The Ainu, Japan’s Indigenous People
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bbc.com
Marimo is an extremely odd moss ball that only grows in their lake [2]. Once to the brink of extinction, the Ainu celebrates every year by strolling around the city with the prettiest marimo. They celebrate through the night with traditional dances. It was a unique experience.
[1] https://ohmatsuri.com/en/articles/hokkaido-marimo-matsuri
1. A relatively recent (past ~20k years) migration from Central Siberia correlated with the Ancestral North Eurasians [1], who contributed significant ancestry to Amerindians, Europeans, and Central/South Asians. They were phenotypically intermediate between modern East and West Eurasians, hence the unique combination of features often found in Amerindians.
2. A remnant of a much earlier (~50k years) population descended from humans who took the Southern Route [2] across Eurasia. They contributed significant ancestry to the Australian Aboriginals, certain South and Southeast Asian populations, and potentially some groups in the Amazon. The ancestry contributed to those Amerindians in the Amazon would've had to come from this population coming up across East Eurasia, where they could've left behind (or contributed to) populations like the Ainu.
West Eurasians (Caucasoids) and South Eurasians (Australoids) share a few distinctive traits that are shared by the Ainu, notably prominent brow ridges, lack of epicanthic folds, and heavier facial hair. So purely from a phenotypic point of view it's difficult to determine their origin. Genomic analyses also tend to be inconclusive, with Ainu often clustering with other Siberian groups rather than some special outgroup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_period
It’s supposedly more complicated since Yamato people are partly descended from Jomon who are supposedly also one of the ancestral groups of the Ainu. Both are indigenous and have been for over 1500 years. Or perhaps more accurately, the invasion started over 2000 years ago and was complete a few hundred years ago. Seems somewhat similar to Okinawa.
It’s like a technologically more advanced people subjugating their cousins.
Not unsurprisingly the biggest two, the Ainu and the remaining Japanese civilization, seem to correspond to the two biggest islands.
This suggests to me that the Ainu while maybe sharing some ancestry with the dominant Yamato people have a very different history, with the Ainu probably sharing less genetic history with modern East Asians.
But this peopling was a good 2000+ years ago. So it’s a bit like saying my ancestors were here 13000 years ago and most of yours were here only 2000 years ago.
Furthermore, we have no idea how many waves of people have migrated to those islands.
Some claims state that the Emishi and Ainu are related, but this is debated.
I came into the series for the educational part, but stayed for the crazy jokes.
[1] https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.237533/page/n8...
[2] https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.31614/2015.3161...
[3] https://archive.org/stream/cu31924013977727#page/n209/mode/2...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440125 from 2017
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19711756 from last year
* was the elder brother of the polish national hero jozef pilsudski
* conspired to assasinate russian tsar together with the brother of vladimir lenin
* was sentenced to death, then sent to 15 years of hard labour on sakhalin island
* married ainu woman, they had 2 children
* studied the ainu language, culture, etc, created the dictionary and recorded 100 wax cylinder of the ainu native speakers
* fled to japan when russo-japanese war broke out, where he was trying to help ainu cause too
* returned to poland and studied ethnography of peoples of polish mountains
* fled to france at the beginning of ww1 and was found drowned in seine river
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82aw_Pi%C5%82sudski
If my memory serves me, he's also mentioned in Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast.
> Having treated the bear well in life, her people believe the spirit of the sacred animal, which they worship as a deity, will ensure the continued good fortune of their community.
That's... so interesting
Indigenous or not, humans have truly monstrous traits. Occasionally, there's a question of how future generations will see us. I hope this is going to be one of those inconceivable mentalities which they will point to with curiosity and sadness.
Agreed though that nature is anything but 'nice'. Anyone who thinks otherwise has been lucky enough to be almost entirely shielded from nature by human society.
Where is our consciousness, self-awareness? The invention of religion - as the ultimate moral or ethical framework - is exposed as a fraud. That's several millennia of philosophy up in flames.
So I maintain that we should hold humans to a higher standard - the one that we believe we're entitled to, but seldom live up to.
In Search of Japanese Roots https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/in-search-of-j...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
Hayden White's metahistorical perspectives on how "narratives" shape history were really eye opening for me.
It's too sad to think of the finality of culture, but this is the least I can do. I think it's great that some Ainu are relearning the language - it's such a strong cultural bond.
I'm white but I work with a Coast Salish language that the tribes are trying to bring back from extinction. Indian children were forced into boarding schools and beaten if they didn't speak English, so a generation grew up without learning and the last L1 speaker died a decade ago. So much was lost, but linguists and elders wrote down enough that revival is possible. It will take hard work and determination for entire tribes though, so it may never recover except in ceremonial usage.
Not every society has produced things of equal value, and it's not particularly offensive to notice that.
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-writt...
> To restate Sima Qian’s experience in less emotional terms: because he was principled enough to contradict the emperor in the presence of his court, Sima Qian was sentenced to castration. This was a death sentence—any self-respecting man of his day would commit suicide before submitting to the procedure. Everyone expected Sima Qian to do so. But in the end Sima Qian decided to accept the punishment and live the rest of his life in shame, because if he did not he would never finish the history he had started.
> Not every historian has the balls to a challenge despot face-to-face. For despotic Wudi was—the castration of Sima Qian was hardly the most despotic thing Wudi would do before his reign ended. It is but one episode in a string of terrors, one paint-stroke in a portrait of tyranny.
> But who painted the portrait? None other than the grand historian Sima Qian. We remember Wudi as Sima Qian chose to depict him. Had Wudi realized the influence his court astronomer would have on future generations, he might have treated him differently. But Wudi realized none of this. Sima Qian was published brutally and embarrassed publicly. He was a loser.
> But in the end, the loser got his revenge.
It may be just survivorship bias, since all the "losers" that are really "lost" in history are nowhere to be found.
In the story of your reference, Wudi did not choose to destroy the work of Sima Qian, which he can do easily if he want to, and happened a lot in Chinese history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o....
Sima Qian may be just a lucky guy enough to get his work passed on and that's all.
See https://www.stand.ie/crofters-scotlands-indigenous-heritage/, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/crofters-..., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_is..., and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_is...
It seems like the Crofters are in the first group.
Oh, is e Albannach a tha annam, tha beagan Gaidhlig agam, ach chan eil mi fileanta ann.
I just checked Wikipedia and the Celts seem to have come from central Europe, so I guess they aren't the original inhabitants, but another wave of invaders.
If you go back far enough, you could probably consider Neanderthals to be victims of genocide. But there could have been an even earlier wave of settlement, so were they really indigenous?
The largely Angle/Saxon incursion was not a smooth considered invasion but more of a spreading out. Bear in mind that travelling by sea was generally easier than by land at the time. Heavily wooded hills are a pain to cross compared to sea with a decent wind. So the sea back then was not a barrier but actually helpful.
300?-1066 - What will become the UK etc is an amalgam of tiddly kingdoms and whatnot. What becomes England is Wessex, Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall - a bit Welsh - west wales), Kent, Essex, Sussex, Norfolk, Mercia, Deira and quite a lot more. There was the Danelaw and Dalegelt business with a bunch of homicidal viking folk. York's, and hence New York's names are derived from Jorvik which was the Danish name for the original town. The Romans called the place Eboracum.
Then the Normans turn up in 1066. lol
There is a step between Jorvik and the Latin Eboracum: Eoforvic.
One example, large portion of words (~30%) are have either French roots, quite likely due to the Norman invasion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England
And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_Britain
I believe there's a couple of Hardcore history episodes about the Roman invasions that are worth a listen.
Well, they Christianised the Welsh and left a lot of Roman ruins and roads but that seems to have been the extent of the long term influence. As far as I’m aware there’s no real genetic imprint of four centuries of Roman rule in Britain and culturally the Anglo-Saxon invasion just wiped everything out. Roman elite culture was urban culture; the withdrawal of the Empire led to a rapid economic collapse and they were completely unable to defend themselves in the end.
We have pretty strong evidence Vulgar Latin didn’t penetrate to the peasantry too. Brittany was settled by refugees from Roman Britain and that’s a Celtic language about as similar to Cornish as Irish Gaelic and Scots Gallic.
> ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’
The current majority culture is pretty new; about 1500 years (or maybe 1000, depending on what view you take on the Normans). There were a number of waves; before the Angles et al, the Romans, Celts, aforementioned bloody Beaker people, and various others. That’s for England; once you consider the rest of the UK it’s even messier.
This one's obvious; your tongue can't hold water the way a cat's does. Humans everywhere can cup water in their hands, but they suck it up rather than trying futilely to lick it up. I feel comfortable generalizing this into the past.
The UK doesn't talk much about its internal ethnic structure, but there are still traces of discrimination against people with the "wrong" accents.
The Troubles isn't usually called a war of colonialism, but it has the hallmarks: different languages and religious beliefs between groups which largely didn't intermarry? Long history of supremacy of one group over the other, including formally in law?
Ignoring Ireland for a moment, that is.
The history of all nations and peoples revolves around claiming land, and then fighting over it.
Even the act of founding a country carries many of the same sins as conquest or colonization. When a country is founded, a person or group of people decides that they are the ruler of everybody within some particular boundaries on the map. The only difference between that and conquest is whether or not those people had an established ruler.
> uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
History is not divided into victims and perpetrators in this respect, the only distinction you can make is that at any particular point in time any particular group may have been on the winning or losing end of it.
> colonialism has devastated cultures across the globe, and we should acknowledge that
To what end is it important to acknowledge this? The history of all people is drenched in the blood and atrocity of the past. Colonialism is not different from any other form of historic state or empire building.
> Let’s acknowledge that most modern Americans are not fans of slavery, the confederacy or racism. But is it right or useful to go back into history and cleanse the campus of references to those events and people who, in an earlier era with a different set of values, participated in them? So much is lost if we insist on this approach to history:
–Leaders are not perfect. In fact, the very qualities that may lead to huge success may also result in grand failures. Ask Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton or, yes, Woodrow Wilson. We’re better off celebrating and learning from leaders warts and all.
–History itself is full of failures and successes. Before the U.S., essentially every culture and country had slavery. Only in America was the prospect of eliminating it on the table at the founding, and eventually it was accomplished, Are we now to cleanse the public square of all failures?
——-
Generally, I think slavery and mass murder/subjugation are pretty awful, no matter the era, no matter if someone else is also doing it.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2015/12/01/prese...
> The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first citation for presentism in its historiographic sense from 1916, and the word may have been used in this meaning as early as the 1870s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_his...
Your comment goes beyond a typical ad hominem, you’re dismissing an argument simply because it has previously been used at least once by people you disagree with.
Presentism is a very specific kind of Eurocentrism founded on the teleological idea that, essentially, this is all God's plan and we're on the right side of it. Its meaning is changing a little in the modern era, now that we're looking back on our (human) history and recoiling. This naturally causes us some dissonance; the classic example is Jefferson's devotion to liberty... as a slaveholder who personally ordered his slaves flogged [2]. And classically, presentism would say that the US was on the correct course, and these other peoples (indigenous Americans, people we brought over to enslave, etc.) would inevitably lose out, because they're not on the right side of history [3].
But again in the modern era, we're seeing the meaning change from "we're on the right side of history and therefore can do no wrong" to "our values now are so different, if Andrew Jackson were alive today he'd be in prison". I think this is right; I don't want to erase Jefferson from history, but I do think I'd feel weird as an African-American to see slaveowners exalted everywhere (even money, save Lincoln and Grant everyone on there was a slaveowner). I mean, as a white guy I feel weird about it anyway.
But while I think the wiki article is pretty thinly cited, it does reference an opinion piece from the president of the American Historical Association which I actually really like. Here are some good bits:
> I'm not arguing that identity politics have no place in historical study; women's history, African American history, Latino history, gay and lesbian history, and the like have all made fundamentally important contributions to our understanding of history. It is hard to imagine American history in this country without some element of national identity in it. And present-day concerns have helped revivify topics, such as imperialism, that needed reconsideration.
> Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline.
> Students readily absorb these attitudes of temporal superiority, but they also stand in some ways as our best bulwark against it. When I teach Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history to students in UCLA's history of history class, they at first seize upon his Eurocentric, indeed racist, comments about Africa's place in world history, but they quite readily see that their condescension toward Hegel derives from Hegel's own worldview. Hegel was the great codifier of Western temporal superiority; for Hegel, all truth is revealed through the progression of history, which means that those in the present always have a better shot at grasping truth than do people in the past. Students understand quite quickly that those who follow them will have the same retrospective advantage over them that they enjoy vis à vis Hegel.
So, specifically, I'm not dismissing your characterization of my comment as presentist (?) because it's got some new modern relevance. I'm dismissing it because I buy the moral relativism critique: I think these things (colonialism, here) were always bad, and I think your attempt to dismiss my characterization as presentism is applying moral relativism (or whataboutism, less charitably) to acts that are universally, eternally immoral. Which is why I wrote:
> Generally, I think slavery and mass murder/subjugation are pretty awful, no matter the era, no matter if someone else is also doing it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Presentism_(liter...
[2]: This is a great example actually; read about American exceptionalism or the Jefferson's Empire of Liberty. That's textbook presentism right there.
Nearly every area in the globe was occupied by an earlier group before it was occupied by the present occupying group. Many areas had wave after wave of occupying group, some eliminating the previous group, some merging with the previous group. The people now "Greek" have little relationship to the ancient Greeks, the Mid East is mess, India has fabric of different groups, China was conquered by multiple waves of "barbarians", etc.
Many of these conquests and settlement processes have unspeakably cruel. European process stand out for being the largest and most recent but not necessarily otherwise. The cause for hope is that just hearing all this, most people want something better.
The Han suffer from altitude-related health problems and die at much, much higher rates than the Tibetans.
It seemed a little weird that China would want to “settle” Tibet considering that the most economically prosperous regions of the Country are on the Coastal regions. What are the incentives to abandon your home and move to a strange land?
2. Nationalistic pride. A lot of modern China's identity is tied up with using the perceived territories of the old Qing empire as a baseline measure for the country's standing in the world. Tibet was part of the Qing empire (disregarding how pre-modern empires controlled territory in arrangements that gave local rulers much more leeway than modern nations) so not having Tibet as part of modern China would be seen as a major defeat. Try asking a Chinese national to explain why the PRC fought to keep Tibet but not Mongolia despite both being part of the old Qing empire and watch the mental gymnastics.
The reasons for each individual migrant choosing to go to Tibet instead of staying in their home provinces are more likely to be economic: better-paying jobs in tourism, mining, hydropower, ...
You're just asking for Tibet to revolt at that point. Obviously you know this, but longstanding imperial Chinese policy was that no official was ever allowed to administer his own home province. There was good reason for that.
> The reasons for each individual migrant choosing to go to Tibet instead of staying in their home provinces are more likely to be economic: better-paying jobs in tourism, mining, hydropower, ...
Some of them are just assigned as settlers by the government. I don't know how significant the phenomenon is, but e.g. a friend of mine told me that her father had been in the army, and upon leaving he was settled in Xinjiang.
The PRC requires that "The chairman of an autonomous region, the prefect of an autonomous prefecture or the head of an autonomous county shall be a citizen of the nationality exercising regional autonomy in the area concerned." http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/...
I'm not sure whether subdivisions in an autonomous area are automatically autonomous as well, but if so, that would require local Tibetan governments at all administrative levels to be lead by Tibetans.
That doesn't mean they can't use the old tactic of promoting officials across regional borders to prevent individuals from building up their own little kingdoms. E.g. the current chairman of Tibet is a Tibetan from Yunnan, so technically he isn't ruling his home province. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Dalha
> her father had been in the army, and upon leaving he was settled in Xinjiang.
How does settlement work in that case? Did they give him a plot of land to farm or a job at a SOE or did they simply order him to stay in Xinjiang and find some way to make a living there?
If you're interested in the issue, the term of art is "China proper". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_proper
I asked someone once what the point of China owning Xinjiang was. He responded "we don't want them to attack us".
For Tibet, I agree with magicsmoke that it is incredibly significant as the source of both of China's rivers. I can't imagine China willingly ceding control over those.
The funniest pattern you can see in news - everyone talks about the other, while ignoring their own mess. Chinese media will bring up Native Americans while American media will bring up Tibet or Honk Kong or Taiwan. Middle East Muslims will complain about Palestine while conveniently ignoring Assyrians.
Are you suggesting that native american genocide isn't a hot topic in America?
The language of modern Greeks is directly descended from that of the ancients. From classical times through the hellenistic period, the Byzantine Empire up to today there is a continuity of culture.
Molecular anthropology gainsays this statement.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-hav...
I don’t believe this is true, FWIW. If I’m not mistaken, most of the Mediterranean as had relatively little genetic replacement since the Indo-Europeans first stablished themselves. There has been cultural turnover in the Middle East, but this has mostly taken the form of elites engaging in tax farming conquered populations, rather than genocide and replacement.
Being a black person in snow would attract predators and they would die so people with lighter skins who could camouflage easily in the background would survive.
All the areas you're quoting have changed very little since the Bronze Age.
The fact the imperial power belonged to foreign dynasties (mainly the Yuan and the Qing) doesn’t mean the people itself and its culture was erased. Actually in case of Manchu the reverse happened with the ruling elite taking Chinese culture while forgetting it’s own culture.
It's also the case that indigenous people killed each other off. For example, the Māori genocided the pacifist Moriori and the Comanche came very close to doing so with the Apache.
Depending on how you define "country" the Pitcairn Islands are an exception:
> The earliest known settlers of the Pitcairn Islands were Polynesians who appear to have lived on Pitcairn and Henderson, and on Mangareva Island 540 kilometres (340 mi) to the northwest, for several centuries. They traded goods and formed social ties among the three islands despite the long canoe voyages between them, which helped the small populations on each island survive despite their limited resources. Eventually, important natural resources were exhausted, inter-island trade broke down and a period of civil war began on Mangareva, causing the small human populations on Henderson and Pitcairn to be cut off and eventually become extinct.
> Although archaeologists believe that Polynesians were living on Pitcairn as late as the 15th century,[citation needed] the islands were uninhabited when they were rediscovered by Europeans.
The Polynesians were there, but they died off before the Europeans came.
And in most cases every "indigenous people" have actually replaced other indigenous people that were there before but for which we have no recorded history.
The more common accepted theory according to recent DNA studies is that the Ainu are actually Siberians who mixed with Jomon and also mainland Japanese.
Saying that the Ainu are indigenous to Hokkaido is a common misconception of Western scholars, they somehow insist in this historical error.
The Ainu are not indigenous to Hokkaido. The only factually known indigenous people of Hokkaido as well as the whole of the Japanese archipelago is the Jomon, as far as current evidence is considered. The Jomon lived in Hokkaido centuries before the Ainu existed.
Recent DNA studies have found that the Ainu in the Edo era was already an admixture of Jomon, Okhotsk and about 30% mainland Japanese.
I also noticed that Western scholars usually get very defensive when we show them evidence that their narrative of Ainu being the indigenous victims of Japanese colonization is false.