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cultivation duties and constant shifts between outposts had left them“no
time to obtain shelters.”There were other requests that New Manchu
troops be moved from“temporary”residences in Ningguta’s outskirts to
houses within the town to permit them to“understand its ways.”^103
Relocation also disrupted the Qing pelt tribute system. By 1678 Qing
officials sought to stop Ningguta’s“new people”from trading pelts with
Fiyaka and Hejen groups, which they held responsible for the poor
quality of tribute pelts that year. They also feared the state would per-
manently lose exclusive access to high-quality pelts.^104 In this instance,
Qing response to Russian incursion necessitated increased dynastic regu-
lation of inter-aimantrade to preserve the integrity of tribute and to
monopolize foraging of premium sable.
Dynastic officials, however, found they could not opportunistically
reorder relations between peoples and pelts by decree. In fact, sable pelts
were so much a part of basin quotidian existence that some banner
officers felt pelt exchanges could not be prohibited because sable was
used as dowry and to pay debts, in effect as currency for major transac-
tions.^105 Some people, such as the Warka deserters, even felt compelled to
move back to game-filled forests, in spite of other people’s objections.
Connections between game and peoples were not wholly subject to state,
or even human, manipulation, which overlooked the ecological fact that
the Warka’s new residence of Ningguta, likely critically deforested, was
not prime sable habitat.^106 Limitations on imperial power arose from
such interdependency between indigenous culture and biodiversity rather
than simply from human action.
Cossack incursion pressured the dynasty to resort to relocation, a denial
of the human resources that also embodied, however tenuously, Qing
territory. A more decisive reassertion of a Qing borderland would require
different embodiements, based on restructured tributary identities and new
constructions from indigenous peoples such as those Fiyaka, Hejen, and
Kiler-Ewenki who had never been imperial subjects. This restructuring
had to go beyond an alteration of pelt tribute relations. It required a more
drastic transformation of indigenous peoples’forager identities into highly
regimented military-administrative garrisons almost exclusively dependent
on cultivation. Some of this transformation’s consequent problems were
already visible in issues of game, agriculture, and town residence that
appeared within thefirst several years of the Warka arrival in Ningguta.
Additional problems, however, would emerge once a more direct Qing
presence was established along the northern reaches of the basin during
thefinal expulsion of Romanov forces. This expulsion had begun with the
The Nature of Imperial Foraging in the SAH Basin 93
