Ainu: Spirit of a northern people

Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People

Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, April 30,1999-January 2, 2000.

Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People. William W. Fitzhugh and Chisato 0. Dubreuil, eds. Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History, in collaboration with University of Washington Press, 1999. 415 pp.

Ainu history itself has a history, and it is not straightforward.

Richard Siddle, Ainu: Spirit ofa Northern People (p. 67)

It seems that little about the Ainu peoples of northern Japan is straightforward. Their origins and language, their history, and their place in contemporary Japanese society are still in dispute. A former seafaring people, they once commanded a large territory known as Ainu Moshir stretching from northern Honshu up through Hokkaido to Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. Today Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands, remains the Ainu's principal homeland. Approximately 25,000 individuals self-identify with the community through formal registration; many times that number are presumed to have blended into the larger Japanese population, both for economic reasons and to avoid the discrimination and social stigma that have shadowed their number for centuries.

Scholarly interest in the Ainu began almost immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which permitted foreigners limited access to Japan's northern region. Motivated in part by racial theories that attributed Ainu origins to a remnant Caucasian population, these early researchers sought to document Ainu lifeways and material culture in the expectation that their subjects would soon "vanish" into history. Such efforts culminated in groups of Ainu being "exhibited" in America and England early in the twentieth century. By 1915, however, interest in Japan's northern people had waned, owing partly to the press of world events and partly to the feeling that assimilation had already done its work. Of course, the Ainu did not vanish. As the present exhibition, co-curated by William Fitzhugh and Chisato 0. Dubreuil, makes clear, a growing indigenous peoples movement has strengthened and energized the group in the modern period. At the same time, the opening of the former Soviet Union to archaeologists and other scholars has fostered renewed interest in Ainu origins and culture history.

Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People was born in large measure out...