Humanities Gossip | Legend of the Yi People, author, Feng Li
Author: Feng Li
1. Historical Review
I am a Yi ethnic group. I moved to the United States. Whenever I mention my ethnicity, I find that many overseas intellectual elites (not to mention ordinary people) have little knowledge of my ethnic group, which always triggers a series of strange questions, as if I came from a land of ignorant barbarians. In fact, the history of the Yi ethnic group is as old as Chinese civilization. It was the most important ethnic group among the "Southwest Yi" tribes in the pre-Qin period. Later, it was called "Yi people" and "Luolu" by the Han people. It was not until the 1950s that Mao Zedong changed "Yi" to "Yi" when he first met with Yi representatives in Beijing. He believed that the former had one bow per person and were barbaric; the latter lived in stilt houses under the big roof of the house, had rice and silk, and lived in stilt houses, which symbolized that they had no worries about food and clothing and were prosperous. Since then, people have called us "Yi people", but it took my elders and fellow villagers a long time to recognize and get used to this name from outsiders, because our ethnic group still uses the ancient self-names "Nuosu" and "Niesu".
