The Last Quarter of the Moon

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A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.

At the end of the twentieth century, political upheavals seize upon an intergenerational Indigenous family of the Evenki tribe living deep in the forested mountains of Chinas eastern edge. An elder spins the daily tales of family and community drama against the fray of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian nation-building and resource extraction. As our narrators world is forced to the margins of empire and industrialization, her abiding and tender attention to her peoples core relationshipshuman, animal, spiritual, environmentalbecomes itself an act of resistance and a lesson in markedly different values.

Acclaimed author Chi Zijian gives us an unabashedly intimate account of how an entire culture can be pushed to the vanishing point. With slowness and storytelling resisting the imposition of grand narratives and plot progression, she raises the stakes of this beautiful, deceptively simple read. Faithfully translated in word and intention by Bruce Humes, the book renders an Evenki experience of interdependence and reciprocity with the natural world, where wilderness is infused with domestic life and spiritual intervention. From reindeer herding and ice fishing, to Shamanic songs and rites, to tallies of marriages, births, and deaths, this nomadic clan contends with displacement on an existential scale.

This essential addition to the Seedbank series shows real lives that dont conform to the march of modernization, speaking profoundly to real endangerment of Indigenous communities and knowledge across the world. When I look again at the fawn that is nearer and nearer to us, it feels as if the pale-white crescent has fallen to the ground, our narrator concludes. Im crying, because I can no longer distinguish between heaven and earth. This epic, internationally recognized work humbly challenges us to also see the moon and the reindeerand our futureas one and the same.