by ANN-ELISE LEWALLEN
“Children playing in the kotan.” Tapestry by Ainu artist Kat Machiko. PHOTO/Ann-Elise Lewallen
Abstract: In contemporary Japan Ainu women create spaces of cultural vitalization wherein they transit between Ainu identity determined by their natal relationships and actively negotiating with Ainu identity through their art. Engaging in self-craft through cloth arts has empowered Ainu women to imagine new expressions of self and to redefine their identities as Ainu or mixed ancestry, and thus reflects women’s lived realities and struggles. Women’s clothwork, as well as musical performance and other arts, has also been pivotal to the Ainu Indigenous rights movement and to cultural revitalization efforts. By carefully positioning heritage cloth, ritual regalia, and ancestral patterns as mouthpieces of Ainu indigeneity, Ainu women have leveraged traditional knowledge to claim Indigenous rights in UN forums and the Japanese Diet.
As such, Ainu women move between “being Ainu,” a racist label attached to Ainu bodies by settler society, to actively “becoming Ainu” and determining what this means on their own terms. The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum, and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and Indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles.
Indigenous Ainu women stitch together ancestral values and global Indigenous activism to challenge bitter legacies of settler racism and colonial erasure. Instead of orchestrating this resistance in spectacular mass protest or violent clashes with the state, they invoke ancestral knowledge and inhabit ancestral spaces through clothwork as a silent yet politically potent resistance to these erasures. Ainu women’s expressions of Indigenous modernity in Japan, a nation which has long denied the presence of Indigenous peoples and its own history of settler colonialism, directly clash with narratives of Japan’s imagined homogeneity. By placing their ancestors at the heart of their resistance, Ainu women reinstate ancestral balance through gendered labor and gender complementarity, refusing the settler patriarchy imposed by the colonial state.