more Bunun rebels to their cause.

Bunun people wear this vest with a short black skirt and a colorful abdominal bag, functioning as a type of undergarment.

[7] Additionally, the Bunun people adorn themselves with various ornaments and accessories, such as headbands exclusively worn by males, hats, and necklaces.

In its wrath, the moon demanded that father and son would return to their own people to tell them that they henceforth had to obey three commandments or face annihilation.

The Bunun assumed that the world in which they lived were full of supernatural beings (qanitu) that were often associated with particular places (trees, rocks, etc.).

All supernatural forces seem to have had a fairly abstract character and it is therefore not really clear whether the sky was a god or just a place in which all kinds of spirits lived.

The origin story of the Bunun people's tendency to live in mountainous areas was related by the wife of the American consul general in Yokohama in the following way:[12] According to a tribal legend, the Vonum Group of Formosan mountain savages lived in the plains until the misfortune of an all-destroying deluge befell them.

They owed their deliverance from the great snake to the timely appearance of a monster crab, which, after a terrific battle, succeeded in killing the reptile.

The Bunun are the only aboriginal people in Taiwan that developed a primitive form of writing to record lunar cycles and their relationship to important events such as the harvest or the slaughter of pigs.

Most of these rules got into disuse after the coming of Christianity (which branded them as superstition), but present-day Bunun society has still retained a number of social rituals and still imposes a strong obligation on children to behave in a respectful and obedient way towards anyone that is older than themselves.

Following a successful hunt, the men would return home and hang the carcasses from wooden frames so that the boys could shoot the dead animals.