Abstract
Recognized as Japan’s indigenous peoples in 2008, the Ainu people of Hokkaido have sought to recuperate land and self-determination by physically reenacting Ainu traditional knowledge through ecotourism in Hokkaido. Colonization and assimilation have severed most contemporary Ainu from relations with nonhuman sentient beings (A. kamuy) rooted in land and waterways. Ecotourism provides a context for reenacting an ancestral ontology through engaging in wild food gathering, relearning subsistence practices for cultural transmission, and reinscribing Ainu cultural logics onto the land through stewardship and language. At the same time, the Japanese government’s campaign to have Siretok nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site can be interpreted as an attempt to legitimate Japanese claims to Shiretoko and reinscribe the authority of Japan, as both the proper steward to ensure responsible conservation of Shiretoko but also the rightful owner and proper occupant of the promontory and its surrounding waterways. The article reveals how Ainu attempts to establish relationships and assert ancestral claims with the kamuy in the landscape are stymied by the ongoing reality of settler colonialism and erasure of Ainu presence in the landscape. Further, it explores how a capitalist-driven economy of ecotourism unleashes new dynamics in relations between local Ainu fishers and farmers in Shiretoko and outsider Ainu who seek to develop ecotourist initiatives.
Highlights
Settler colonialism strives for the dissolution of native societies
For its indigenous Ainu community, the Shiretoko region was better known as Sir-etok, and the entire island was seen as the domain of
This paper was published as Performing Identity, Saving Land: Ainu Indigenous Ecotourism as a Stage for Reclaiming Rights in Japan, pp. 112–124 in the Report of the 第13集 国際シンポジウム: 観光から見る東アジアのエスニシティと国家 [13th International
Summary
Settler colonialism strives for the dissolution of native societies. It erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base To get in the way, all the Native has to do is stay at home ([2], p. 38). On 8 September 1986, a broad coalition of eastern Hokkaido Ainu, calling themselves the Ainu Spirit Campaign to Block Logging in Shiretoko , demanded that the kamuy dwelling in the forests and the forests be protected at all costs They proposed three actions: (1) a public kamuynomi prayer ritual at the proposed timber site; (2) a dramatic public reading of the Blakiston’s fish owl yūkar (oral literature); and (3) as a last resort to protect local kamuy, the kewtanke, a ritual reserved only for states of emergency. In March 1987, after determining that the endangered Blakiston’s Fish Owl (J: shimafukurō) population would not be significantly impacted, the Forestry Agency approved the revised logging proposal This moment in the history of settler engagement in the Shiretoko landscape demonstrates how wajin in Hokkaido had already adopted a conservationist approach to the ecology of the region, in contrast to the government’s attempts to capitalize on its abundant natural resources. Inasmuch as Ainu attempts to block the timbering were discussed in only one of 37 news accounts, this episode suggests that Ainu were already erased from Shiretoko lanscapes sometime in the late nineteenth or early tweintieth century, as the depopulation figures indicate
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