Ureltu’s Ewenki narratives and the crisis of minority cultures in China

Reconfirming Ewenki cultural values

The philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner has said that a country composed of polyethnic groups, while respecting multiculturalism, always uses its power to construct a ‘high-level culture’ based on the traditional dominant culture, through education and other means, to make the dominant culture a national ‘identity’ recognised to a lesser extent by diverse minority ethnic peoples. In order to ensure cultural independence for minorities, ‘cultural revival and redefinition must be achieved first’. ² In light of this, Ureltu’s works can be regarded as an Ewenki narrative on the conflict between ‘Confucianism’ as a ‘high-level culture’ and the ‘lower’ Ewenki ‘primitive’ hunting culture. In the course of the conflict, some of the cultural factors in the ‘lower’ culture have been ‘homogenised’, suppressed or even replaced. Generally speaking, the rejuvenation and redefinition of cultural values are often undertaken by the champions of the ‘lower’ national culture. They do so based on the self-identity of the ‘lower’ culture either through the revival of a national ethnic cultural movement or the redefinition of its meaning, systems, images and values in terms of collective memory of common ancestors, myths, language, religious beliefs, life customs and traditions, etc. They restore or renovate historical and cultural traditions embedded in the collective memory.

In Crossing the Kebo River, Ureltu adheres to the ethnographical understanding of the family commune called urileng ³ and the ‘awe’ fostered in the Ewenki spiritual mentality. As with writers from other minority peoples of China in the early 1980s, his effort to reconstruct cultural memory manifests itself in an attempt to legalise the pursuit of cultural identity and a people’s specific mode of thought. It is a practical action aimed at cultural restoration and reconstruction.

In his Creative Communication with Li Tuo (李陀) and the preface to The Collected Works of Ureltu, the author repeatedly emphasises ‘the strong national feelings that have awakened in my heart. This common feeling is a golden key handed down from my nation.’ ⁴ The terms ‘awakening’, ‘national feeling’, ‘common’ and ‘my nation’ refer to a clear sense of Ewenki identity and cultural consciousness, including the recognition of the life values and cultural forms of the ‘less populous’ minority Ewenki people.

Ureltu is a member of the Tuktun clan, a branch of the Ewenki who migrated from Lake Baikal and live on the banks of the Nen River. He was born in the town of Nirki in the north-eastern part of China, a Han-dominated multi-ethnic community with a small number of Ewenki. As a child, he was thus more exposed to and was more knowledgeable of other ethnic cultures and the dominant Han culture than his own native Ewenki; and he did not shy away from this. He says, ‘After I finished my Chinese primary school curriculum, I did not clearly understand what the Ewenki nationality was.’ ⁵

In 1969, because his father, Turong, was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (1966−1976), ⁶ 17-year-old Ureltu had to move to the area around the Argun River on the border with Russia, where the famous ancient Aoluguaya clan, who also had migrated from Lake Baikal, live. They lived a primordial hunting life in the mountains and forests, believed in Shamanism, and have been known as the only Ewenki tribe that continued to domesticate and utilise reindeer. In the anthropological note My Days of Hunting in the Forest, Ureltu recalls, ‘Everything about the life of the Ewenki hunter settlement was strange to me. To be honest, at that time I was still very unclear about my national identity. Living in a multi-ethnic cultural vortex since childhood, I was not conscious of it at all.’ ⁷ It is clear that at this time Ureltu felt disconnected from his own culture amidst the ancient Aoluguaya clan, but, ever since, his Ewenki consciousness began to awaken.

There are four reasons for this awakening. First came the identification entry ‘Ewenki’ in the hukoubu (户口簿, the household register of one’s family name, place of origin, date of birth). Secondly, he was the son of Turong, an Ewenki who was ‘knocked down’ and persecuted during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and rejected by those creating the notion of Han ‘outsiders’. This rejection of his father caused him to feel different and then stimulated his sense of Ewenki identity. Thirdly, because his father was recognised by the Aoluguaya as a son who ‘does things for his own people’, Ewenki elders made a decision, after collective discussion, to acknowledge his status as Ewenki. Fourthly, there was the strong pull of the Ewenki mother tongue. Once on a journey, he heard his father chatting on a train with another descendant of the Xiaobayue (小八月) branch of the Ewenki in the Ewenki language. Recalling this moment, Ureltu said:

I felt the sounds around me had faded away. There was only the smooth tone of my Ewenki mother tongue as a sweet odor floating in my ears. Father, I and Xiaobayue were all under the cover of this comforting woven sound, no longer afraid of any intimidation or bullying. At that moment, there was a warm current coming towards me. ⁸

The mother tongue activated not only the Ewenki identity gene in Ureltu’s blood, but also his sense of Ewenki community consciousness. However, he did not know at this time that this sudden ‘warm current’ was the enormous energy of national identity released by the mother tongue.

Though physically accepted by the Aoluguaya, Ureltu was still confronted with the need to be spiritually integrated with the group and recognised by them as an Aoluguaya Ewenki. On a basic level, recognition is grounded in the biological lineage of being the son of an Ewenki father. But in their view, it is only when he goes hunting like them, learns crow cawing, drinks bear oil and tames deer that he is a genuine Ewenki. Ureltu’s identity with the Aoluguaya thus demanded the immersion of body and soul. He describes this profoundly meaningful process:

Before the first snowfall, Jiansha presented Ureltu with a new hunting jacket.

‘This winter hunter’s clothes is what I longed for . . . At that moment, I couldn’t express my gratitude in words. Without even saying thank you, I ran away with my hunting suit in my hand.’

The hunter He Lin (何林) handed Ureltu two shotguns. ‘When I realized that I was going to be the owner of these two shotguns, a sense of happiness suddenly rose from the bottom of my heart. I clasped them in my arms, and my heart beat faster. The pleasure was beyond words. I walked out of the warehouse with the two shotguns on my shoulders and straightened up my waist. I felt much taller.’ ⁹

In addition, his soul was shaped as an Aoluguaya Ewenki by the melancholy love-songs of the motherly Dabalajyi and Alikxieyi singing ancient Ewenki hunters’ rituals of redeeming the sin of killing a bear, of the bravery, tenacity, kindness, simplicity and generosity of the Aoluguaya people and their unique independent and free lifestyle.

At the hunting site, Magalag taught Ureltu the first steps of becoming a hunter as if taming a reindeer. By the time he came back from hunting alone, the Aoluguaya people’s identification with him and his own sense of self-identity had undergone a qualitative change: ‘At a casual glance, I seemed to realize something. I was sure that when I decided to go hunting alone, they took me for a real Ewenki.’ ¹⁰ He had a sense of recognition and belonging.

The anthropological criterion for making the distinction, ‘between oneself and others’ is culture. The same language, customs, historical memory, ethnic origin and blood lineage leads to strong cultural cohesion; and cultural exchanges, comparisons and even conflicts among different groups can build and strengthen each group’s self-identity.

However, Ureltu’s awareness of his ethnic identity did not derive from being a lifelong Aoluguaya hunter with good hunting skills. It sprung from his appreciation of the cultural characteristics of the Aoluguaya Ewenki as highlighted by contrasts and conflicts with multiple cultures in the ‘multi-ethnic cultural vortex’ in which he lived. The Aoluguaya people have not been aware of the cultural changes that they are passively accepting, especially the crisis that their traditional living environment and customs are facing. Ureltu is aware. Through his experiences, he has not only discovered the cultural value of the Aoluguaya Ewenki, but he has also come to anticipate its silent crisis. He wants the world to recognise the cultural value of the Aoluguaya and tries to protect it and delay its decline through cultural renaissance.

To do so, Ureltu does not go for direct social action but chooses the form of literary fiction. In 1976, he stated: ‘This year I became interested in literature because I had a lot to express in my heart, and I was eager to shout out my voice in a unique form.’ ¹¹ As matter as fact, his ‘fiction’ is a mix of imagination and ethnography.

The goals of cultural renaissance and of fostering cultural values are the same, but the methods are completely different. The former can only be accomplished through a nationwide movement, while the latter needs to be realised by the intellectual enlightenment of cultural consciousness. Ureltu chose the latter. Since cultural consciousness is first and foremost a process of self-awareness of one’s own ethnic culture, Ureltu first abstracted and formulated a summary of the cultural forms of the ancient Aoluguaya Ewenki. Before that, most Chinese did not know that there was such an original tribe in the deep forests of north-eastern China. He revealed the surviving cultural landscape of this tribal people to the public: ‘There are only just over 170 hunters here in this ancient and unique tribe of the Ewenki people. For ages, they have maintained a relatively complete hunting economy.’ ¹²

‘Primitive’ and ‘modern’ are often regarded as just two different types of culture. Ureltu does not identify the ‘non-primitive’ aspects of this ‘holistic form of hunting economy’, but aims to correct people’s notion that ‘primitive’ must be ‘backward’ in the evolutionary concept of culture and to objectively display the Ewenki people’s ‘primitive’ life of freedom, self-sufficiency, rationality and legitimacy in the modern context. He points out: ‘The reason why every people is termed independent and vigorous is that it is different from others in some way and has advantages that others do not have.’ ¹³ He says that ‘although there are only just more than 10,000 Ewenki, they stand before me once and again as a giant figure’. ¹⁴

The need to reconfirm the cultural values of a disadvantaged, ‘minority’ ethnic people points to the fact that its values are often not recognised in an unequal power relationship. In addition to the active intervention of power discourse based on state ideology, it more often arises from the collective resistance and need for renewed recognition on the part of the disadvantaged people themselves. Ureltu skilfully borrowed the political discourse of ‘ethnic equality’ in the multicultural makeup of China as a way to make his reconfirmation of Ewenki values irrefutable. However, the recognition of the cultural values of disadvantaged ethnic nationalities does not amount to shying away from the real crisis of identity that they face.

By calling the Ewenki a ‘giant figure’, Ureltu challenges the evolutionary view of minority peoples as ‘dwarfed’ and at a low level of ‘primitive life’. In his Ewenki narratives before 1985, he celebrates them as a living picture of self-sufficiency, freedom and vitality with images such as: ‘songs in the forest’, ‘children in bear caves’, ‘green riverbanks’, ‘amber bonfires’, ‘my little white deer’, ‘bucks with seven-pointed antlers’, ‘birch in the snow’. At the same time, however, Ureltu speaks of the threat that Ewenki feel about a powerful heterogeneous culture that is drawing nearer and nearer, presenting this sense of threat as a state of panic. In Songs in the Forest, Unaji wonders, ‘Do people beyond the mountains not bully us?’ To assuage Unaji’s panic, Dundu answers, ‘No, the sufferers of the Han people beyond the mountains are our flesh-and-blood brothers.’ In the same calming vein Ureltu writes, ‘the suffering hunter and the team sent by the government are walking happily beneath the mountains, side by side in the woods’. ¹⁵

To describe the Ewenki and Han sent by the government as ‘flesh-and-blood brothers’, Wang Mingke (王明珂) has suggested that the phrase ‘emphasizes the historical memory of original common beliefs’, the

foundational history of blood, geography and continuation in time, the aim to cohere together as a community defined by shared spatial resources, the essential social bonds of shared distribution of and competition for life resources, and the resulting system of relationships and differentiation along with the related power relations and ideology of the system. ¹⁶

The social reality expressed by ‘flesh-and-blood brothers’ and ‘walking side by side’ in Songs in the Forest refers to the situation in the Ewenki mindset in which the ‘outsiders’, injected by political powers, have begun to substantially influence their lives. The question of ‘bullying’ refers to the historical memory of the people’s local resources being taken over. In A Hunter’s Plea, it is these ‘flesh-and blood brothers’ that take Ewenki shotguns and force the native hunters into a ‘learning class’ to educate them about the dominant Han culture.

Ureltu’s writings can be seen as facing in two directions: the reconfirmation of Ewenki cultural values brings to consciousness the appeal of ‘his appearance’ and ‘happy laughter’, and ‘letting more people understand and grasp his mind’. But it also involves sharing with readers worries about the Ewenki’s cultural crisis and ‘hearing his painful sigh’. However, Ureltu’s success was somewhat limited. He is successful in that many people, including historians and ethnologists, have begun to have a comprehensive understanding of the ‘giant’ image of the Ewenki from Ureltu’s narratives of ‘cultural value reconfirmation’ expressed in A Hunter’s Plea, Bucks with Seven-pointed Antlers, Amber Bonfires and over twenty other narratives. He is unsuccessful in that he cannot ward off the crisis of the actual decline in Ewenki culture.

Misreading the Ewenki

Unlike novelists writing pure fiction, Ureltu used a ‘hybrid’ form of narrative to reassert Ewenki cultural values and bring out the uniqueness of the Aoluguaya Ewenki among China’s ethnic minorities. He reminded himself that:

if I am intoxicated with the mere surface of this unique forest life and do not spare my efforts to memorialize the mystery that lies hidden in it, but merely end up scribbling, the sin I commit against my own people will be unforgiveable. My people have not given me the power to seek novelty or foster curiosity. Novelty and curiosity are manifestations of piggishness and laziness. ¹⁷

Although he could stop his own display of ‘curiosity-seeking’, to his dismay, he could not prevent readers from misreading what he carefully wrote and misunderstanding the complexities of an Ewenki culture perceived as alien.

Ureltu’s ‘hybrid’ Ewenki narrative can be divided into two periods: 1978−1985 and 1988−1993. The representative works of the former are A Hunter’s Plea, Amber Bonfires and Bucks with Seven-pointed Antlers. Those of the latter are mainly Woke and Milig (1988), Early Morning Firing (1988), You Let Me Drift along the Water (1992), Where to Sign My Name? (1992), Shaman, Our Shaman (1993) and Mysterious Forest (1993). Concerning the difference between the two periods, Ureltu has said, ‘My early novels are all about expressing personal feelings; in my later writings, I gradually came to express group feelings. Through my pen, I brought to light the feelings of a people and their fate.’ ¹⁸ Careful analysis reveals, however, that there is a progressively deepening relationship between the two periods, with no substantive difference in their core thinking. The early ‘personal feelings’ are actually those of an individual Ewenki endowed with his people’s identity and cultural consciousness – his early writings reconfirm Ewenki cultural values as much as the later ones. The so-called ‘group feeling’ of the later writing amounts to a further deepening of this consciousness. The difference between the two periods is only that of the transformation in the writer’s identity from ‘narrator’ to ‘spokesperson’. In the course of this transformation, Ureltu tries to rebuild Ewenki collectivity. That is to say, with his deep understanding of Ewenki history and contemporary growing cultural crisis, the focus of his narrative turns to Ewenki anxieties and reflections on their historical and cultural destiny.

During this second period, Ureltu was greatly influenced by Social Organization of the Northern Tungus, the 1929 work by the famous Russian ethnologist Shirokogorov, who is known for unearthing the ‘original ethnos beneath the squeeze of multi-layered civilizations: Han, Mongolian, and Russian imperial civilization’. ¹⁹ Through Shirokogorov’s work, Ureltu came to understand the origin, historical evolution and cultural changes of the Ewenki:

With a rare sense of reverence, I read the great work of the Russian ethnologist, Social Organization of the Northern Tungus; and I am suddenly enlightened. The ancient Ewenki culture is unique and rich, but its cultural continuity has become so fragile today. It makes me feel danger . . . How many unique national sentiments, how many ancient cultural imprints seem now about to disintegrate in me, in our hearts and minds, in the hands of a generation keen on novelty. This really shocks me. Intentionally or unintentionally, our people constitute a unique cultural chain; but we are transmitting our cultural knowledge in a way that has only limited life. ²⁰

The ‘cultural chain’ and the transmission of ‘our cultural knowledge’ are the links in the transformation of Ureltu’s ideology and the main thrust of his later Ewenki narrative. Ureltu keeps to his ‘hybrid’ style. He devoted all his efforts to recording and preserving the unique culture of his people in literature because ‘her old body had become very fragile’. But his literary output takes a different form after 1985. In the Ewenki shaman tale Woke and Milig (1988), he tells of Uncle Milig singing a hymn tracing his ancestry in his sleep; and in Early Morning Firing (1988) he describes Grandma Basha as she painfully uses the back of her hand as a deerskin shovel. In Night of Grey Reindeer Hide (1990), reluctant to live in her house, Grandma Basha is frozen to death one night when she inexplicably rushes out into the snow; and her body is placed on a swath of reindeer hide. In Shaman, Our Shaman (1993) the last shaman Kadob dies without a grave, accidentally killed by a hunter from his own people. His shaman gown is stolen and sold to a museum as a cultural specimen for people to come and gaze at. In Mysterious Forest (1993), a giant bear, the great but helpless totemic ancestor, is killed. And the killer is none other than a descendant of the bear, who knew nothing of it. The names of the characters in these texts are fictional, but the scenes of life are real, and many details were actually witnessed by Ureltu. They have a cultural value as ‘sub-ethnography’. Their representations make people shocked to see that the ‘modernity’ of industrial civilisation is rapidly eroding and changing traditional Ewenki life. The rapid flow of capital and multiculturalism driven by globalisation sweeps like a tornado through the mountains where they live and erodes the unique Ewenki lifestyle, customs, language, religion, historical memory of myths and legends and mode of thinking. The cultural system constructed in the traditional style has begun an all-round process of disintegration in which the collective mentality and thinking of the people is changing and confused. In these texts, Ureltu’s questions are: why was the last old shaman killed by a young hunter? How can a holy shaman be killed by mistake? How can a hunter accidentally kill a shaman? Who masked the blood relationship between the killed giant bear and its offspring, and who deprived the offspring of his right to know the relationship? The Oedipal fates depicted in the texts present multiple paradoxes that point to the collapse of a whole national culture and loss of a people’s historical memory. Entrapped in collective anxiety and frenzy, Ewenki have become their own ‘mistaken killer’ and ‘mistakenly killed’. The Ewenki ‘giant’ is falling like the last shaman.

Ureltu’s late Ewenki narratives constitute a forceful prophecy of ethnic destiny. The Ewenki ‘giants’ who are falling down with tears and bloodshed have ended up becoming biological specimens on an autopsy dissection table. From the figures in the texts, folklorists collect Ewenki folk samples, religious scholars find sought-for shaman rituals, travel enthusiasts discover frontier scenery, people from various cultures peer into the Ewenki original ecological culture through the ‘keyhole’ of the texts, eco-literature advocates are overjoyed. Ureltu’s narratives have added to a growing collection of ‘forest novels’, ‘hunting novels’, ‘ecological literature’ and ‘root-seeking literature’; and the folk specimens that they provide for sample hunters have led to a collective misreading of Ewenki culture and a continual nightmare for Ureltu.

Such misreadings led Ureltu to reflect on and question his initial choice of using a ‘hybrid’ style. In using an ‘aesthetic mode of thinking’ to express the ‘primitive simplicity’ of Ewenki life, he did not want to hold up a kind of factionalist torch of a people’s ethnic history and culture. He adopted a scientific approach and thought that readers would accept his basically non-fictional Ewenki stories with that same attitude. He sought to broaden the social awareness implicit in literary realism and do away with a false dichotomy between ‘aesthetic thinking’ and ‘scientific attitude’. In the face of the misunderstanding of his works and their being used as mere cultural examples, however, he had to rethink his approach and choose a narrative mode in the second period that explicitly reconfirmed the historical and cultural value of the Ewenki way of life.

The right to self-interpretation

After nearly three years of silence, Ureltu re-emerged with non-fictional writing, which falls into three categories. One is cultural and ideological essays, such as Substitution of Voice (1996), The Inalienable Right of Self-Interpretation (1997), Writings of Vulnerable Groups (1997), Discoverer or Colonial Pioneer (1999), Lost Hunter (2000), Dreams of Eco-Man (2004). Another is anthropological and ethnographical notes, such as The Ewenki Style (1993), Yesterday’s Hunters (2016), In the Argun River Basin (2016), etc. The last is historical writings, such as the oral histories of Ewenki Conversations (2009), Historical Traces of the Ewenki (1998), Offering Sacrifice to Aoluguya (2007), Historical Manuscripts of the Ewenki (2007), Historical Words of the Ewenki (2005), etc.

‘With the changes in the life scenes I am familiar with’, Ureltu explained, ‘I can no longer express my thoughts by using the original literary form. So, some changes have taken place in my writing.’ ²¹ Such texts as Substitution of Voice, The Inalienable Right of Self-Interpretation, Writings of Vulnerable Groups, Discoverer or Colonial Pioneer represent Ureltu’s mode of self-narration. In these cultural and ideological essays, he cites Ma Jian (马建) and other Han writers’ misreadings of the history, culture, religious beliefs and folklore of Tibetan, Kazak and Hui peoples, which were strongly objected to by each group. He quotes the critique of colonialism by the Palestinian American academic Edward Said, introduces the resistance writings of Third World writers and criticism of Eurocentrism and calls to mind the bloody massacre of the Indians and the sanitised history of Columbus. He analyses the ‘appropriation of voices’ in fictional works such as that cited in Shlomith Rimmon- Kenan’s Narrative Fiction and the awakening of recent decolonisation movements.

Ureltu’s writings of this period show how his thinking has been deeply influenced by postcolonial theory and Michel Foucault’s postmodern sociology. He compares the withholding from Indians the right to explain their own history and aboriginal culture with the lack of voice given to ethnic minorities in China, and the subsequent misunderstanding of their history and culture. He calls attention to the fact that his ‘hybrid’ Ewenki narratives have been misinterpreted and used as stereotypical examples. The way to resist is for minority peoples to produce their own knowledge, be the authors of their indigenous ethnic historical and cultural modes. In his view, the substitution and appropriation of the voices of minority nationalities by a powerful elite essentially amounts to a form of cultural plunder used to elevate the dominant history and culture and validate hegemonic discourse and pseudo-knowledge. This connection of the fate of Ewenki culture with other ethnic groups and native cultures across the world, constituted a major change in his analysis.

It must be pointed out, however, that Ureltu makes a strict distinction between ‘appropriation of voice’ and ‘substitution of voice’. He claims that ‘appropriation of voice’ is an important feature of colonial history and the postcolonial era, whereas ‘substitution of voice’ occurs in ‘a country of political integration’ like China. ‘In a country where multi-nationalities coexist and seek common development, the substitution of voice is a phenomenon that is difficult to eliminate at this time. It also needs more attention.’ ²²

Ureltu’s thought embodies his understanding of the complex issues of cultural power, knowledge production, politics and ideology of Chinese ethnic minority peoples as it emerged from his personal experience of the Ewenki historical and cultural crisis. He pointed out,

As a marginal group, it has never had its own voice. The past history has been distorted, covered and rewritten. Therefore, in order to bring back the true history of our group, we have to face various pressures in the process of searching for it. People are often accustomed to the fixed old mindset. ²³

Mastering one’s ability of self-interpretation is the most effective way to avoid cultural misunderstanding, stereotyping, substitution and the false rewriting of history. In this, the role of fictional narrative and ‘hybrid’ literary discourse in making use of one’s right of self-interpretation cannot match direct, non-fictional expression of a people’s historical understanding.

Ureltu’s understanding clearly stems from a recognition of an ‘Ewenki cultural chain’ created over a long period of time. However, at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this century, in the context of China’s looking forward to the ‘new century’ as a ‘whole nation’ and its eagerness to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the course of world integration, his thinking came to have a new and obviously decolonising aspect. In light of the collective illusion of the ‘world imagination’ inspired by globalisation and traditional Chinese notions of ‘great harmony’, Ureltu turned to discourse on the rationality and legitimacy of ‘group-specific rights’ as discussed by the Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka. ²⁴

People tend to think that the history and culture of ethnic peoples is a kind of public resource and that the right of interpretation of that history and culture is a public endowment that anyone can utilise. In that view, there is no problem of ‘substitution’ or ‘appropriation’. In many people’s deep-rooted preconceptions, moreover, the economic and cultural modernisation of ‘backward’ ethnic minorities is an inevitable trend and Ureltu’s thought has a tendency to cultural conservatism and ethnic nationalism. After the widely acclaimed prize-winning Chinese novelist Chi Zijian (迟子建) published The Right Bank of Argun River (2005), which also focuses on the Aoluguya Ewenki, readers who know very little about the topic argued that her work amounts to a complete subversion of Ureltu’s ‘right of self-interpretation’. However, nothing can be further from the truth.

Such people paid no attention to Chi’s and Ureltu’s attitudes toward ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’, ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ with regard to the cultures of such minority peoples as the Ewenki. Chi’s attitude toward cultural identity is highly consistent with that of Ureltu’s. In particular, people have failed to understand why Ureltu emphasises the right of self-interpretation. From his point of view, who does the interpretation is only a superficial problem. The essence is why and how to do so, and from what standpoint. For behind the right of interpretation is the question of the generation of knowledge and what kind of knowledge one produces. On this point, Ureltu and Chi Zijian share an opinion.

Ureltu strongly agrees with the attitude toward voice appropriation expressed by the Mohawk Indian writer Beth E. Brant, who does not think that only Indians can write of Indians:

You can’t steal my story and say it’s yours. You can’t steal my spirit and say it’s yours. This is the history of North America: stolen wealth, stolen life, stolen dreams, stolen spirituality. If your history is the history of cultural domination, you must understand it clearly and tell the truth about it. You have to admit this history before you can get permission to write about it. ²⁵

The experiences of Brant and Ureltu show that writing about one’s own ethnic history when it is entangled in the history of domination by another culture is extremely difficult. When the Ewenki spirit in Ureltu’s early novels is dubbed ‘Confucian moralism’, it amounts to ‘stealing’. How can the Ewenki people’s indigenous characteristics become ‘Confucianism’ and ‘moralism’?

Such characterisation directly obscures people’s understanding of the formation of the Ewenki spirit and its historical development. As Ureltu says, the appropriation of a people’s voice not only ‘radically distorts the ethno-national image of American Indians’; it also ‘distorts the history of human civilization’. As is shown in the debate between anthropologists Margaret Mead in Coming of Age in Samoa and Derek Freeman in his critical rebuttal Margaret Mead and Samoa: the making and unmaking of an anthropological myth, whether it is a matter of ‘western-centrism’, ‘white-centrism’ or colonial hegemonic discourse, a ‘living’ heterogeneous culture is readily regarded as a source of ‘available resources without sovereignty, boundaries and subject consciousness’ that can be disposed of and plundered at will. Ureltu stresses that in the course of both of these anthropologists’ use of Samoan culture, they failed to reflect on the legitimacy of power. They ignored the feelings and rights of Samoans themselves, which resulted in a historical instance of rigid rewriting of an ethno-national culture, based on personal motivation and resulting in an enterprise far removed from reality. ²⁶ Their debate reveals the unequal power relationship between hegemonic discourse and vulnerable subaltern modes as well as the role of manipulation in the production of knowledge.

The production and dissemination of Ewenki historical knowledge

Here, on the level of knowledge production and power relations, Ureltu finds another serious problem. That is, although the ‘right of self-interpretation’ sometimes seems to lie in one’s own hands, in fact, in many cases, as with the Samoan people, the voice in colonised societies was ‘appropriated’ by the colonisers with no authorisation from the indigenous people themselves. The colonisers had the power to generate and disseminate knowledge on a global scale. Whereas for colonised or ethnic minority peoples, the production of knowledge occurs in a kind of ‘self-enclosed workshop’, in which knowledge is doomed to remain at the level of self-contained ‘indigenous knowledge’. It is impossible for such peoples to take part in the overall knowledge production-consumption system that a writer like Mead has at her disposal. In such circumstances, people like the Samoans can exercise their right of self-interpretation and produce ‘indigenous knowledge’; but this cannot correct the misunderstanding of ‘Samoans’ that has already been disseminated by the holders of power in the modern mass media, which becomes the ‘truly proven’, ‘canonical’ knowledge and hegemonic discourse. The self-interpretation generated from among the Samoans themselves becomes pseudo-canonical knowledge, muzzled and even stifled by the knowledge-hegemony of the ‘canonical’.

In order to further illustrate this problem, Ureltu, in Discoverer or Colonial Pioneer, deflates the ‘pseudo-knowledge’ created by western colonisers of Columbus as a ‘great navigator’ and ‘discoverer of the New World’. He recalls how colonisers used the power of interpretation to produce ‘pseudo-knowledge’ and canonise it in a way that conceals their crimes and creates a distorted understanding of history. He asks how Europe charmed itself. ‘At first, it was a geographical center, then a cultural center, then a power center.’ ²⁷ But who assesses Europe as ‘cultural center’? Who defines it as ‘power center’? Who empowers the ‘power center’ of Europe? If this is a kind of self-empowerment, then what is the legitimacy of that power? The use of self-empowerment to transform colonisers into discoverers, and mobs and their atrocities into God’s messengers and saviours, and the use of their ‘historic’ knowledge to bolster the legitimacy of their power – is this a sign of civilisation or an act of barbarism?

Based on this, Ureltu confirms Foucault’s insight on the relationship between power and knowledge: power makes knowledge, and no knowledge can be formed independently of power. Knowledge must necessarily rely on a process of communication, recording, accumulation and transfer; and that process itself is a form of power. Conversely, the exercise of any power cannot be separated from the presentation, possession, distribution and retention of knowledge. ²⁸ This leads directly to the issue of the right of minority peoples to self-interpretation, the driving force for Ureltu to abandon his ‘hybrid’ Ewenki narrative and adopt a more direct mode of knowledge production − namely, non-fictional ethnography and national history, so as to reconstruct Ewenki history and confirm the value of Ewenki culture.

Nevertheless, Ureltu still holds in high regards the influence of fictional works based on minority people’s experiences, such as the image of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the influence of the ‘genuine black voice’ of the author Richard Wright in his novel Native Son (1940) on American literary circles. With regard to the validity of fiction as opposed to non-fiction, Ureltu came to firmly believe in the latter. So, he abandoned ‘aesthetic thinking’ and took to anthropology, history, archaeology, philosophy and religious theory as his main perspectives for capturing Ewenki history and culture. Thus, he continued to use the ‘right of self-interpretation’ to repair, rectify and integrate the historical memory of Ewenki, which was covered over, misunderstood and even fragmented by history. In order to prevent Ewenki history from being ‘rewritten’, ‘appropriated’ and ‘sampled’ to generate ‘pseudo-knowledge’, he used on the ground recordings of the transformation Ewenki culture had undergone, so compounding the scientific side of his work over forty years.

Of course, non-fictional historical accounts need to be tested and validated against historical material. In terms of Ewenki origins, for example, the expert on Ewenki history Wu Yundalai, in his 1983 Brief History of the Ewenki, proposed a completely different view from that of Ureltu. Wu maintains that the Ewenki people originated from the lower reaches of the Wusuli, Suifen and Tumen Rivers and that their ancestors were the Anjugu tribe, one of the seven tribes of the Mohe area near the border with Russia. ²⁹ The two writers explored the same sources, but with different conclusions – pointing to a gap in the production of Ewenki historical knowledge.

Knowledge is always produced for dissemination. If there is no dissemination, knowledge has no value. The influence that Wu Yundalai came to have on Ureltu is a typical case of ‘local knowledge holders’ using the right of self-interpretation to further the ‘production-reproduction dissemination’ process of national historical knowledge. In 1998, Wu went on to publish The Origins of the Ewenki, later hailed as a ‘unique historical discovery’ that outlined the historical migration path of the Ewenki and opened a further door into the collective memory of the Ewenki for him. ³⁰ However, Wu’s ‘reproduction’ of Ewenki historical knowledge initially encountered difficulties. Partially because of a lack of funding and also because he did not receive timely support from colleagues, his academic views failed to spread to the outside world and few people knew of his research. ³¹ Ureltu’s contact with Wu’s The Origins of the Ewenki (1998), however, made him more aware of the identity of the ‘cultural chain’; so, in the light of Wu’s wise observations, he completed Historical Works of the Ewenki in 2005 and Historical Manuscripts of the Ewenki in 2007. As Cui Rong has noted, he ‘inherited Wu Yundalai’s academic views and personal wisdom and used his own clout to fill in missing links in collective memory’. ³² While helping disseminate Wu’s work, Ureltu has become an important successor, producer and disseminator of Ewenki historical knowledge and a link in the chain of Ewenki history and culture. In Historical Words of the Ewenki and Historical Manuscripts of the Ewenki, as well as in the oral history recorded in Ewenki Conversations, his purpose was to ‘preserve a clear memory of the past’ and ‘set up this picture as the national historical memory’.

Ureltu challenges head-on the complete extinction of the Ewenki’s ‘first-class’ culture and civilisation. Are the people who are facing this crisis just the Ewenki? Or is it China and the world as a whole?