From Sasaki, Masao. Genshi Suru "Ainu". Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2008.
Written during the heated debate over the future of the Former Natives Protection Act, Sasaki's Asahi Newspaper article, included in the anthology of his work Genshi Suru "Ainu", provides an extremely sharp and concise critique of this law.
Sasaki attacks the law from two angles: one is how the law played a role in racializing the Ainu. The term "Ainu" itself is questioned throughout the article, put into quotation marks along with terms like "kaitaku" (colonizing/'opening up' the land), "Wajin" (ethnic Japanese settlers), or "Nihon" (Japan). This doesn't simply give the impression that Sasaki is trying to express, as one often does with scare quotes, a hesitation to use these terms literally. But rather, he seems to be suggesting that these terms are mutually constitutive ideological constructions and can only exist on conjunction with each other. The imagined community of the Japanese ethnic nation-state is, in other words, constituted in part through the abjection of racialized groups like the Ainu, and vice versa. Moreover, while Sasaki is not entirely clear in his intentions, he appears very self-conscious of the fact that many ethnic Japanese, in or out of Hokkaido, have a particular image of terms like "Ainu" or, worse still perhaps,"kyūdojin" (former natives) as signifying primitive, inferior barbarians. The stigma around the term "Ainu" as it was used by Japanese in the early and mid 20th century led many in Sasaki's generation to reject it outright as an ethnic slur. In this, the Former Natives Protection Act played a key role in racialized subjectification. Those to whom this law applied to could be said to be legally "former natives"/Ainu and those to whom this law did not apply were thereby legally "Wajin"/Japanese. But this isn't to say that there were clear cut understandings of what constituted an "Ainu" at the time this law passed. After all, the first bill of the Former Natives Protection Act failed to pass in 1892 because it wasn't clear to the committee members assessing the bill who and who wasn't Ainu. This shouldn't be overstated, especially given the presence of Japanese descendants of Tokugawa-era settlers whose lineage may not have been clearly traceable by the state, and who themselves may have been, in some cases, quite hybridized in terms of obvious cultural markers such as clothing or language. There was no clear line between Ainu and Japanese, in other words. And, the fear was, most likely, more about labeling Japanese as Ainu than wrongfully labelling Ainu as Japanese. But curiously, in the reading of the second Former Natives Protection Act in the Diet, as Sasaki alludes to, the question of children of unclear lineage came, and how the law would apply to them. When asked whether these children would be considered Japanese or Ainu, Shirani Takeshi simply replies that if the child looks Ainu, they're Ainu. Or in other words, if a child meets the physiognomy of a cliched racist image of an Ainu, that's good enough for the state. Sasaki rightly sees this almost arbitrary racialization as consequentially applying to all Ainu, children or not.
The second key argument Sasaki makes is to attack the enduring idea that the Ainu race had simply lost the survival of the fittest to the Japanese race on an even playing field. This was a key rationale for the need for 'protection': that the Ainu were natural inferior and needed their lives to be directly managed by the state in order to protect them from natural processes by which they would eventually face extinction simply through contact with the racially superior Japanese settlers. Sasaki responds to this by looking directly at laws targeting Ainu hunting and fishing, the basis of their economy and a major source of food for them, as having an absolutely devastating effect on their community. The other effect of these bans on Ainu hunting as well as the encroachment of the forestry industry was that many Ainu lost access to furs and birch bark used to make clothing. This effectively meant the Ainu could no longer easily make their own clothing needed to survive in the frigid northern winters. These laws produced the precarity that many Ainu found themselves in. And the Former Natives Protection Law, in addressing this precarity as rooted in Ainu inferiority rather than the effects of colonial policy, not only did nothing to change the conditions of this precarity, but naturalized and normalized the Japanese settler colonial presence which led to these laws being passed in the first place.
Sasaki is equally critical of the land 'grants' given to Ainu households as based on the precondition that they farm the land and that the land remains in the family, and can't be transferred outside of the family without government approval. This is both because many Ainu, who were primarily hunters and fishers, were simply not easily able to sustain themselves with vegetables gown on family farms. Moreover, settlers usurping Ainu land continued. As the land was leasable through civil law, many lessees used loopholes to claim the land and, according to Sasaki, and had great success in continuing the land theft that the Protection Act ostensibly aimed to curb.
In all of this, Sasaki is arguing for the abolition of the Former Aborigines Protection Act by attacking the basis on which it was enacted. As an Ainu writing in the late 1960s, he describes the law as "humiliating" for Ainu, and preserving the the racist assumptions from the 19th century that the law is predicated on.
This source is the first of several Ainu critiques of the Japanese settler colonial law targeting the Ainu that I'll be looking at. Sasaki is in some ways the most radical of this group of Ainu writers, but as Mark Winchester demonstrated with his brilliant analysis of Sasaki's long form essays, his almost deconstructive approach to his own racial subjectivity in many ways anticipates post-structuralist and post-colonial politics and can be used quite effectively in critiquing Japanese settler colonialism.
Moreover, Sasaki's discussion of such simple, matter of fact things as the Ainu not being able to collect birch bark to make clothes because of the forestry industry is extremely relevant in any discussion of the effects of these laws on the Ainu ability to sustain their own communities without relying on the Japanese state or, for that matter, becoming more and more integrated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a matter of contingency. Sakaki illuminates in a short article how these processes worked. Cutting Ainu off from resources, or greatly restricting access they had to resources, also freed them up for economic exploitation by both small time capitalist settlers, or more often, it seems, large conglomerates from the mainland. Ainu land, of course, was and remained the object desire of the colonization of Hokkaido, and putting them onto small parcels of farmland kept them off the great majority of their former territories. These laws were just as much about removing the limits of Japanese exploitation of the natural resources of Hokkaido as they were about limiting the Ainu. Sasaki Masao is a powerful voice in revealing this power relationship.
Thursday, 18 August 2016
Sunday, 31 July 2016
Source analysis: Itinerary of Hokkaido (日本北海道案内記)
Very briefly, I've been going through a bilingual pamphlet on Hokkaido prepared by Rev. John Batchelor and published bilingually for a Japanese and American audience, respectively. While Batchelor garnered a reputation for being a champion of the Ainu, and is still defended by academics for his high moral character, a number of his descriptions of the Ainu are remarkably condescending and extremely colonialistic. It constitutes, if nothing else, the racist abjection of the Ainu and apologism for the Japanese colonization of the Ainu territories in Hokkaido and, at the time this was published, in the Kuriles.
Besides playing the old game of victim-blaming, and not to mention the spurious logic behind this, we see strong overtones of progressivist discourses by which races around the world are segmented and isolated from each other in a universal competition toward an ill-defined "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama put it. According to this logic, which is very much in accordance with Batchelor's ethnic Japanese contemporaries who were involved in Ainu policy, and for that matter, colonial officials around the world, a race, depending on its inborn qualities, will either thrive by actively progressing towards this future or be doomed to die out if they fall behind. Aside from the obvious fact that "races" are not mutually exclusive, hermetically sealed entities that act collectively, the social Darwinist logic behind this racist view of the survival of the fittest negates any question of morals. A race, or individual, cannot be victimized: they can only let themselves by victimized. And by this same logic, one cannot be a victimizer. Rather, the assumption is that, as Hobbes argued, homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. This renders violent, exploitative, hateful behaviour as natural and normal. This is a sociopathic logic, and given how deeply anti-social social Darwinism is, the most curious part of Batchelor's passage his muted appeal to "Society" to swoop in and "rescue" the Ainu from themselves. We see this seeming contradiction in the discourse surrounding the Former Natives Protection Act that Batchelor is vaguely referencing here. The assumption is it is a sign of modernity and high ethical development to be able to have the gumption to "rescue" a dying race.
One other important consideration here is that, as mentioned above, this pamphlet was published in the same year in English and Japanese. I knew that Batchelor wrote this sort of drivel about the Ainu already, but I had wondered, as he does have such a reputation for his work with the Ainu, if this wasn't a sort of race baiting to sell books in Great Britain or the United States where there was a veritable print industry focused on racist descriptions of colonized people. But, as the publication of this book for a Japanese market shows, this may not simply have been simply for foreign consumption.
The great attraction in Hokkaidō to those who travel for pleasure and education combined, letting alone the peculiarly weird and wild scenery and the pleasures afforded to the sportsman, is in the Ainu race, or Aborigines of Japan, who, it appears, are gradually becoming extinct. Though this peculiar race of people was once very numerous and formerly inhabited the whole of Japan proper, they now number, as has been previously remarked, no more than 16,765 persons, and these are decreasing. Visitors to Japan should surely see something of them if possible. In a very few years they will, in all probability, become quite extinct, or at all events become so amalgamated with the immigrants as to become indistinguishable from the Japanese. Hokkaidō is the only place in the world where they can be seen untainted by European influence, for those who live in Russian Territory have now become quite Russianized. Here in Hokkaiddō may be seen the oldest and newest peoples of this Ancient Empire side by side, two distinct and very different races, the one superseding the other; — intelligence, fore-thought, and energetic enterprise triumphing over ignorance, improvidence, and inaction. Here one may actually see that process of the gradual extinction of the Ainus and the appropriation of their land which has been going on for years; not indeed by cruelty and slaughter or owing to unfeeling wantonness, but simply because the Ainus have not the self-reliance and steady energy by which they could, if they chose, work and live happily side by side with the Japanese. But the race, simple, kind, truthful and child-like as we have found it, seems destined to pass away in a few years. Something it is hoped will be done for these poor people in the future. The Japanese are now waking up to their duty towards, and responsibility with regard to the Ainus and a society has been established which has for its object the "rescue" of the race. It remains to be seen what will be done by this Society. Those people who desire to see the Ainus in their own homes can do so by going to Usu in Volcano Bay from Hakodate, or by visiting Chitose from Satporo. But a far better idea of them may be had by allowing one's self a little more time and going to Piratoru in the Province of Hidaka. // This is the old Ainu capital and is a most typical village; it is surrounded by the most lovely scenery. (pg. 14, 15)From Itinerary of Hokkaido, Japan by the Rev. John Batchelor, presented by the Hakodate Chamber of Commerce to Visitors of the Columbian Exhibition Held at Chicago, U.S.A. in 1893 (Tokyo Tsujiki Type Foundry, Tokyo: 1893)
Besides playing the old game of victim-blaming, and not to mention the spurious logic behind this, we see strong overtones of progressivist discourses by which races around the world are segmented and isolated from each other in a universal competition toward an ill-defined "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama put it. According to this logic, which is very much in accordance with Batchelor's ethnic Japanese contemporaries who were involved in Ainu policy, and for that matter, colonial officials around the world, a race, depending on its inborn qualities, will either thrive by actively progressing towards this future or be doomed to die out if they fall behind. Aside from the obvious fact that "races" are not mutually exclusive, hermetically sealed entities that act collectively, the social Darwinist logic behind this racist view of the survival of the fittest negates any question of morals. A race, or individual, cannot be victimized: they can only let themselves by victimized. And by this same logic, one cannot be a victimizer. Rather, the assumption is that, as Hobbes argued, homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. This renders violent, exploitative, hateful behaviour as natural and normal. This is a sociopathic logic, and given how deeply anti-social social Darwinism is, the most curious part of Batchelor's passage his muted appeal to "Society" to swoop in and "rescue" the Ainu from themselves. We see this seeming contradiction in the discourse surrounding the Former Natives Protection Act that Batchelor is vaguely referencing here. The assumption is it is a sign of modernity and high ethical development to be able to have the gumption to "rescue" a dying race.
One other important consideration here is that, as mentioned above, this pamphlet was published in the same year in English and Japanese. I knew that Batchelor wrote this sort of drivel about the Ainu already, but I had wondered, as he does have such a reputation for his work with the Ainu, if this wasn't a sort of race baiting to sell books in Great Britain or the United States where there was a veritable print industry focused on racist descriptions of colonized people. But, as the publication of this book for a Japanese market shows, this may not simply have been simply for foreign consumption.
Source overview: English language documents related to Hokkaido and the Ainu
Over the past year I have primarily been engaged in research for my PhD dissertation project, which has been interrupted intermittently by family obligations, including parental leave during the Spring semester of 2016.
During the Fall of 2015, I largely focused on English language documents related to the Ainu and the colonization of Hokkaido. Given that part of the focus of my dissertation is the presupposition that Japanese policy planners and colonial elites self-consciously viewed their colonization and economic development of Hokkaido as a distinctly modern, Western-style enterprise, as well as the fact that this colonization was bolstered by the active participation of Euro-Americans such as Horace Capron and John Batchelor, I felt it was important to look at Euro-American views of the Ainu and the Japanese during this time period.
I focused on three document collections in particular. The first of which was Kirsten Refsing's massive five volume set, Early European Writings on Ainu Culture: Travelogues and Descriptions. This collection includes English, French, and German primary documents dating from the early 19th century until to the beginning of the 20th century. Given the century long scope, this collection clearly shows an historical arc in which the Ainu were at first racialized as proto-Caucasoid, and then were increasingly racialized as primitive, barbaric, or animalistic and akin to abjected Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, or India. This change, as the editor notes, can clearly be traced to the longue durée of Japan’s place in so-called “international society”, by which a “Caucasian” Ainu race imbued with all of the positive qualities that Europeans imagined themselves as having could be contrastively used to denigrate the “Oriental” Japanese. Vice versa, as the Meiji state gained stature internationally in part due to the success of their aggressive colonization of the Ainu, the Ainu were increasingly imagined as akin to other colonized (or legally colonizable) Indigenous peoples.
The second collection was the Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, published by the Kaitakushi (the Hokkaido colonial government) in 1875. This sizable collection of English language reports was prepared by American employees of the Japanese government and was intended for use by the Japanese government in policy planning. Two main themes emerge, which have had an influence on the scope of my own research. The first is, similar to Refsing’s collection, the triangular colonial relations between the Ainu, Japanese, and white Euro-Americans present in Ainu territories. This dynamic is especially evident in the chief planner Horace Capron’s insistence on the superiority of all things American, which included his advocacy for allowing more “hardy” white settlers to colonize Hokkaido in place of Japanese, as well as pushing for American crops, farm animals, and foodstuffs to be prioritized in Hokkaido and Euro-American-style buildings to be constructed. While the Ainu appear only briefly, mostly serving as guides, we learn that Horace Capron recommended to Kaitakushi head Kuroda Kiyotaka to strictly ban “barbaric” Ainu hunting methods. This is significant, and merits further research, because, according to Yamada Shinichi, the sudden ban on Ainu hunting had a catastrophic effect on Ainu communities which were suddenly without a major food source. Local officials alerted the Kuroda to this, and requested the ban be overturned, but these warnings were disregarded. Secondly, a major theme of the Kaitakushi reports is a conflation of capitalist development and civilization. In a quasi-Hegelian gesture, A.G. Warfield goes so far as to equate the construction of roads into the interior of Hokkaido to the development of "history", "progress", and "civilization". Specifically, he argues that roads lead to commercial development, which leads to the integration of Hokkaido into larger networks of capital, which will help bring civilization to the island. It can even be surmised that, philosophically speaking, for Warfield, like other 19th century colonial planners, it is capital itself that produces "history" and "civilization".
Finally, I read Horace Capron two-volume memoirs. The first of which details his role as a Texas Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent in the removal of Indigenous groups to make way for Anglo-American settlement shortly after the US annexation of the Republic of Texas. The second volume is entirely dedicated to his time in Japan, and largely consists of diaries, notes, and reports. It offers a more nuanced look at Capron’s time in Japan than the Kaitakushi-published volume, including his thoughts on the Japanese during his time in Tokyo, which are largely negative. Though not entirely, and he shows great satisfaction, with a sharply narcissistic tone present throughout both volumes, that it was partly his own influence that Japan Westernized as quickly as it did. It’s no doubt, either in his descriptions of Native Americans, Japanese, or Ainu that Capron was racist, however, he wasn’t racist in the way that one might think of a stereotypical 19th century “good old boy” white male American elite. In fact, Capron was unusually liberal, I would imagine, for the antebellum time period where he was most influential. During this time Capron was involved in the ethnic cleansing of parts of Texas which were targeted for Anglo-American settlement. What's interesting, however, is at a time when frontier genocide was still the rule and not the exception in many parts of the American West, Capron was in extremely quite critical of the brutal treatment of Indigenous people to the point where he expressed sympathy for a group of Indigenous men who had killed white settlers in self-defense. He also expressed his disapproval for policies forcing Indigenous people off their land without a clear sense of where they should go. Capron even considered the lower-class settlers to be a more negative influence on the Indigenous groups than vice versa (so much for "going native").
In all of this, Capron -- like Katō Masanosuke, Oyabe Zenichiro, Nitobe Inazō, or Shirani Takeshi later in Japan -- represented a distinctly liberal form of Indigenous land management where he sought to pacify groups as frontier buffers through to allow for settlement of whites, and aimed for blanket assimilation rather than simply pushing groups further and further out of American society. This is to say, there’s no evidence that he actually cared about Indigenous peoples under his care: he saw more “humanistic” policies as a means to an end, which was, white settlement on and American territorial sovereignty over Indigenous land. There are numerous examples of this there he personally had peaceful groups of Indigenous people who were peaceably living on agricultural settlements (Capron’s stated goal for Native Americans) removed because the land was not part of a reservation and was intended for white settlement. Even the goals for citizenship were predicated upon cultural genocide and their insertion into the American economy as surplus labourers, similar to his "rehabilitation" of lower class whites in Maryland. This, if anything, brings to mind critiques of liberalism itself not as a rejection of brutal colonial conquests, but rather a recalibration of power by which rather than being violently excluded, colonized people are put in a space somewhere in-between included and excluded.
During the Fall of 2015, I largely focused on English language documents related to the Ainu and the colonization of Hokkaido. Given that part of the focus of my dissertation is the presupposition that Japanese policy planners and colonial elites self-consciously viewed their colonization and economic development of Hokkaido as a distinctly modern, Western-style enterprise, as well as the fact that this colonization was bolstered by the active participation of Euro-Americans such as Horace Capron and John Batchelor, I felt it was important to look at Euro-American views of the Ainu and the Japanese during this time period.
I focused on three document collections in particular. The first of which was Kirsten Refsing's massive five volume set, Early European Writings on Ainu Culture: Travelogues and Descriptions. This collection includes English, French, and German primary documents dating from the early 19th century until to the beginning of the 20th century. Given the century long scope, this collection clearly shows an historical arc in which the Ainu were at first racialized as proto-Caucasoid, and then were increasingly racialized as primitive, barbaric, or animalistic and akin to abjected Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, or India. This change, as the editor notes, can clearly be traced to the longue durée of Japan’s place in so-called “international society”, by which a “Caucasian” Ainu race imbued with all of the positive qualities that Europeans imagined themselves as having could be contrastively used to denigrate the “Oriental” Japanese. Vice versa, as the Meiji state gained stature internationally in part due to the success of their aggressive colonization of the Ainu, the Ainu were increasingly imagined as akin to other colonized (or legally colonizable) Indigenous peoples.
The second collection was the Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, published by the Kaitakushi (the Hokkaido colonial government) in 1875. This sizable collection of English language reports was prepared by American employees of the Japanese government and was intended for use by the Japanese government in policy planning. Two main themes emerge, which have had an influence on the scope of my own research. The first is, similar to Refsing’s collection, the triangular colonial relations between the Ainu, Japanese, and white Euro-Americans present in Ainu territories. This dynamic is especially evident in the chief planner Horace Capron’s insistence on the superiority of all things American, which included his advocacy for allowing more “hardy” white settlers to colonize Hokkaido in place of Japanese, as well as pushing for American crops, farm animals, and foodstuffs to be prioritized in Hokkaido and Euro-American-style buildings to be constructed. While the Ainu appear only briefly, mostly serving as guides, we learn that Horace Capron recommended to Kaitakushi head Kuroda Kiyotaka to strictly ban “barbaric” Ainu hunting methods. This is significant, and merits further research, because, according to Yamada Shinichi, the sudden ban on Ainu hunting had a catastrophic effect on Ainu communities which were suddenly without a major food source. Local officials alerted the Kuroda to this, and requested the ban be overturned, but these warnings were disregarded. Secondly, a major theme of the Kaitakushi reports is a conflation of capitalist development and civilization. In a quasi-Hegelian gesture, A.G. Warfield goes so far as to equate the construction of roads into the interior of Hokkaido to the development of "history", "progress", and "civilization". Specifically, he argues that roads lead to commercial development, which leads to the integration of Hokkaido into larger networks of capital, which will help bring civilization to the island. It can even be surmised that, philosophically speaking, for Warfield, like other 19th century colonial planners, it is capital itself that produces "history" and "civilization".
Horace Capron
Finally, I read Horace Capron two-volume memoirs. The first of which details his role as a Texas Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent in the removal of Indigenous groups to make way for Anglo-American settlement shortly after the US annexation of the Republic of Texas. The second volume is entirely dedicated to his time in Japan, and largely consists of diaries, notes, and reports. It offers a more nuanced look at Capron’s time in Japan than the Kaitakushi-published volume, including his thoughts on the Japanese during his time in Tokyo, which are largely negative. Though not entirely, and he shows great satisfaction, with a sharply narcissistic tone present throughout both volumes, that it was partly his own influence that Japan Westernized as quickly as it did. It’s no doubt, either in his descriptions of Native Americans, Japanese, or Ainu that Capron was racist, however, he wasn’t racist in the way that one might think of a stereotypical 19th century “good old boy” white male American elite. In fact, Capron was unusually liberal, I would imagine, for the antebellum time period where he was most influential. During this time Capron was involved in the ethnic cleansing of parts of Texas which were targeted for Anglo-American settlement. What's interesting, however, is at a time when frontier genocide was still the rule and not the exception in many parts of the American West, Capron was in extremely quite critical of the brutal treatment of Indigenous people to the point where he expressed sympathy for a group of Indigenous men who had killed white settlers in self-defense. He also expressed his disapproval for policies forcing Indigenous people off their land without a clear sense of where they should go. Capron even considered the lower-class settlers to be a more negative influence on the Indigenous groups than vice versa (so much for "going native").
In all of this, Capron -- like Katō Masanosuke, Oyabe Zenichiro, Nitobe Inazō, or Shirani Takeshi later in Japan -- represented a distinctly liberal form of Indigenous land management where he sought to pacify groups as frontier buffers through to allow for settlement of whites, and aimed for blanket assimilation rather than simply pushing groups further and further out of American society. This is to say, there’s no evidence that he actually cared about Indigenous peoples under his care: he saw more “humanistic” policies as a means to an end, which was, white settlement on and American territorial sovereignty over Indigenous land. There are numerous examples of this there he personally had peaceful groups of Indigenous people who were peaceably living on agricultural settlements (Capron’s stated goal for Native Americans) removed because the land was not part of a reservation and was intended for white settlement. Even the goals for citizenship were predicated upon cultural genocide and their insertion into the American economy as surplus labourers, similar to his "rehabilitation" of lower class whites in Maryland. This, if anything, brings to mind critiques of liberalism itself not as a rejection of brutal colonial conquests, but rather a recalibration of power by which rather than being violently excluded, colonized people are put in a space somewhere in-between included and excluded.
Saturday, 9 July 2016
Source overview: "Views of Sakhalin Island" and "Ainu Komonjo"
I've randomly come across two extremely useful online archives. The first is the "Views of Sakhalin Island" collection online at the Collections from the National Library of Russia: Prints and Photographs website and the second is Ainu Komonjo at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The "Views of Sakhalin Island" collection consists of early Russian photographs of Sakhalin (Karafuto) with some shots of Aboriginal people including Ainu. These shots seem more ethnographic in nature: basically head shots which were likely used by the Russian Imperial government to catalogue groups being colonized. In addition to photos of these colonized groups, of early colonial architecture, and of Russian laborers (who at this time were likely to have been exiles, political prisoners, and convicts), there are some stunning photographs of Ainu.
While it's hard to extrapolate any sort of narrative description from this collection, it's certainly illustrative of the Russian colonial project as it existed in the 1890s. This was a 30 year period between the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875 and the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 when Russia had total control over the island. When Japan formally withdrew their claim in 1875, they had ethnically cleansed most of the Ainu from Sakhalin and forcibly moved them to Hokkaido, so it's interesting to see photos such of this of Sakhalin Ainu man wearing what appears to be traditional Ainu clothing. If I focus on Sakhalin/Karafuto, it would be very interesting to find some descriptions of Ainu life on Sakhalin during the period of exclusive Russian control.
The second collection, the Ainu Komonjo, is a huge online archive of Japanese writings on the Ainu across Hokkaido, the Kuriles, and Sakhalin in the 18th-19th centuries which had previously been in the private collection of Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Many of the later works are reports made of the Ainu for the Japanese government which sometimes took the form of journals or travelogues. The scans are not particularly high resolution, but are very readable, and this archive makes a fantastic addition to the resources I've collected so far.
The "Views of Sakhalin Island" collection consists of early Russian photographs of Sakhalin (Karafuto) with some shots of Aboriginal people including Ainu. These shots seem more ethnographic in nature: basically head shots which were likely used by the Russian Imperial government to catalogue groups being colonized. In addition to photos of these colonized groups, of early colonial architecture, and of Russian laborers (who at this time were likely to have been exiles, political prisoners, and convicts), there are some stunning photographs of Ainu.
While it's hard to extrapolate any sort of narrative description from this collection, it's certainly illustrative of the Russian colonial project as it existed in the 1890s. This was a 30 year period between the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875 and the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 when Russia had total control over the island. When Japan formally withdrew their claim in 1875, they had ethnically cleansed most of the Ainu from Sakhalin and forcibly moved them to Hokkaido, so it's interesting to see photos such of this of Sakhalin Ainu man wearing what appears to be traditional Ainu clothing. If I focus on Sakhalin/Karafuto, it would be very interesting to find some descriptions of Ainu life on Sakhalin during the period of exclusive Russian control.
The second collection, the Ainu Komonjo, is a huge online archive of Japanese writings on the Ainu across Hokkaido, the Kuriles, and Sakhalin in the 18th-19th centuries which had previously been in the private collection of Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Many of the later works are reports made of the Ainu for the Japanese government which sometimes took the form of journals or travelogues. The scans are not particularly high resolution, but are very readable, and this archive makes a fantastic addition to the resources I've collected so far.
Saturday, 2 July 2016
Reading notes on precursors to the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act in Canada, Australia, the United States
As part of my analysis of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, I've been looking into the "Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes" (Upper Canada, 1857), "An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria" (Victoria [British Australia], 1869), "The Indian Act" (Canada, 1876) and the "Dawes Act" (United States, 1887).
While there have been studies to ascertain whether the Dawes Act was a direct influence on the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act (1899), these have been largely inconclusive. In my own research, I am avoiding the question of a direct casual link between these two particular laws, and am instead embedding the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act in a larger genealogy of interrelated legislation, particularly (though likely not limited to) in Anglophone settler colonies.
Below I will give a short overview of the four laws mentioned above and will make brief concluding remarks as to their similarities and differences to the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act and the significance of this. In my previous post, I went into some detail about the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act and it's relevance to Euro-American discourses of racial improvement and it's proto-'racial hygiene' discourse so these remarks in this post are intended to complement that analysis in preparation for a more comprehensive cross-comparison.
"Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes" (Upper Canada, 1857)
While not the earliest law of this nature, this law clearly demonstrates a number of key features present in the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, including the discourse of "protection" of so-called "Indians" itself. The key feature of this act is self-explanatory in the very name, however, it specifies that through being "civilized", "Indians" will see "the gradual removal of all legal distinctions between them and Her Majesty's other Canadian Subjects" and can thereby acquire the right to private property ownership. Critically, the path to enfranchisement is an examination by a missionary or a government commissioner "examines" a strictly male individual over 21 years of age in their ability to "speak, read and write either the english (sic) or french (sic) language readily and well", their being "sufficiently advanced in the elementary branches of education" and most importantly, perhaps, their being "of good moral character and free from debt". By being enfranchised as a British subject, the examined individual "shall no longer be deemed an Indian", which by implication would define "Indian" as an uncivilized person. This is similar to Francisco de Vitoria's prescription of Indians as unable to make "just war" and thereby not possessing sovereignty, which would imply that a sovereign Indian is no longer an Indian. It's actually stunning how similar this discourse is, albeit hundreds of years apart.
Another key feature of this law is that not fully "civilized" Indians could, if they "speak readily either the English or French language" and are "of sober and industrious habits, free from debt and sufficiently intelligent to be capable of managing his own affairs", they can report for inspection to the governor and can be put into a state of probation for three years after which they can be granted enfranchisement. Enfranchised former Indians are to be allotted a piece of land 50 acres or less and are given a "baptismal name" of their choosing. Any Indian attempting to 'pass' as enfranchised is to be jailed.
"An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria" (Victoria, 1869)
This law, passed the year Hokkaido was annexed by the Japanese Empire, transformed Aborigines living in Victoria into wards of the state and assigned local committees as their "guardians". In doing so, these local guardians were to distribute "bedding clothing" (I assume bedding and clothing) to be held on loan by Aborigines while remaining "the property of Her Majesty". Similarly, this law strictly limits the manner in which settlers can interact with Aborigines, particularly the sale of "intoxicating liquor". Finally, the act addresses the question of who is an "aboriginal native". Specifically, "aboriginal half-castes" and, ambiguously, children "habitually associating and living with aborigines" were deemed "aboriginals". In cases where the race of an individual is note clear, "the justice adjudicating may ... decide on his own view and judgement whether any person ... is or is not an aboriginal".
The apparent vagueness and briefness of this law, rather than resulting in a piece of legislation that was weak or impossible to apply, vested an incredible amount of power to make decisions on behalf of Aboriginal individuals or communities including the ability to decide on a person's race (which inevitably meant some Aborigines were decided white, and some whites may have been mistaken as Aboriginal). This also, seemingly in gross opposition to the Upper Canadian "Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes" seems to have limited the ability of Aborigines to hold property or engage freely in commerce with settlers, essentially disenfranchising them.
"Indian Act" (Canada, 1876)
By far the most comprehensive of the other laws analyzed here, the Indian Act describes in detail the "rights" and "privileges" granted by the Canadian state to Indigenous people on either formally ceded or unceded land (ie. land seized through treaties and land seized without treaties as terra nullius). As the law is extremely detailed at 30 pages, I won't give a fully overview but will go over some relevant key points.
Similar to the Victorian law, the "Indian Act" allowed the state to reserve the right as to who and who is not Indigenous, though based on a "band" structure by which Indigenous people were by the act of government divided into groups and tied to particular pieces of government property (very) roughly corresponding to Indigenous people's national divisions and pre-colonization territorial boundaries. An "Indian" was explicitly defined as male, and an unmarried woman, despite her background, was only an "Indian" if she was married to one, and by implication, a settler woman who marries an Indigenous man becomes an "Indian", while an Indigenous woman immediately ceases to be Indigenous if she 'marries out'. In cases where the race of an individual is ambiguous, like the Victorian law, the "Superintendent-General or his agent" would decide the race of an individual or group. Perhaps most shockingly, in defining language used through the law, such as "reserve", "Indian lands", "intoxicants", "person" is defined as "an individual other than an Indian", which would seem to literally dehumanize Indigenous people in Canada while implicitly defining a person as by default a white person.
The key feature of this act is land and property. It was designed to assign "Indian bands" reserves which were subdivided into lots. Individual families were assigned lots and while they had no legal title to the lots, which remained public land, they could be compensated if they become "dispossessed" (passive form in text) if they have made "improvements". This is critical to 19th century assertions of property rights, developmentalism, and civilization, in that land would only become property if it was "improved", meaning exploited for financial gain. In areas where people lived, this would most commonly be through agriculture. So title could not be gained from "improvements", but some recognition of worth could, according to the Indian Act. However, occupants could not freely sell products of the land, whether it was lumber or metals "other valuables", and could face heavy fines if found to be financially profiting off of their allotment. Lots themselves were formally managed by the Superintendent-General and could not be freely bought or sold, and in the case where the occupant died without an heir or family member to transfer the land to, it would be reverted to formal Crown land.
Similar to the "Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria", the "Indian Act" strictly regulated the sale of alcohol and moreover would give the state the right to jail those who are found intoxicated regardless of circumstance. While alcoholism is a complex and controversial subject both in Indigenous communities and in racist stereotyping of "Indians" today, this law and the "Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria" both echo fears that "Indians" or "native aborigines" need only alcohol to revert back to a "wild" state. Horace Capron himself says this in reference to Indigenous people who were ethnically cleansed from their own land that drink out of misery. And, according to Capron (who we obviously shouldn't trust as an objective voice in the matter) revert to a violent, barbaric state and could become a threat to white settlement. This also reflects larger temperance movements, where drunkenness was associated with the lower class, and proper Christian bourgeoisie was expressed through abstention. Common to both these laws was the vague, questionably attainable end goal of becoming fully fledged 'honorary whites' within colonial society, and it's undoubtable that in addition to stereotypes of barbarism, the ban on liquor was partly based on norms of "civilized" society.
Similar to the colonial-era Upper Canadian "Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes", "enfranchisement", granted to individuals that demonstrate a higher "degree of civilization" and displaying "the character for integrity, morality and sobriety" as judged by the Superintendent-General, legally defines them as non-Indians. Again, this consequentially defines "Indian" as someone showing a low degree of civilization, deceit, immorality, and drunkenness. Unlike the "Gradual Civilization" act, however, rules are defined for bands that wish to be collectively enfranchised, perhaps owing to the focus on the band system.
Finally, while there are specific sections of the law which bar trespassing or illegal logging, etc, this seems to have been based on the assumption that the land was formally Crown land and not specifically as protection of Indigenous people's property. This, I would argue, is the key point of this law, which is to clearly define "Indians", aside from all the other racist, dehumanizing descriptions, as those living in bands on government-administered reserves. Below, in reference to the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, I'll go into the relevance of tying Indigenous people to the state and to particular parcels of land.
"Dawes Act" (1887)
The last of the laws I've surveyed is the infamous "Dawes Act", which is strongly associated with the state's sale of Indigenous land to settlers. However, the act is similarly based on the process of dividing up reservations into allotments which were intended specifically for agriculture, with additional land allotted for "grazing purposes". The Indigenous occupants of these lands are put under a probationary period for 25 years, during which the land cannot be transferred or sold except to heirs. However, the United States government has the right to "negotiate" under conditions considered by the government "just an equitable" for the re-appropriation of the land. The land is then sold by the United States to "actual settlers". The money made from these sales was "subject to appropriation by Congress for the education and civilization of such tribe or tribes of Indians". These reservations were to be monitored by "Indian police". Preference for this job given to "those Indians who have availed themselves to the provisions of this act and [have] become citizens of the United States". As citizens, formally, reservation Indians were given formal "equal protection" of the law.
The second path to citizenship set out in the "Dawes Act" was Indians born in the United States but has "voluntarily taken up ... his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States".
However, similar to the "Indian Act", the "Dawes Act" reserves the right of the United States government to re-appropriate reservation land and privatized lots for public use with compensation.
Finally, in contrast to the "Indian Act", which served a similar function in every other regard, the "Dawes Act" clearly defined "Indians" as either a man or a woman irregardless of marital status.
Analysis
While the "Dawes Act" in particular has been often compared to the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, and sometimes considered the basis on which the latter was drafted, there are key differences between these two laws, or any of the two laws above. Differences, of course, were based upon the particular historical conditions the laws were drafted in over a 40 year period, as well as goals for the publicization and then settlement of Indigenous land in the particular settler colonial spaces. However, what all of these laws have in common is the legal framework connecting land use to level of civilization to (legal or literal) personhood. In this, they were all drafted for the same purpose and have strong similarities.
Moreover, particularly the "Dawes Act" and Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act base Indigenous land rights on their adoption of agriculture. This was the normative mode of living for the majority of people in the 19th century, so this was an assimilative gesture. This also, especially in Hokkaido where there was a zealous drive for development of Ainu as quickly as possible, effectively tried to force the Ainu to help in the colonization of their own land.
But perhaps most importantly, all of these laws transformed Indigenous people as wards of the state, holding a legal status similar to children. In this, they lacked legal personhood and could not hold property as a male settler in the same colony could, they could not consent, and while they were expected to make their own livelihoods as farmers, their well being was primarily decided by the state.
Ultimately, this was about the land and not people. By allotting Indigenous people small plots of land under the management of the state, and especially by having them perform tasks as normative probationary quasi-citizens, the great mass of Indigenous land that was stolen by settlers was, for the colonial state, legitimized. In other words, the very seemingly generous action of 'giving' the Indigenous groups land was based on the assumption that it was the settlers' land to give. All other lands were thereafter freely sold to settlers, and particularly with the Dawes Act, even the allotted lands were often sold by the state without the consent (which was legally impossible to give).
We also see race and gender to varying degrees being tied to the settler colonial state. As mentioned in a previous post, one of the things that blocked the first draft of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act from passing was the ambiguity between Ainu and, to use Stephen Harper's phrase, 'old stock' settlers and anxiety that the wrong people would be indigenized/de-indigenized. And in the case of the Ainu, being Ainu was tied to family registers, and transferring one's registered place of domicile outside of an Ainu community would legally strip one of their being Ainu. In the Australian and Canadian settings, this was not the case, and questions of ambiguity were solved through arbitrary inclusion/exclusion of people into the Indigenous races and out of settler society, or vice versa, by white judges. And as a clue as to what might happen to mistakenly white-washed Indigenous people, or for that matter, "enfranchised" Indigenous people, we might look to Mark Winchester's analysis of Sasaki Masao's poetry and essays. Sasaki, an ethnic Ainu public school teacher with a Master's degree living far from his ancestral community on the Japanese mainland had, in every way that Katō Masanosuke or other Japanese policy planners might have hoped, 'assimilated' into mainstream Japanese society but nevertheless experienced regular racist harassment and exclusion from Japanese society. In this, the racism which is always both the condition and result of colonization deferred the very possibility of assimilation for Indigenous people, should they desire it. So in this, we should be suspicious of the promises of "enfranchisement" and look at concrete effects of assimilation policies and discourses.
Finally, curiously, the length of these laws varies considerably. The "Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes", Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria", and "Dawes Act", were all two or three pages. The "Indian Act" was 31 pages. The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act is less than one page, type written. For as racist and sexist as the "Indian Act" was, I wonder if the aporias generated by sparse or ambiguous wording generate a state of exception by which the colonial authorities have more, not less, control over the affairs of Indigenous people over which they hold legal guardianship. In this, especially the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act was haphazard, and we learn from people, again, as racist as he was, like Oyabe Zenichiro that much of the law had yet to go into effect a decade later. More on this later.
Conclusion
There are undoubtedly many other similar laws which are part of interrelated/trans-colonial Indigenous management, though for their major differences, the goal was of course identical: the settlement of Indigenous land and legitimization of the settler presence. At this point, I don't think it's likely that Katō Masanosuke was specifically thinking about the "Dawes Act" when drafting the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, however, he wrote it in a context of a great proliferation of this sort of legislation.
Moreover, continuing my last post, what are the discursive conditions that lead to this sort of law-making. Was it the closing of the frontiers, was it humanist ideologies, was it the growing acceptance of the idea of a multiethnic empire? Or did it reflect biopolitical modes of population management as it developed during the 19th century?
While there have been studies to ascertain whether the Dawes Act was a direct influence on the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act (1899), these have been largely inconclusive. In my own research, I am avoiding the question of a direct casual link between these two particular laws, and am instead embedding the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act in a larger genealogy of interrelated legislation, particularly (though likely not limited to) in Anglophone settler colonies.
Below I will give a short overview of the four laws mentioned above and will make brief concluding remarks as to their similarities and differences to the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act and the significance of this. In my previous post, I went into some detail about the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act and it's relevance to Euro-American discourses of racial improvement and it's proto-'racial hygiene' discourse so these remarks in this post are intended to complement that analysis in preparation for a more comprehensive cross-comparison.
"Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes" (Upper Canada, 1857)
While not the earliest law of this nature, this law clearly demonstrates a number of key features present in the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, including the discourse of "protection" of so-called "Indians" itself. The key feature of this act is self-explanatory in the very name, however, it specifies that through being "civilized", "Indians" will see "the gradual removal of all legal distinctions between them and Her Majesty's other Canadian Subjects" and can thereby acquire the right to private property ownership. Critically, the path to enfranchisement is an examination by a missionary or a government commissioner "examines" a strictly male individual over 21 years of age in their ability to "speak, read and write either the english (sic) or french (sic) language readily and well", their being "sufficiently advanced in the elementary branches of education" and most importantly, perhaps, their being "of good moral character and free from debt". By being enfranchised as a British subject, the examined individual "shall no longer be deemed an Indian", which by implication would define "Indian" as an uncivilized person. This is similar to Francisco de Vitoria's prescription of Indians as unable to make "just war" and thereby not possessing sovereignty, which would imply that a sovereign Indian is no longer an Indian. It's actually stunning how similar this discourse is, albeit hundreds of years apart.
Another key feature of this law is that not fully "civilized" Indians could, if they "speak readily either the English or French language" and are "of sober and industrious habits, free from debt and sufficiently intelligent to be capable of managing his own affairs", they can report for inspection to the governor and can be put into a state of probation for three years after which they can be granted enfranchisement. Enfranchised former Indians are to be allotted a piece of land 50 acres or less and are given a "baptismal name" of their choosing. Any Indian attempting to 'pass' as enfranchised is to be jailed.
"An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria" (Victoria, 1869)
This law, passed the year Hokkaido was annexed by the Japanese Empire, transformed Aborigines living in Victoria into wards of the state and assigned local committees as their "guardians". In doing so, these local guardians were to distribute "bedding clothing" (I assume bedding and clothing) to be held on loan by Aborigines while remaining "the property of Her Majesty". Similarly, this law strictly limits the manner in which settlers can interact with Aborigines, particularly the sale of "intoxicating liquor". Finally, the act addresses the question of who is an "aboriginal native". Specifically, "aboriginal half-castes" and, ambiguously, children "habitually associating and living with aborigines" were deemed "aboriginals". In cases where the race of an individual is note clear, "the justice adjudicating may ... decide on his own view and judgement whether any person ... is or is not an aboriginal".
The apparent vagueness and briefness of this law, rather than resulting in a piece of legislation that was weak or impossible to apply, vested an incredible amount of power to make decisions on behalf of Aboriginal individuals or communities including the ability to decide on a person's race (which inevitably meant some Aborigines were decided white, and some whites may have been mistaken as Aboriginal). This also, seemingly in gross opposition to the Upper Canadian "Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes" seems to have limited the ability of Aborigines to hold property or engage freely in commerce with settlers, essentially disenfranchising them.
"Indian Act" (Canada, 1876)
By far the most comprehensive of the other laws analyzed here, the Indian Act describes in detail the "rights" and "privileges" granted by the Canadian state to Indigenous people on either formally ceded or unceded land (ie. land seized through treaties and land seized without treaties as terra nullius). As the law is extremely detailed at 30 pages, I won't give a fully overview but will go over some relevant key points.
Similar to the Victorian law, the "Indian Act" allowed the state to reserve the right as to who and who is not Indigenous, though based on a "band" structure by which Indigenous people were by the act of government divided into groups and tied to particular pieces of government property (very) roughly corresponding to Indigenous people's national divisions and pre-colonization territorial boundaries. An "Indian" was explicitly defined as male, and an unmarried woman, despite her background, was only an "Indian" if she was married to one, and by implication, a settler woman who marries an Indigenous man becomes an "Indian", while an Indigenous woman immediately ceases to be Indigenous if she 'marries out'. In cases where the race of an individual is ambiguous, like the Victorian law, the "Superintendent-General or his agent" would decide the race of an individual or group. Perhaps most shockingly, in defining language used through the law, such as "reserve", "Indian lands", "intoxicants", "person" is defined as "an individual other than an Indian", which would seem to literally dehumanize Indigenous people in Canada while implicitly defining a person as by default a white person.
The key feature of this act is land and property. It was designed to assign "Indian bands" reserves which were subdivided into lots. Individual families were assigned lots and while they had no legal title to the lots, which remained public land, they could be compensated if they become "dispossessed" (passive form in text) if they have made "improvements". This is critical to 19th century assertions of property rights, developmentalism, and civilization, in that land would only become property if it was "improved", meaning exploited for financial gain. In areas where people lived, this would most commonly be through agriculture. So title could not be gained from "improvements", but some recognition of worth could, according to the Indian Act. However, occupants could not freely sell products of the land, whether it was lumber or metals "other valuables", and could face heavy fines if found to be financially profiting off of their allotment. Lots themselves were formally managed by the Superintendent-General and could not be freely bought or sold, and in the case where the occupant died without an heir or family member to transfer the land to, it would be reverted to formal Crown land.
Similar to the "Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria", the "Indian Act" strictly regulated the sale of alcohol and moreover would give the state the right to jail those who are found intoxicated regardless of circumstance. While alcoholism is a complex and controversial subject both in Indigenous communities and in racist stereotyping of "Indians" today, this law and the "Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria" both echo fears that "Indians" or "native aborigines" need only alcohol to revert back to a "wild" state. Horace Capron himself says this in reference to Indigenous people who were ethnically cleansed from their own land that drink out of misery. And, according to Capron (who we obviously shouldn't trust as an objective voice in the matter) revert to a violent, barbaric state and could become a threat to white settlement. This also reflects larger temperance movements, where drunkenness was associated with the lower class, and proper Christian bourgeoisie was expressed through abstention. Common to both these laws was the vague, questionably attainable end goal of becoming fully fledged 'honorary whites' within colonial society, and it's undoubtable that in addition to stereotypes of barbarism, the ban on liquor was partly based on norms of "civilized" society.
Similar to the colonial-era Upper Canadian "Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes", "enfranchisement", granted to individuals that demonstrate a higher "degree of civilization" and displaying "the character for integrity, morality and sobriety" as judged by the Superintendent-General, legally defines them as non-Indians. Again, this consequentially defines "Indian" as someone showing a low degree of civilization, deceit, immorality, and drunkenness. Unlike the "Gradual Civilization" act, however, rules are defined for bands that wish to be collectively enfranchised, perhaps owing to the focus on the band system.
Finally, while there are specific sections of the law which bar trespassing or illegal logging, etc, this seems to have been based on the assumption that the land was formally Crown land and not specifically as protection of Indigenous people's property. This, I would argue, is the key point of this law, which is to clearly define "Indians", aside from all the other racist, dehumanizing descriptions, as those living in bands on government-administered reserves. Below, in reference to the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, I'll go into the relevance of tying Indigenous people to the state and to particular parcels of land.
"Dawes Act" (1887)
The last of the laws I've surveyed is the infamous "Dawes Act", which is strongly associated with the state's sale of Indigenous land to settlers. However, the act is similarly based on the process of dividing up reservations into allotments which were intended specifically for agriculture, with additional land allotted for "grazing purposes". The Indigenous occupants of these lands are put under a probationary period for 25 years, during which the land cannot be transferred or sold except to heirs. However, the United States government has the right to "negotiate" under conditions considered by the government "just an equitable" for the re-appropriation of the land. The land is then sold by the United States to "actual settlers". The money made from these sales was "subject to appropriation by Congress for the education and civilization of such tribe or tribes of Indians". These reservations were to be monitored by "Indian police". Preference for this job given to "those Indians who have availed themselves to the provisions of this act and [have] become citizens of the United States". As citizens, formally, reservation Indians were given formal "equal protection" of the law.
The second path to citizenship set out in the "Dawes Act" was Indians born in the United States but has "voluntarily taken up ... his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States".
However, similar to the "Indian Act", the "Dawes Act" reserves the right of the United States government to re-appropriate reservation land and privatized lots for public use with compensation.
Finally, in contrast to the "Indian Act", which served a similar function in every other regard, the "Dawes Act" clearly defined "Indians" as either a man or a woman irregardless of marital status.
Analysis
While the "Dawes Act" in particular has been often compared to the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, and sometimes considered the basis on which the latter was drafted, there are key differences between these two laws, or any of the two laws above. Differences, of course, were based upon the particular historical conditions the laws were drafted in over a 40 year period, as well as goals for the publicization and then settlement of Indigenous land in the particular settler colonial spaces. However, what all of these laws have in common is the legal framework connecting land use to level of civilization to (legal or literal) personhood. In this, they were all drafted for the same purpose and have strong similarities.
Moreover, particularly the "Dawes Act" and Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act base Indigenous land rights on their adoption of agriculture. This was the normative mode of living for the majority of people in the 19th century, so this was an assimilative gesture. This also, especially in Hokkaido where there was a zealous drive for development of Ainu as quickly as possible, effectively tried to force the Ainu to help in the colonization of their own land.
But perhaps most importantly, all of these laws transformed Indigenous people as wards of the state, holding a legal status similar to children. In this, they lacked legal personhood and could not hold property as a male settler in the same colony could, they could not consent, and while they were expected to make their own livelihoods as farmers, their well being was primarily decided by the state.
Ultimately, this was about the land and not people. By allotting Indigenous people small plots of land under the management of the state, and especially by having them perform tasks as normative probationary quasi-citizens, the great mass of Indigenous land that was stolen by settlers was, for the colonial state, legitimized. In other words, the very seemingly generous action of 'giving' the Indigenous groups land was based on the assumption that it was the settlers' land to give. All other lands were thereafter freely sold to settlers, and particularly with the Dawes Act, even the allotted lands were often sold by the state without the consent (which was legally impossible to give).
We also see race and gender to varying degrees being tied to the settler colonial state. As mentioned in a previous post, one of the things that blocked the first draft of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act from passing was the ambiguity between Ainu and, to use Stephen Harper's phrase, 'old stock' settlers and anxiety that the wrong people would be indigenized/de-indigenized. And in the case of the Ainu, being Ainu was tied to family registers, and transferring one's registered place of domicile outside of an Ainu community would legally strip one of their being Ainu. In the Australian and Canadian settings, this was not the case, and questions of ambiguity were solved through arbitrary inclusion/exclusion of people into the Indigenous races and out of settler society, or vice versa, by white judges. And as a clue as to what might happen to mistakenly white-washed Indigenous people, or for that matter, "enfranchised" Indigenous people, we might look to Mark Winchester's analysis of Sasaki Masao's poetry and essays. Sasaki, an ethnic Ainu public school teacher with a Master's degree living far from his ancestral community on the Japanese mainland had, in every way that Katō Masanosuke or other Japanese policy planners might have hoped, 'assimilated' into mainstream Japanese society but nevertheless experienced regular racist harassment and exclusion from Japanese society. In this, the racism which is always both the condition and result of colonization deferred the very possibility of assimilation for Indigenous people, should they desire it. So in this, we should be suspicious of the promises of "enfranchisement" and look at concrete effects of assimilation policies and discourses.
Finally, curiously, the length of these laws varies considerably. The "Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes", Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria", and "Dawes Act", were all two or three pages. The "Indian Act" was 31 pages. The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act is less than one page, type written. For as racist and sexist as the "Indian Act" was, I wonder if the aporias generated by sparse or ambiguous wording generate a state of exception by which the colonial authorities have more, not less, control over the affairs of Indigenous people over which they hold legal guardianship. In this, especially the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act was haphazard, and we learn from people, again, as racist as he was, like Oyabe Zenichiro that much of the law had yet to go into effect a decade later. More on this later.
Conclusion
There are undoubtedly many other similar laws which are part of interrelated/trans-colonial Indigenous management, though for their major differences, the goal was of course identical: the settlement of Indigenous land and legitimization of the settler presence. At this point, I don't think it's likely that Katō Masanosuke was specifically thinking about the "Dawes Act" when drafting the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, however, he wrote it in a context of a great proliferation of this sort of legislation.
Moreover, continuing my last post, what are the discursive conditions that lead to this sort of law-making. Was it the closing of the frontiers, was it humanist ideologies, was it the growing acceptance of the idea of a multiethnic empire? Or did it reflect biopolitical modes of population management as it developed during the 19th century?
Tuesday, 28 June 2016
Reading notes on Katō Masanosuke's speech on the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Bill
I've been going through Katō Masanosuke's December 1893 speech given in the Imperial Diet to promote the bill for the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. The speech is densely packed and heavy on the rhetoric, so it's a bit more difficult than the already difficult texts I've been going through. I'm going to come back to it when I'm a bit further along. But, I did an extremely rough first draft translation of my reading. The key points are as follows:
Katō opens his speech with an appeal to Japanese anti-racism. He described how "sacred" emperors have, generation after generation, treated their subjects with humanity and righteousness. Therefore, Japan's dealings with other countries are based on righteousness and are inspired by noble ideas such as the strong protecting the weak. This can be contrasted with Euro-American empires which aggressively invaded other nations and insulted other races, Katō notes. This righteousness, Katō tells his audience, is the Japanese national character.
With this set-up, Katō criticizes this self-image as having been sullied or betrayed in settler colonial Hokkaido:
What to me is truly shocking about the first point is not simply the question of hygiene itself. This has been explored already by numerous scholars looking at colonial contexts and often damaging attempted outside interventions to improve the purportedly poor hygiene of the colonized group. Ruth Rogaski's "Hygienic Modernity" and Todd Henry's "Assimilating Seoul" have looked at Japanese colonial hygiene regimes already, and the only thing surprising about Katō pushing hygiene discourse in regards to Hokkaido is that it's a relatively early example of 'hygienic modernity' in the Japanese Empire. What's more interesting to me is that Katō is discussing an essentialized Ainu race as unhygienic, and this as being a fatal flaw that will result in extinction, and thereby in need of protection. This is stunningly similar to German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz's writings on "Rassenhygiene" (racial hygiene), which infamously became one of the central ideologies promoted by the Nazi German state, though not before having a major influence on eugenics and public health in states ranging from Sweden to the United States to Japan itself. However, Ploetz's famous book which introduced the phrase 'racial hygiene', Foundations of Racial Hygiene, Part I: The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Defectives (Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene. Band I, Die Tuechtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen), was published in 1895, two years after Katō's speech. This is not to suggest that Katō had anything to do with Ploetz's work, however, the strikingly similar analogy drawn between the two, and an analogy that has had enough staying power to inform much of eugenicist thinking into the present, clearly is not something that spring up spontaneously like a cancer at Ploetz's writing desk. For one, both Katō and Ploetz had something in common, which was time spent in the United States. It's in the context of the post-Civil War United States that there was wide scale interest in hygiene along racial lines, particularly African Americans and Native Americans, and it is also at this time that liberals in the United States began a protect which aimed to assimilate these two racialized groups into normative, 'productive' American citizens. This was also a preoccupation of Katō who similarly promoted education of the Ainu. What's critical about this is how much of a change it was to see African Americans or Native Americans as improvable, as opposed to entirely abject. It's based on the assumption that there is some critical racial handicap that can be cured by making them more and more white. But also, by seeing tentative acceptance as fellow citizens through the suppression of cultural, linguistic, and religious practices to facilitate assimilation and eventual disappearance into wider white society, there's an element of these discourses which is genocidal. This is exactly what, for Katō and generations of policy planners after him, the plan was for the Ainu. The link to Australian Aborigines is part of Katō's global vision, even if it's an entirely spurious point on his part. As I will discuss more at a later time, Australia was somewhat of a mirror of Hokkaido through the 19th century. This is both in early Tokugawa-era Japanese plans to colonize Australia drawn up at the same time that the plans to colonize Hokkaido were, and these plans were drawn up by the same people, but also in that Hokkaido was declared terra nullius in entirely the same manner that Australia was, and moreover, in the year that Hokkaido was first annexed by Japan as terra nullius, Australia had passed its own Aborigine Protection Act. All of this is to say that it is but isn't a coincidence that Katō had articulated Ploetz's vision of 'racial hygiene' before Ploetz did, and that the aims of the law were almost entirely the same as similar discourses and policies in the United States and British Empire.
- Appeals to the morality of the Japanese, indirectly linked purported Ainu decline
- Criticizes racism, critiques previous Japanese treatment of the Ainu
- Disavows racism, promotes a view of the Ainu as improvable
- Pushes, in particular, the idea of the Ainu as an 'unhygienic race'
- This contradicts the insinuation that the Japanese are responsible for the Ainu decline
Katō opens his speech with an appeal to Japanese anti-racism. He described how "sacred" emperors have, generation after generation, treated their subjects with humanity and righteousness. Therefore, Japan's dealings with other countries are based on righteousness and are inspired by noble ideas such as the strong protecting the weak. This can be contrasted with Euro-American empires which aggressively invaded other nations and insulted other races, Katō notes. This righteousness, Katō tells his audience, is the Japanese national character.
With this set-up, Katō criticizes this self-image as having been sullied or betrayed in settler colonial Hokkaido:
I went to investigate up in Hokkaido twice with my own eyes, and the result is that I have discovered that we are truly neglecting our responsibilities as Japanese citizens. ... We should look at the Ainu race, who up until the early modern period occupied Hokkaido, ... one quarter of Japan. There is no doubt that they made their livelihood off the land, collecting resources for to live. However, when mainlanders started going to Hokkaido, they entered a competition [with the Japanese] for survival. The result of this struggle ... was that this ancient race could not endure, and retreated into the interior [of Hokkaido]. ... [T]he truth is, mainlanders took advantage of their weakness and took advantage of their ignorance and oppressed them, and this clearly manifests itself today.
But to give one example, while we were travelling on foot around a place called Setana district, we were told that 100 or 150 years ago there were 3,000 of the natives living there. however, nowadays, it's said that they have fallen into a situation where [their population] shrunk down considerably, and now there are merely 10 families and around 200 people.However, this is where this line argument ends, and Katō begins to pathologize the Ainu. Keeping in mind that this is the time when eugenics discourses are already flourishing in Japan, it should perhaps not be surprising, but we should pay close attention to how Katō then characterizes the Ainu:
And in the pitiful circumstance the Ainu are in today ... they don't respect hygiene laws and suffer from illnesses, and don't know to visit a doctor to be cured, don't know to take medicine, and gradually their bodies have become unhealthy, and this race which is suffering from diseases is today in a state of decline. And, to ask about places where they live, on the edge of Tokachi and Hidaka, there are some people living in suitable houses, but there are very few of them, and a great many Ainu live as beggars in pathetic huts in bad places where they spend day after day. If we continue our non-interference like we practice today, I think the Ainu race will go extinct in some decades just as the Australian natives have gone extinct.There are three things which are important here to consider: (1) the characterization of the Ainu as a race as collectively "unhygienic", and this leading to their eventual "extinction", (2) the context of the Ainu thereby needing external "protection" in the form of this proposed law, and (3) the analogy, although factually untrue, between the Ainu and the not-actually-extinct Australian natives.
What to me is truly shocking about the first point is not simply the question of hygiene itself. This has been explored already by numerous scholars looking at colonial contexts and often damaging attempted outside interventions to improve the purportedly poor hygiene of the colonized group. Ruth Rogaski's "Hygienic Modernity" and Todd Henry's "Assimilating Seoul" have looked at Japanese colonial hygiene regimes already, and the only thing surprising about Katō pushing hygiene discourse in regards to Hokkaido is that it's a relatively early example of 'hygienic modernity' in the Japanese Empire. What's more interesting to me is that Katō is discussing an essentialized Ainu race as unhygienic, and this as being a fatal flaw that will result in extinction, and thereby in need of protection. This is stunningly similar to German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz's writings on "Rassenhygiene" (racial hygiene), which infamously became one of the central ideologies promoted by the Nazi German state, though not before having a major influence on eugenics and public health in states ranging from Sweden to the United States to Japan itself. However, Ploetz's famous book which introduced the phrase 'racial hygiene', Foundations of Racial Hygiene, Part I: The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Defectives (Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene. Band I, Die Tuechtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen), was published in 1895, two years after Katō's speech. This is not to suggest that Katō had anything to do with Ploetz's work, however, the strikingly similar analogy drawn between the two, and an analogy that has had enough staying power to inform much of eugenicist thinking into the present, clearly is not something that spring up spontaneously like a cancer at Ploetz's writing desk. For one, both Katō and Ploetz had something in common, which was time spent in the United States. It's in the context of the post-Civil War United States that there was wide scale interest in hygiene along racial lines, particularly African Americans and Native Americans, and it is also at this time that liberals in the United States began a protect which aimed to assimilate these two racialized groups into normative, 'productive' American citizens. This was also a preoccupation of Katō who similarly promoted education of the Ainu. What's critical about this is how much of a change it was to see African Americans or Native Americans as improvable, as opposed to entirely abject. It's based on the assumption that there is some critical racial handicap that can be cured by making them more and more white. But also, by seeing tentative acceptance as fellow citizens through the suppression of cultural, linguistic, and religious practices to facilitate assimilation and eventual disappearance into wider white society, there's an element of these discourses which is genocidal. This is exactly what, for Katō and generations of policy planners after him, the plan was for the Ainu. The link to Australian Aborigines is part of Katō's global vision, even if it's an entirely spurious point on his part. As I will discuss more at a later time, Australia was somewhat of a mirror of Hokkaido through the 19th century. This is both in early Tokugawa-era Japanese plans to colonize Australia drawn up at the same time that the plans to colonize Hokkaido were, and these plans were drawn up by the same people, but also in that Hokkaido was declared terra nullius in entirely the same manner that Australia was, and moreover, in the year that Hokkaido was first annexed by Japan as terra nullius, Australia had passed its own Aborigine Protection Act. All of this is to say that it is but isn't a coincidence that Katō had articulated Ploetz's vision of 'racial hygiene' before Ploetz did, and that the aims of the law were almost entirely the same as similar discourses and policies in the United States and British Empire.
Friday, 3 June 2016
Comment on the Japanese annexation of Hokkaido
I've come up against scholar after scholar that have strongly pressed the opinion that the 1869 Japanese annexation of Hokkaido was merely a formal de jure announcement of what had been long since the de facto reality of Japanese control of or the long-since completed Japanese "conquest" of Ainu Moshir. This reading of the history of the colonization of Hokkaido would understand the proclamation of the Japanese Empire's annexation of Hokkaido (May 1869/Meiji 2; reproduced in full below) as a mere formality.
But even out of the context of the "Sinocentric tributary system", we can find examples of this kind of relationship as a precursor to settler colonialism in Canada and the United States, with the Hudson Bay Company's Rupert's Land and Columbia District territories functioning in a similar way to the Matsumae domain in Ainu Moshir. Like Matsumae, which Brett Walker shows as unique amongst the Japanese domains in that they had an economy based primarily on trade rather than agriculture (and with the secondary role of border defense and exploration), the Hudson Bay Company territories were similarly based on trade with Indigenous peoples and surveying lands which would later be colonized by white settlers. While the Hudson Bay Company, for the most part, did not interfere in local Indigenous affairs, they indeed maintained their own laws and political order and represented a sort of "place holder" for future British (and as it happened, American) sovereignty, while maintaining a degree of sovereignty over the lands they administered.
And similar to the 1869 proclaimation as being spurred on over fears of Russian colonization of the Ainu territories, the formal transfer of control of the Hudson Bay Company's territories to the British Empire (as well as the push for white settlement of these territories, and the often violent suppression of Indigenous people's political sovereignty, lifeways, and economies that accompanied settlement) was based on fears over the westward push of the United States and southward push of the Russian Empire. For what at times borders on apologism over the Japanese colonization of Ainu Moshir as a necessary maneuver against the Russian threat, we should keep in mind that British/Canadian colonization of "the west" was spurred on by the exact same rationale. As was, for that matter, Euro-American colonial land appropriation globally under the guise of the "Great Game", "the Scramble for Africa", etc.
All this is to say that we have to be careful in how we frame the basic question of sovereign control of Indigenous territory means, either as this question applied to Indigenous people on their own land, to the settlers whose presence may have signified sovereign control of a territory, or as applied to the colonizing empire itself. The basic ability to enslave or kill people is not the same thing as "owning" their land, especially given discourses of land ownership central to territorial sovereignty as it is recognized by international law. Just as the British Empire took control of territories formally controlled by the Hudson Bay company and aggressively began to colonize these territories in a way recognizable to competing colonial states, Japanese control of lands formerly administered or managed by the Matsumae domain was part of the "use it or lose it" discourses of territorial sovereignty which have remained prevalent into the 21st century, as demonstrated by Japan's ongoing territorial disputes. And, moreover, while I haven't yet had a chance to look at 万国公法 and couldn't say for certain, I imagine if the Chinese/kango translation of Wheaton's Elements of International Law included the passage on internationally-recognized Russian sovereign control of the Kuriles, late Tokugawa period Japanese readers would have been extremely alarmed with the rug pulled out from under them.
蝦夷地開拓御下問書While who could doubt the Tokugawa/Matsumae's hegemony of the Hokkaido (and to a lesser extent, the Kurile/Sakhalin) Ainu in as far as the efficacy of armed suppression of the Ainu, or the reality of the basho ukeoi slavery or the endemic sexual exploitation that accompanied this, I think we have to take Tessa Morris-Suzuki's stance in looking at the May 1869 annexation as representing a major break in the history of Hokkaido. Tokugawa-era Japanese hegemony over the Ainu, after all, was much more akin to the Ming/Qing tusi (土司) system of frontier management, where formal Indigenous sovereignty was maintained, as were Indigenous lifeways, on the basis of recognition of the imperial sovereignty of the central state. In effect, this was a form of the larger, so-called "Sinocentric tributary system" which exchanged recognition and monetary tribute from the weaker state to that of the stronger imperial state, whether it be China or Japan. At times, this took the form of a grotesque farce, like the spectacle of local Japanese officials kowtowing to Ainu headmen to demonstrate formal recognition of Ainu sovereignty over their land, and despite the fact that, as some perplexed European observers described in the 1850s and '60s wrly observed, the same Ainu who went out to greet the kowtowing Japanese officials were themselves obviously terrified of the same kowtowing Japanese. In other words, even as the Japanese physically dominated the Hokkaido Ainu throughout the Tokugawa period, they took special care to performatively demonstrate recognition of Ainu sovereignty over Ainu land. Why? The reason is, the Japanese state gained legitimacy from the tributary relationship with neighbouring states and the symbolic capital from the formal recognition of Ainu autonomy was worth than the expected from outright annexation of the Ainu. This is similar to the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was formally was allowed to maintain its monarchy under armed Satsuma hegemony. And in both cases, the Ainu and Ryukyuans continued to formally recognize the hegemony of both the Qing and Japanese states. As Ronald Toby demonstrated with the Ryukyu Kingdom and Brett walker similarly showed with Ainu Moshir, at a time of total Japanese estrangement from the Qing Empire, an indirect relationship through these borderlands was vital.
「蝦夷地ノ儀ハ皇国ノ北門直ニ山丹満州ニ接シ給界粗定ルトイエドモ北部ニ至テハ中外雑居致処是迄官民ノ土人ヲ決設スル甚ダ苛酷ヲ極メ外国人ハ頗ル愛恤ヲ施シ候ヨリ土人往々我邦人ヲ怨離シ彼ヲ尊信スルニ至ル一且民苦ヲ救ウヲ名トシ土人ヲ煽動スル者有之時ハ其禍忽チ箱館松前ニ延及スルハ必然ニシテ禍ヲ未然ニ防グハ方今ノ要務ニ候箱館平定ノ上ハ速ニ開拓指導等ノ方法ヲ施設シ人民契殖ノ域ト為サシメラル可キニ付利害得失各意見ヲ忘憚ナク可申出候事」
But even out of the context of the "Sinocentric tributary system", we can find examples of this kind of relationship as a precursor to settler colonialism in Canada and the United States, with the Hudson Bay Company's Rupert's Land and Columbia District territories functioning in a similar way to the Matsumae domain in Ainu Moshir. Like Matsumae, which Brett Walker shows as unique amongst the Japanese domains in that they had an economy based primarily on trade rather than agriculture (and with the secondary role of border defense and exploration), the Hudson Bay Company territories were similarly based on trade with Indigenous peoples and surveying lands which would later be colonized by white settlers. While the Hudson Bay Company, for the most part, did not interfere in local Indigenous affairs, they indeed maintained their own laws and political order and represented a sort of "place holder" for future British (and as it happened, American) sovereignty, while maintaining a degree of sovereignty over the lands they administered.
And similar to the 1869 proclaimation as being spurred on over fears of Russian colonization of the Ainu territories, the formal transfer of control of the Hudson Bay Company's territories to the British Empire (as well as the push for white settlement of these territories, and the often violent suppression of Indigenous people's political sovereignty, lifeways, and economies that accompanied settlement) was based on fears over the westward push of the United States and southward push of the Russian Empire. For what at times borders on apologism over the Japanese colonization of Ainu Moshir as a necessary maneuver against the Russian threat, we should keep in mind that British/Canadian colonization of "the west" was spurred on by the exact same rationale. As was, for that matter, Euro-American colonial land appropriation globally under the guise of the "Great Game", "the Scramble for Africa", etc.
All this is to say that we have to be careful in how we frame the basic question of sovereign control of Indigenous territory means, either as this question applied to Indigenous people on their own land, to the settlers whose presence may have signified sovereign control of a territory, or as applied to the colonizing empire itself. The basic ability to enslave or kill people is not the same thing as "owning" their land, especially given discourses of land ownership central to territorial sovereignty as it is recognized by international law. Just as the British Empire took control of territories formally controlled by the Hudson Bay company and aggressively began to colonize these territories in a way recognizable to competing colonial states, Japanese control of lands formerly administered or managed by the Matsumae domain was part of the "use it or lose it" discourses of territorial sovereignty which have remained prevalent into the 21st century, as demonstrated by Japan's ongoing territorial disputes. And, moreover, while I haven't yet had a chance to look at 万国公法 and couldn't say for certain, I imagine if the Chinese/kango translation of Wheaton's Elements of International Law included the passage on internationally-recognized Russian sovereign control of the Kuriles, late Tokugawa period Japanese readers would have been extremely alarmed with the rug pulled out from under them.
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