Some time ago, I signed up for a semi- archaeological newsletter, Sapiens. This week I ran across an article that peaked my interest. The discussion on a dig on the island of Rebun, a small island off the coast of Hokkaido, Japan. The dig has been ongoing for 6 years, delving into the artefacts of the Ainu.
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Monday Crimson Quillfeather, Tuesday ejoanna, Wednesday Pam from Calif, Thursday art ah zen, Friday FloridaSNMOM, Saturday Gwennedd, Sunday loggersbrat
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38,000 years ago, Asian peoples moved to the island of Honshu and surrounding islands likely via a land bridge. They did not settle in Hokkaido...that being the colder and more mountainous island. Tens of thousands of years later, Hokkaido was settled by a different peoples…the Ainu:
Humans first landed on Hokkaido at least 20,000 years ago, probably arriving from Siberia via a land bridge in search of a less frigid environment. By the end of the last ice age, their descendants had developed a culture of hunting, foraging, and fishing. Large-scale rice farming was a southern phenomenon; the north was too cold, too snowy. The northerners’ ancient culture persisted largely unchanged until the seventh century, when the traditional Ainu way of life became more visible in the archaeological record on Hokkaido, Kamchatka, and nearby smaller islands, such as Rebun, Rishiri, Sakhalin, and Kuril. A nature-centered society of fishers, hunters, horticulturalists, and traders emerged.
The Ainu, like their ancestors, shared their land with an important predator. The brown bears of Hokkaido, Ursus arctos yesoensis, are closely related to the grizzlies and Kodiaks of the New World, though they’re on the smallish side, with males reaching 2 meters in height and fattening to almost 200 kilograms.
In the north, the lives of the Ainu and their ancestors were closely entwined with the bears, their fiercer cousins. Where bears fished, humans fished. Where bears picked monkey pear, humans picked monkey pear. Where bears tramped, humans tramped. They were kindred spirits, and so strong was the connection between humans and bears, that it lasted across time and cultures. The people honored bear spirits through ritual for thousands of years, deliberately placing skulls and bones in pits for burial. And in historical times, written accounts and photographs of a bear ceremony show that the Ainu maintained this deep kinship.
www.sapiens.org/...
The Ainu carried on trade with other peoples living on nearby lands, part of a vast network of trade that existed for thousands of years. Using canoes made from large planks carved from enormous trees, they traded dried fish and furs for materials, beads, coins and other goods that they traded to the Japanese in Honshu, then took Japanese iron and sake back to the Chinese.
Some 2800 years ago, there was a massive influx of Koreans who became a part of the human mix. And life carried on for the Ainu, isolated as they were in Hokkaido and nearby islands, but 600 years ago, life changed on Honshu and an effort to colonize Hokkaido began. Eventually, the newcomers determined to “harmonize” all the peoples and began a concerted effort to educate and assimilate the Ainu culture into Japanese culture. Unfortunately, they did it wrong. Instead of respecting the Ainu traditions, language and culture, they forced Ainu children into education facilities, forbade their language and traditions, and denied their culture.
What strikes me most about the Ainu people are their stories...the similarity of those stories to stories of other indigenous peoples:
Hokkaido had for thousands of years been populated by the Ainu who hunted and fished and had small agriculture as well as a fair trade market. Then suddenly, they found their lands occupied by Waijin ( “colonizers” in Ainu...it also means “ someone you cannot trust” ) who took everything from them. Many of the colonizers were samurai clans, ruthless and greedy. All their trade disappeared, their language was unacceptable, their villages destroyed. As Zoey Eddy, a historical archaeologists puts it:
This is so not a uniquely Ainu story,” says Eddy, who traces some of her ancestry to the Wendat, an Indigenous group in northeastern North America. She thinks it’s important to remember all the violence that colonization entailed for Indigenous people. “Imagine one year where everything changes for you,” she says. “You have to move somewhere, you can’t speak your language, you can’t live with your family, you watch your sister raped in front of you, you watch your siblings die of starvation, you witness your animals slaughtered for fun.”
The same type of treatment was meted out to Canadian First Nations. They almost completely lost their culture and language as a result of forcing native children into residential schools that punished children for speaking their own language and practicing cultural norms. It has been nearly the same story in all colonization of occupied lands. It was, and is, cruel, inhumane and outright theft.
Something else that I and Jan (she read the article a couple of days ago ) noticed when going through the article...the artwork.
Almost all indigenous tribes in the world have highly stylized artwork all centered around the wildlife they interact with and their pantheon of gods. The Haida depict their spirits or totems in strong graphics with lines and loops that are hauntingly similar to the Ainu:
Note the strong lines and notches in the center of the wing feathers. So very like the Ainu’s designs. The Maori also used highly stylized designs in their carvings wrought from nature...the spiral of an unfolding fern, the shape and unique looping of spiderwebs and the overlapping curves of fish scales, the graceful curves and tips of feathers, the weavings of fronds and twinings of slender branches. All these delights of nature’s designs and strengths have been noted and copied
The Ainu did not copy animals or humans in their artwork thinking that making copies trapped the spirit of the creature so that it could not escape, even after death.