Japan's 'vanishing' Ainu will finally be recognized as indigenous people
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
My parents were Sami and Kven, but they didn't teach us, the children, their mother tongues. When they were growing up in the 50s and 60s, Norwegian schools would punish children who spoke their mother tongues instead of Norwegian. There was an explicit policy of assimilation and being Sami in particular carried shame.
Unlike the person in the article, I was aware of my background. However, I am as robbed as he is of any cultural heritage. Our parents raised us as Norwegian — a generic version of it with few local roots except for the accidental Sami influences that did slip through the cracks. It didn't help that I grew up in a central area mostly populated by people from the surrounding areas. The distinguishing trait of my home town is that it doesn't have one.
I feel mostly like a mutt. When I travel Norway, I see people with an actual culture, and I envy them a little. I don't have that kind of anchoring or rich tradition to draw on.
It is sadly the default mode of 'nation building', perhaps inherently so. One thing I would like to add is please don't blame your parents. No doubt they experienced the sort of systemic prejudice from the Norwegian state, and wanted to spare you that.
A stark contrast to the 'accident of birth' attitude prevalent in much of the West.
I think they should definitely be considered a minority, while still continuing with the actions mentioned in the article, like recognizing their culture and trying to help them after suffering discrimination.
But I always find the term "Indigenous" weird, because we all came from somewhere, so will American from Italian descent be considered "Indigenous" (just to Italy and not America)? I feel like that word is always used to describe non western culture, things and customs that are considered "less advanced", less modern, that we need to preserve, when in reality I think it's just another culture that we need to respect and except, and that by calling that group of cultures "Indigenous" there is some racism involved (by all participants)
Wikipedia says they are known as "first peoples":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples
For the most part, that is literally true -- they were the first group of humans on that land, humans having originated in Africa.
These books make the point that agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Agricultural technology enables people to get on boats and take the land of non-agricultural societies. It enables greater popular density and wealth.
This happened all over the world in the same progression, at roughly the same times.
In America, the indigenous peoples came from Asia by way Alaska more than 10,000 years ago. Then Europeans came by boat ~500 years ago.
I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
China was of course one of the first agricultural societies, and this enabled them to expand their territory rapidly, on the Asian continent and beyond. There were indigenous peoples living all over the Phillipines, Polynesia, Hawaii, etc. but they look "Asian" now because of the Chinese expansion. There were two different groups of people that collided.
Why should we care that anybody was a "first people"? And how long down the line will we recognize a group of people as fist people? Do they not make babies with non first people?
10k years from now are we still going to be going on about "so and so is of so so blood line making him indigenous" ?
While they seem like shitty questions, they are serious, because for somebody like me who knows little about his past, its hard to wrap my mind around being so attached to a group identity that really seems like it matters very little to your ability to succeeded and live a happy life today -- unless -- you declare being indigenous is something special and thus gives you extra rights, or more say, or something? And if having the label brings nothing, they why such the fuss?
Also, I am sure we can all trace our blood back to some "first people", so now what? Can I go back to my "first peoples" land and demand to be called indigenous?
As an example of that, there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu.
Also, ethnic discrimination against indigenous peoples has a long history pretty much globally. Legal equality is often not enough, because the past couple centuries have been spent whittling their economic and social capital to basically nothing. Reparations or subsidy is required for even a hope of getting those people on equal footing.
The lack of Manchu native speakers is not a problem for dealing with Qing-era state documents. The Manchu language is well-described and for many, many decades Han Chinese scholars (and then foreign scholars in Europe and North America) have been trained to work with Manchu sources. Does the lack of Latin native speakers hinder anyone from working with a new Roman-era text or inscription?
Furthermore, those handful of remaining native Manchus heavily code-switch with Chinese, and they have lost a great deal of their native Manchu vocabulary (a common phenomenon as a language dies), so even if you did show them a Qing-era text, they would probably be unable to understand much of its terminology without special training.
I am all for protecting language diversity, but your Manchu example is uninformed.
If Manchu didn't need to be protected because of how widely known it is, the notoriously assimilationist PRC would not be launching an initiative to translate all the documents, and would not be promoting Manchu language use and education[0]. You don't see similar efforts with, say, Shanghainese.
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/1982570/quie...
Similarly, even if Manchu had not become so moribund, its native speakers probably would have been no more proficient in Qing-era texts, especially considering that they represent an elite literary style and bureaucratic terminology, than trained non-native speakers.
The act implemented Japan's compulsory national education system in Hokkaido and eliminated traditional systems of Ainu land rights and claims. Over time, the Ainu were forced to give up their land and adopt Japanese customs through a series of government initiatives.
This was in 1899, not 10,000 years ago. I don't know if they are 'shitty' questions but they aren't very serious since they are framed in a pointedly inaccurate and uninformed way.
The first people were in 1899? Or just the "second" people came in 1899?
Part of my argument is that you can't be a "first" person in 1899, because the first people arrived thousands of years before.
Even the first subject is only partly decedents of the "first" peoples.
So if we are going to go down these lines of people get rights, or special treatment based off being indigenous, what are we really looking at? There are have been 1000s of years of intermingling both known and unknown, a "people" are not a static group, people are changing all the time.
Shitty was not the word I wanted to use but I was in a time crunch, callus is more how I feel on the subject.
Not having your language and culture coercively erased is not 'special treatment'. Again, framing it like that is not some flinty insight into a hard truth. It's just making stuff up.
Languages and cultures have a life cycle, I am not sure any of us would want to live in a society that tolerated and nurtured every culture that ever existed.
That being said you / me / they, are not their culture. You are a individual, and people should only be treated based off their individual merit. Using your culture as a way to distinguished your self and get special treatment, respect, or reconsecration is literally an extension of racism. This is not something you chose, there for it should be meaningless much like the color of your hair, or skin color. When you treat culture like you are -- you are creating exclusionary boundaries based on happenstance. There is nothing to be proud of because you were born in X culture, because you have done nothing. There is nothing to be ashamed of because you were born in Y culture because you as a individual have done nothing but simply existed. Wanting to preserve it -- and not make anew is just burying your head in the sand.
In short, your ancestors accomplishments/failures or sins matter not, for you are a new person.
Indigenous peoples have their own cultures, languages, traditions, etc. Unfortunately, colonization has oftentimes wiped out these things, as said in the article:
>The act implemented Japan's compulsory national education system in Hokkaido and eliminated traditional systems of Ainu land rights and claims. Over time, the Ainu were forced to give up their land and adopt Japanese customs through a series of government initiatives.
>High levels of poverty and unemployment currently hinder the Ainu's social progress. The percentage of Ainu who attend high school and university is far lower than the Hokkaido average.
Recognizing that the Ainu are an indigenous people is one of many steps that are necessary to create a more inclusive society so the Ainu can preserve their culture/traditions and not be forced to assimilate.
Now, you could argue that Taiwan represented a Chinese conquest of indigenous peoples. But even before the island was annexed (during the Qing dynasty, in 1683 CE) there had been fishermen and pirates from the mainland (and Japan) operating there to some degree.
Ultimately, you have various populations leaving the Asian mainland at different times. Sometimes later populations intermixed/intermarried with populations that had arrived in outlying territories earlier, sometimes they displaced them; usually it was a combination of both. But it wasn't some monolithic ethno-state exploiting a technological advantage to expand its reach -- the reality was much more complicated.
Coincidentally, yesterday I was watching "Civilizations" on Netflix, and they brought up the 1986 discovery of these incredible Bronze Age statues from the 12th-11th century B.C.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxingdui
And they were saying this contradicts the "Middle Kingdom" idea, i.e. that all of Chinese culture came from one place. The book Sapiens reminds us that every civilization/government likes to make an argument for why it has inevitable "divine" authority, and China is no exception. They exaggerate their history to claim power.
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But I think there is probably a reasonable analogy to Europe. It's not inaccurate to say the "Europeans" conquered the Americas starting around the 1500's.
European states like Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands were constantly at war with each other. But they all made conquests to different places in the Americas at slightly different times (i.e. South and Central America for Spain, the Caribbean, North America, etc.)
These societies shared broad characteristics and influenced other. Not just agriculture, but also property rights, the rule of law, etc. Their spoken and written languages were mutually unintelligible, but they recognized each other's currencies and could trade with each other. They adopted each other's technologies.
Nobody would call them the same, but it is coherent to talk about them as "European". It's a matter of semantics, but I think you can also call a group of disparate people "Chinese" in the same way. Although in the latter case there is a much greater difference in time. The Europe of today has considerable cultural continuity with the Europe of 1500 (art, music, government to some extent, etc.). I don't know how true that is for pre-modern China, although I suspect that if you adjust for the time period, it's roughly similar.
I would be interested in pointers to more resources about that.
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Another point: what other term would I use besides "Chinese"? "Asian" does not seem accurate or what historians would use. I think historians would come up with a different term than "China" or "Sino" if the difference were extremely large.
For example, as far as I know Mycenaean society has basically nothing in common with modern Greece -- no continuity in art, music, government, etc. -- but it's still called "Mycenaean Greece" since the land area they occupied is the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece
If there is another word for post-agricultural but pre-modern China, I would be happy to use it! "Chinese" is indeed a big and vague term with a lot of baggage to many people. (I am Chinese myself but born in America.)
Agreed, but a significant number of scholars still think the Yayoi people came from what's now Korea, and I think that there were also movements of peoples from the Southeast Asian peninsula into the Philippines and Indonesian archipelago. Now, there are certainly overseas Chinese communities in these places who came there recently, i.e. in the last few centuries, and have maintained their Chinese identity -- but the reason why most people in Indonesia look significantly different from most Papuans or Aboriginal Australians is not because of those recent arrivals, but rather because of a wave of in-migration from Southeast Asia that occurred millennia ago, long before China had taken on anything like its current form.
I actually think "Asian" is far and away the better term to use here, and the one historians (I actually am a historian of China) would use: it refers simply and neutrally to peoples from the continent of Asia, just as "Europeans" strictly speaking refers to peoples from the continent of Europe (in contrast with more culturally fraught terms like "Westerners", which connotes the technologies, currencies, etc. you mention). But there are in fact several different terms used to refer to the cultures that have affinities with China's when it comes to philosophy, linguistics, politics, etc. -- "Sinitic" and "Confucian" being the most prominent. (Some just call China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and certain pockets of other areas the "Sinosphere"). How appropriate those terms are is rightly debated, of course, but they are taken seriously as categories of analysis. Lots of members of the New Qing History school of historiography (e.g. Pam Crossley, Mark Elliott, Laura Hostetler, and Emma Jinhua Teng) have written about these issues, as have Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光, Peter Bol, and Yao Dali 姚大力. James Millward had a good outline of attitudes regarding minorities (少數民族) and ethnicity from the Qing to the present-day in his New York Review of Books article on the current crackdown in Xinjiang a few weeks ago, though I think it's paywalled.
(BTW, I think the general feeling is, in fact, that Chu culture was lineally descended from the Sanxingdui culture -- Sapiens did well to use it as an illustration.)
That's quite a strong and controversial claim to be making without strong evidence. From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea. As one of the other replies pointed out, it's also a bit anachronistic to be applying terms like China and Japan in this situation.
Japan is a country where even in academia, people often have an unshakable belief in the "uniqueness" of their culture. This has made Japanese unwilling to consider connections to other Asian regions and peoples. Consequently, a lot of the scholarly consensus on Japanese history has been formed by scholars from outside Japan who don't have an attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.
Generally, Korean has been seen as the probable source of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, not China, and there were Japanoid populations on the Korean peninsula centuries ago. However, Alexander Vovin (one of the world's most respected scholars on the history of Japanese) recently gave a thought-provoking conference presentation arguing that the Japanese language and certain aspects of Japanese culture may well ultimately spring from coastal China.
Given my experience with these outside "scholars" of my own culture, I'm going to go with the Japanese consensus. Often what these people claim as "objectivity" is actually just ignorance that they mask with the pseudoscientific language of the Humanities.
>attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.
Every nation and culture is unique. Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors, this notion does not seem unfounded. The hostility that outside scholars have towards this idea does however seem less than objective.
> Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors.
Again, Japanese shares the same family with neighbours they had on the Korean peninsula before the Korean peninsula's demographics changed. Almost no one disputes this. Longer-range connections like Altaic or Martine Robbeet's Transeurasian hypothesis are more controversial, but still within the scholarly mainstream.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713685
As mentioned, the Chinese exaggerate their history to claim power. But "modern Japanese historians" aren't exactly disinterested either.
I'd be interested to read more informed sources on the topics, rather than vague policing of words.
It is widely believed that they are related to (and originated from) the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, which is distinct from Chinese civilization in both genetics, culture and agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansio...
When the Polynesians arrived by boat in New Zealand (Maori), Hawaii, Easter Island and other islands in the South Pacific prior to AD 1300, they were the first settlers there. Also, their expansion is completely unrelated to "Chinese expansion".
The "menehunes" arrived via the Marquesas. The present Polynesian population came from Tahiti or Fiji, although all ultimately trace back to Taiwan.
There is some evidence that islands closer to New Guinea were populated more than 20,000 years ago, before the present population swept in.
Japan adds an interesting footnote: the samurai are said to retain a much higher proportion if Ainu genetic heritage than typical Japanese. This observation is not popular in Japan.
Isn't part of the history of Plymouth that the Mayflower pilgrims had no idea how to farm and were woefully unprepared and thus on the verge of starving, but the indigenous Wampanoag people helped them learn how to do it and survive?
Isn't there massive, widespread and overwhelming evidence that most indigenous societies in the Americas as an example practiced sophisticated agriculture and had an enormous variety of developed crops and techniques including selective breeding, biochar, terracing, enormous terraforming projects, large scale irrigation systems, special varieties of maize for arctic, desert and salty biomes, as well as developing massive trade networks that managed to get central american grown cocoa as far north as Utah?
How could it be that such cultures could possibly be described as being distinguished by not having agriculture?
Yes, that part of the parent comment stuck out at me as grossly untrue. While some were hunter-gatherers, many American indigenous populations had widespread agriculture [1].
[1] I know it's a bit uncouth to cite wikipedia, but it was easy as a source for something I already knew to be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...
But, it's all fraught and complicated, conceptually(/politically/culturally) and empirically. (For instance, Yamato people also have Jomon heritage, and these days most Ainu also have Yayoi / Yamato heritage.) So indeed, indigeneity is complicated here, just like it is, as you say, everywhere.
David Howell at Harvard has written quite a bit about identity in Japan -- see esp. "Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (2005).
a) Have a long historic and cultural tie to the region they currently occupy,
b) are no longer the dominant culture in that region, and most importantly,
c) consider them self indigenous,
In practice an indigenous people group really only has to fulfill the last criteria. Note also that they don’t have to be the first people group to occupy a region. They don’t even have to have been there before the dominant culture arrived. For example, the Inuit people are believed to have arrived in Greenland after the Norseman in the early 11th century, and they didn’t occupy parts of east Greenland until th 20th century. Today they are arguably the dominant culture in Greenland. However nobody can dispute the fact that they are indigenous people in their land.
Right but of course there is a difference between coming to NA less than 200 years ago and 15,000++ years ago.
When settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous Nations in North America were systematically stripped of their lands and titles and worse. In Canada at least the notion that 'everyone came from somewhere' is viewed as a settler rhetorical tactic to loosen and obfuscate Indigenous title to the land and this is not taken kindly by Indigenous persons.
Consequently in Canada Indigenous people will often state that they've been in NA 'since time immemorial' or more simply 'always'. This is not scientifically likely to be true, but it's essentially a strong assertion and underlining of the fact that the land is their unceded land and that settlers are settlers to it.
Does place X "really belong" to tribe A, who sold it to white people? Or to tribe B, who were previously conquered by tribe A? Or to tribe C, who were conquered by tribe B even before that? And so on.
It also shades quickly into nativist ideas that delegitimize immigrants since even after generations since they're not "really from" the place where they live. If white Americans aren't "really from" America, it's not hard to argue that e.g. black British aren't "really from" the UK and don't have a true right to exist there if the natives disagree.
If we're going to have any coherent framework around this at all, it has to include some duration of time after which people are considered naturalized to a land. I'm inclined to say that someone who was born in a place and lived there their whole life has a natural, native right to live there. But it's definitely open to discussion. What isn't open is the idea of eternal ethnic land rights. Nor is the unspoken but commonly-applied rule that whites have no exclusive rights to any place but everyone else owns the place they live in.
(The American example even ignores the complexities of settler/native interactions; it was by no means a one-sided conquest; they worked together, and traded, and involved each other in inter-white and inter-tribal conflicts on both sides for centuries. Whites acted very much like just another collection of tribes on the American political field for a long time; the only long-term diffrence was not moral at all, but simply the fact that they managed to succeed where the Lakota and Iroquois and others tried but failed.)
This statement eliminates the necessary nuance.
No.
Settlers took over unceded indigenous land. Indigenous Nations are now attempting to re-claim specific tracts of land. This is a real and concrete issue.
Yes, and this was happening before Europeans arrived in North America. Indigenous cultures were at war before Europeans showed up.
Whats more in some cases they saw European colonisation as a potential strategic alliance against their longer term Indigenous foes.
Contrast this also to the Faeroe Islands (another Danish colony in the North Atlantic) whose current people group settled there centuries before the Inuit settled Greenland, were (arguably[1]) the first people there. You’d definitely raise an eyebrow if you’d hear them being called indigenous.
In short. Being the first people group to use the land is neither necessary nor sufficient for being indigenous.
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1: The islands might have been settled earlier by Irish monks, however (unlike the modern Norse settlers) they never established settlements that lasted for generations.
We have good evidence that the Mayan and Aztec peoples had groups that preceded them on the land, but they are still indigenous.
If the Maori were the first people to settle New Zealand, then yes, they are indigenous, otherwise no, the people they displaced were more likely indigenous.
In either case, the people who came after the Maori will never be indigenous no matter how settled they are.