Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism

What does it mean to live through a world coming undone?How do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief?Decolonial Endurance explores these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers in China's Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and Tibet.Like many of China's Indigenous borderlands, this mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state power.Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has been compelling the Lisu to give up their subsistence lifeways, move into urban settlements, and send their children to government boarding schools.In exchange for the so-called gifts of development - healthcare, income, and education - they suffer environmental and social catastrophes such as mass landslides, strange new illnesses, and toxic food. Drawing on over a decade of engagement with the Lisu, Ting Hui Lau takes readers into the world of ex-shamans, heart-pained mothers, restless spirits, and demon-mad migrants as they grapple with the fa