Indigenous and colonial epistemes of place and ecology differ significantly. In part this is because Indigenous knowledge privileges relationality and specificity rather than universals. Professor Mary Graham of the Kombumerri Peoples in Australia states, “In European culture, Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ If there were an Aboriginal equivalent, it would be: ‘I am located, therefore I am’” (2020, 4). Acknowledging that Indigeneity in Asia is “an emerging but contested concept” (Baird 2016), this panel examines three cases in Inter-Asian cultural studies, set in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), that contrast colonial and indigenous ecological epistemes. We analyze Maoist campaigns to mobilize Han Chinese settlers to “construct the borderlands” during the socialist collectivization era (1953-1983), and twenty-first-century neoliberal “green governance” policies to resettle nomadic pastoralists and foragers by “Opening up the West” to extraction, industrial agriculture, and urban development. The panel contrasts dominant state ecological epistemes with Indigenous storytelling strategies that powerfully resist colonial erasure of local ecologies and land epistemologies in China.

Nurila Qizihan’s Kazakh-language memoir, Hunters’ Stories (2009), documents her father’s experience as a commune hunter in the socialist collectivization era in northern Xinjiang Autonomous Uyghur Region in China. Starting in 1953, the PRC incentivized waves of Han migration to this grassland region to work on water conservation, industrial projects and the Karamay oil fields. Dr. Guldana Salimjan examines Nurila’s acts of remembrance based on fieldwork among Kazakh communities in China, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia to examine how storytelling centered on Traditional Ecological Knowledge articulates and documents the unspoken trauma of settler violence among Kazakh readers. Dr. Salijman then reflects more broadly on what indigeneity means today for Inner Asian transnational groups such as Kazakhs, whose histories and memories are shaped by multiple imperial powers in the past, and ongoing settler colonization of their homeland.

Disparate Mongol and Chinese understandings of desert ecology also create clashes. Professor Cheng Li examines the Mao era “Greening the Motherland” campaign exercised in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China. He argues that although Han Chinese planted trees as a “progressive” crusade, their ignorance of indigenous knowledge of local ecology was regressive and oppressive. He first examines the scientific discourse concerning the conquest of the desert by the Communist government, which views tree-planting as a universal good. He then examines a feature film, Spring in the Desert (shamo de chuntian, 1975), where resistance from the local ethnic population emerges when universal values are at odds with local ones upheld by ethnic groups, contending that tree-planting in the desert reflects the conflict between the settled Han Chinese lifestyle and the nomadic lifestyle embraced by Mongols. Professor Li concludes that tree-planting legitimizes Han Chinese social control in the borderlands under a veneer of environmental conservation.

A third case examines literature set in mountainous border regions in southwest China. Professor Robin Visser compares award-winning, environmentally conscious “root-seeking” novels by Beijing-based Han writers with literature by local Wa and Nuosu Yi Indigenes. She suggests Ah Cheng’s King of Trees (1985) and Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain (1989) are “Beijing westerns” that rationalize “Go West” developmental policies. Beijing westerns, she argues, appropriate peripheral Indigenous ecological perspectives to critique Maoist destruction of the environment and the concomitant undermining of Han neo-Confucian values in order to strengthen the center of the nation-state. Works by Burao Yilu (Wa), Bamo Qubumo (Nuosu Yi) and Aku Wuwu (Nuosu Yi), by contrast, resist romanticized or exoticized depictions of Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems. Instead, she illustrates how their poems and essays manifest what Édouard Glissant has called “opacity,” refusing colonial epistemes by centering the border as a place of home, heritage, and everyday humanity, though under great duress from climate change.

Together, these three papers analyze strategies of resistance in literary and cinematic works featuring ecologies set in multiple border regions of the People’s Republic of China. Presided over by Maria Romanova, a comparative specialist in Inter-Asia border ecologies, this panel aims to contribute to the emerging field of Indigenous Studies in Sinophone States.