Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain_ Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China\'s Borderlands

Warka, instead of submitting formal complaints, decided to slip back to

their homes while ostensibly out hunting,fishing, or herding around

Ningguta. At least forty-six males from twenty-six separate households

from eight banner companies made tactical use of their old way of life to

escape the new set of obligations that effectively required the Warka to

leave off foraging and become full-time soldier-farmers (seeTable 3 ).

Some of the fugitives were eventually caught heading back to their homes

on the Bičan. When questioned, the fugitives revealed a cultural gap that

had opened between the two groups of Manchurian forest peoples. When

Qing troopers asked their Warka captives if they had deserted because of

conflict with long-established residents in Ningguta, the fugitives instead

explained that“we were unable to get meat broth and stew to eat”in

Ningguta. In their “native place...abundant grass and trees” had

enabled them to hunt for the requisite meat ingredients. They had

deserted because they“missed”their own food, which was unobtainable

in their new, comparatively treeless home.^96

It is not entirely accurate to view this incident as evidence that the

Warka were literally, purely, and immutably products of their pristine

boreal environment–namely, that they were“primary hunter-gatherers”

in more technical and controversial anthropological terms. It is actually

impossible to speak of“the Warka”as a highly and consciously unified

people in a Qing or Romanov sense, making it difficult for both modern

scholars and imperial contemporaries to categorize them.

Nevertheless, one Warkaaimanofficer’s report made it quite clear that

relatively arablized areas such as Ningguta were ecologically unsuitable in

his people’s terms. He complained that in their normal

existence our people are partial to [hunting/eating] wild animals and fish
working only a little in thefields. Some people do not work thefields at all,
but are pastoral. Now since we moved to Ningguta, however, we have come to
depend only onfields, [but] oxen and plows are insufficient so we cannot engage
in cultivation.^97

These Warka in their natural habitat were not uniformly hunter-gathers,

pastoralists, or agriculturalists. Instead, they manifested a number of

ecologically conditioned practices that probably maximized their chances

of survival. The state itself actually used some such distinctions. Officials

initially decided that if the Cossacks moved toward the various lower

SAH Hejenaiman, none would need evacuation“since these people do

not farm and so are able to move anywhere out of the way.”^98 Yet the

dynastyfinally used an essentialized agrarian identity as the determinant

for indigenous removal. Problems emerged when Warka who were only

90 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain