Teaching Indigenous Asian History Dersu Uzala and The Last Moose of Aoluguya

Chinese history is not just about the Han Chinese and other dominant ethnic groups. As a graduate instructor teaching world and Asian histories, I prioritize integrating the voices of oppressed ethnic minorities and Indigenous peoples into the curriculum design. I designed a comparative film review assignment when teaching the course China and the World in the summer of 2023. It required students to contrast the representations of Northeast Asian Indigenous people’s encounters with imperialism and modernization in two films, Dersu Uzala (1975) and The Last Moose Of Aoluguya (2013). This assignment aims to help students further their understanding of Indigeneity in Northeast Asian history. This essay introduces the application of the innovative assignment, including reviews of its design and deployment along with descriptions of students’ work.

When teaching a modern Asian history course in January 2023, I designed a film review assignment. Students chose an Asian-history–themed movie based on their interests and wrote film reviews from historical and historiographical perspectives. A large number of submissions did not match my expectations: while summarizing film plots and stories, students rarely analyzed those films critically. Their discussions hardly addressed the differences between historical reality and cinematic representation, the filmmakers’ intentions, or the impacts of imperialism, colonialism, orientalism, and other ideologies on the portrayal of historical events and figures.

After the course ended, I recognized that the assignment did not provide adequate information for students to review and criticize the films’ historical representations. For example, one student consulted with me and chose to review the film about the Korean War, Pork Chop Hill (1959). Following my suggestion, he argued that this American film was used as propaganda in the 1950s but did not provide enough evidence or explain the reasons clearly. Reflecting on this student’s submission, I sorted out the best way to redesign the assignment: if I had recommended the student also watch the Chinese film about the Korean War, Ying Xiong Er Nü (Heroic sons and daughters; 1959), he might have understood the anti-communist implications of Pork Chop Hill. The American film depicts Chinese soldiers as communism-brainwashed mobs whose lives were overlooked by their commanders. By contrast, the Chinese film describes the same group of people as heroes defending their motherland while portraying the US military as violent villains. The sharp distinction in the cinematic representations of the same war in these two films can facilitate students’ critical thinking and enable them to recognize the filmmakers’ intentions.

I practiced what I learned from this reflection when I taught the course China and the World in the summer of 2023. In one class meeting, I outlined the history of Qing China as an empire expanding in the 1600s and 1700s, which ultimately could not compete with modern Western empires in the nineteenth century. In the lecture, I took Northeast Asian history as an example. The competition between Qing China, Imperial Russia, and Chosŏn Korea shaped this region’s history between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. I especially encouraged students to rethink the geographical term "Manchuria," which refers to the land of the Manchu people. However, they were not the only group living in the region, which is also the homeland of hundreds of non-agrarian peoples. Moreover, I suggested that students avoid applying the obsolete “frontier thesis” in understanding Northeast Asian history, specifically regarding the Manchuria-Siberia borderlands; this perspective situates colonization of lands as a necessary and fundamental force in nation building. Finally, I created an assignment in which students watched two films about Indigenous people in Northeast Asia and wrote a comparative film review.

One film was Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s work Dersu Uzala (1975). This plot interweaves the Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev’s fieldwork in Ussuri with Nanai hunter Dersu Uzala’s everyday life, portraying their cross-cultural encounters and friendship while Han Chinese people appear as bandits invading the region. Although avoiding the Han- and Sinocentric narrative about Northeast Asia, the film was entrapped in biases of imperialism and colonialism. For example, it played down Arsenyev’s background “as a military officer in the service of the Russian Empire” (Solovieva 2023). Dersu Uzala was depicted as a "noble savage," a concept which “ascribe[d] to the ‘children of nature’ a unique way of seeing” (Sarkisova 2021, 85).  The other film, Mongolian Chinese filmmaker Gu Tao’s The Last Moose of Aoluguya (2013), is a documentary on the experience of Evenki people with modernity and state power in contemporary Chinese society. Different from Dersu Uzala, The Last Moose of Aoluguya records Indigenous perspectives on the precarity of their own culture in modern times.

Besides the two films, I required students to complete supplemental readings. One reading was an excerpt from Chinese writer Chi Zijian’s novel The Last Quarter of the Moon. Beginning with the monologue "I am an Evenki woman, I am the wife of our people’s last Clan Chieftain," this book preserves Indigenous voices by taking shape as an Evenki woman’s memoir (2014, 6). Another reading was an excerpt from Russian anthropologist Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff’s book Social Organization of the Northern Tungus (1929), which is based on his “investigations in Siberia, Mongolia, and Northern China made in 1912, 1913, 1915-7 and 1918 under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences a Petrograd and the Russian Committee for Investigation in Central and Eastern Asia” (Anthropology 1923, ii). His academic analysis of Indigenous peoples’ social structure takes an "imperial" gaze on the Indigenous people’s everyday lives. The contradiction between the two readings representing different perspectives helps students understand the ways that different speakers and points of view can result in different narrative representations.

The curricular design of the comparative film review assignment encourages students to critically reflect on Northeast Asian and Chinese histories and representations of Indigenous people from multiple perspectives. Notably, some students bridged their own experiences and the cinematic representation of Asian history. One international student in the classroom integrated his Han Chinese childhood in Greater Khingan in the review; where he lived is also the geographic setting of The Last Moose of Aoluguya. Contrary to the official narrative he learned from the history textbooks in China, the representation of Northeast Asian history from a Russian character’s perspective and from the Evenki people’s experience in contemporary Chinese society encouraged him to reflect on the limitations of the nationalist historiography of the Chinese past. A White American student in the classroom turned toward American history when discussing The Last Moose of Aoluguya. His essay spoke of the resemblance between the fate of the Evenki people in early twenty-first-century Chinese society and Native Americans in the late nineteenth-century United States. They are both the victims of modernization, in which their cultural heritages are oppressed and their voices are marginalized in mainstream society.

Overall, the comparative review of films interpreting Evenki and Nanai societies and cultures from different perspectives could efficiently integrate Indigenous voices into the Asian history classroom.

Rethinking Indigenous People in the Past and Present of Northeast Asia: Comparative Film Review Assignment

Film Review Guidelines

• At least five pages with double space and with 12-point font (>1200 words).
• The essay should contain at least the following four parts: 1) introduction; 2) summary of the two films’ storylines; 3) reflection on their differences, including the contradictions between them in filmmakers’ intentions, representations of the relations between Indigenous people and state authorities, the influence of modernity on Indigenous culture, and other aspects of your interest; 4) and conclusion. Each part should be in independent paragraphs (in other words, the essay is expected to have at least four paragraphs).
• This essay should reference at least five academic resources in the class readings or outside the classroom. (If you have difficulty finding relevant academic resources, please let me know! I am delighted to help you with seeking the relevant references.) The footnotes or in-text notes and references should be formatted properly (APA, MLA, or Chicago style).

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves on the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.