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.

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?

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:

• 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

Without going through the entire translation, there are two points I will make notes on. The first is the contextualization of the law, and how Katō characterizes the Japanese settlers, and the second is how he characterizes the Ainu.

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.

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.

蝦夷地開拓御下問書

「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」

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.

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.

Reading notes on Hokkaido Prefectural Office Education Division Social Section: the Main points of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act and it's Future

北海道旧土人保護法の本旨と其の将来

While this pamphlet is undated, the author refers to it as being "almost 30 years" after the Former Aborigine Protection Act, so before 1929. However, the 1929 Relief Law is mentioned in the text, so it's probably published that year. The point of the pamphlet seems to be in reaction to a growing movement against the law, and the anonymous author is essentially trying to justify the law through racist apologism, while disavowing the very racist nature of the law. 

We learn, for example, that Ainu land was nationalized strictly to stop it from passing out of Ainu hands, which ad resulted in Ainu "leaving home" and "wandering aimlessly" around Hokkaido. While Ainu retained de facto ownership, the purpose of the protective nationalization of their land became a "forgotten history", and the legal position of ownership over their land became "extremely ambiguous". (pg. 2)

The author here excuses much of the land theft referred to earlier in this blog by explaining it away as "ambiguity", but is clear that land theft was the impetus for the Former Aborigines Protection Act. However, the author quickly adds that the Act was the continuation of a larger transition from "primitive lifestyles" (原始的な生活) to a "civilized economic life" (文化的な経済生活). But, by no means was this adding to the limits of the legal capacity of the Ainu as "incompetent people" (禁治産者). (pg. 3)

However, the author differentiates the Ainu by claiming that general laws are well and good for most people, however, the Act is intended for passive elements of the Ainu population, and goes on to compare the purpose of the law for the Ainu to the 1929 Relief Law (救護法) which "protected" the sick and poor. This comparison of the Ainu to physically ill people seems to have been a common theme. (pg. 5)

Finally, in the short space of the pamphlet, the author completely reverses their original argument saying that the Act was intended strictly to "protect" Ainu land to saying that the purpose of the Act was to "assimilate the Ainu until they're the same as ethnic Japanese (大和民族) in both name and reality". (pg. 6)

An interesting point in the pamphlet is the author's referring to "young people" (若者) who were demonstrating against the Act. It's not clear who they were, or why, but the author seems incensed and begs them to seek progress very, very gradually. In reality, he's taking a textbook conservativist position, which is interesting considering that it was progressive liberals in the Diet who passed the law in the first place, taking what was in Japan, as elsewhere, a 'radical' step of wanting to grant national citizenship to Indigenous people. This on the surface was anti-racist, since, Indigenous people faced not just social exclusion, but genocide in many countries, around the time this pamphlet was published, such as the Japanese "extermination strategy" against Indigenous people in Taiwan (See Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery). It would be interesting to see a true Japanese "conservative" point of view from the 1890s, since many of the proponents of the Former Aborigines Protection Act thought of themselves as dyed-in-the-wool liberals that felt like they were doing the Ainu a great service by unilaterally claiming them for the Japanese states as candidates for future inclusion as full Japanese citizens. While, like the author of this pamphlet, they clearly understood this to be cultural genocide, however, they saw that genocide itself as a benevolent act, in a "kill the Indian, save the man" sense. It's not coincidental that, as with Richard H. Pratt, who coined the phrase, was a liberal involved in Indian education in the United States in the 1870s-1880s. The attitude of liberals in settler colonies at the time strongly advocated for the differential inclusion of Indigenous people based on their ability to participate in the State's goals to colonize their own lands in a way that would exploit the the land economically. This took the role of laws like the Dawes Act in the United States or Former Aborigines Protection Act, as well as residential schools and other forms of assimilative schooling.

But with all that said, as I asked above, I would be genuinely interested in what conservatives thought of this sort of legislation. Not that conservatives were less racist, but for those that absolutely didn't want Indigenous people to be citizens in any capacity, or extreme racists who thought they didn't have the mental capacity to become "civilized", what was their reaction to these laws? And why did things change so quickly that in just 30 years, the conservative position would be one of deep entrenchment of these laws and a disavowal of the racist purpose of the laws?

Reading notes on Yomiuri Shinbun: "Hokkaido Ainu Representative Travels to Tokyo to Request Protection" (1895/2/5)

This article purports to be an overview of a meeting between an Ainu "chief" (酋長), Santotsutei, with unnamed Japanese officials in Tokyo. What we learn from this meeting is in some ways quite stunning. And, I say "purports" because the conclusion of the article, and the nature of the specific "request for protection" is suspicious in context.

But the key points that the Ainu representative makes are as follows:

1. The nature of Japanese settlement led by the Hokkaido government, and of making Hokkaido a new Japanese territory (新版図), is extremely aggressive, and akin to the invasion of one rival state by another. 
2. Hokkaido prefectural statistics clearly show that Ainu numbers are rapidly decreasing. These statistics, according to the article, are based on Ainu living in households located in towns and villages. However, as Ainu livelihood is assaulted, and their condition in villages worsens, many Ainu escape into the interior of the island, and outside of the purview of the Japanese state, and thereby not existing on paper. The Ainu representative argues that while official statistics show Ainu numbers as being as low as 8,400 people, actual numbers may have been closer to 26,000 people.
3. The Ainu economy before wide-scale Japanese settler colonialism was based on villages along the ocean shore. In the summer Ainu would fish and engage in agriculture, and in winter they would hunt. These villages were prosperous. However, as these villages were taken over by ethnic Japanese, Ainu were forced further into the interior, where they established villages along rivers, and continued a similar livelihood. However, settlers were encouraged by the government to move into these riverside areas too, taking more and more Ainu territory. 
4. Animal pelts became the only product that the Ainu produced. The yearly statistics between 1891 and 1893 show that on average the Ainu collected 56,000 furs on average per year. Each fur was worth around 1.5 yen, meaning the yearly total was worth around 80,000 yen. [Note: Here, it seems that the journalist editorializes by suggesting if given "encouragement" (奨励) and "protection" (保護), profits could be "not few indeed". Moreover, while 80,000 yen was a huge amount of money in those days, this number doesn't seem to account for hunting equipment, middle-men taking their cut, expensive licence fees that Ainu were subject to, or the simple fact that if there were 26,000 Ainu, and the 80,000 yen were to be divided up evenly, that's still only 3.5 yen per person per year, which is a tiny amount.]
5. A secondary industry for the Ainu was husbandry. Horses were seen as a "specialty product" for Hokkaido and this reputation stemmed originally from Ainu horse breeding. However, pastures were nationalized as crown land and from there, was divided up for use by the military, or given to "capitalists" (資本家). The loss of this industry caused considerable suffering.
6. Financial aid, or Ainu collective property "protected" by the Japanese government has either been mismanaged or siphoned off. We see an example of this such as a donation for schools of about 300 yen, or an donation from Japan's royal family of of about 3,000 yen, however, Ainu, according to the article, have no knowledge of where this money is, or how much of it remains. Moreover, in other cases, Ainu were pressured to sell their land on the pretense of rumours about the high prices of building houses. And, the amassed wealth of Ainu who were forcibly moved to Hokkaido from Karafuto and the Kuriles' by the Japanese government had a collective wealth of 12,000 yen, which has gone missing. The Karafuto and Kurile Ainu do not know where it's being kept or how much of it remains. [Note: All this is keeping in mind that Ainu at this time did not have control of their own assets, and it was being squandered, mismanaged, or stolen by Japanese officials.]

Strangely, after this brutally candid account of the effects of Japanese settler colonialism on the Ainu economy, we're told to pity and cry for the Ainu, and the article closes by stating that Santotsutei is requesting Ainu land to be parcelled into private lots to be protected by the government. I can't help but feel very suspicious that this is what Santotsutei would have actually concluded, especially since Ainu collective property being privatized, like with Aboriginal people elsewhere, was the colonial goal, and this process of privatization was effectively a form of primitive accumulation. Moreover, what would privatization have to do with the huge amount of missing Ainu money? It wouldn't, moreover, do anything to give back the vast majority of Hokkaido that was claimed in 1869 as crown land to the Ainu, including the vast pasture lands mentioned in the article. But it but would have legitimized this land theft. So, while I'm not denying the possibility that Santotsusei might have actually suggested this, since as David Howell showed, there were certainly Ainu who sought recognition as Japanese citizenship through assimilation as normative Japanese subjects. However, it's so removed from the rest of the critique that I can't help but be suspicious. The solution given, moreover, is coincidentally or uncoincidentally the explicit aim of the Former Aborigines Protection Act, which was being hotly debated at the time.

The question of private versus public property and how they relate to colonialism is a topic that comes up again and again in colonial era texts. The process is explored by Marx at length, and as related to settler colonialism more recently by scholars such as Glen Coulthard. But what's interesting, and I think missing from these other studies, is that Ainu land was not invaded and privatized. It was invaded and nationalized as crown land, and then privatized. This is to say, the path to privatization was through publicization. How would we consider this, legally? There were also in Hokkaido, as in any other settler colonies, numerous examples of settlers stealing Ainu land (which apparently was one of the reasons for the Former Aborigines Protection Act in the first place-- though suspiciously instead of just policing land theft more carefully). These land theft and the formally illegal settlements that came out of them is itself is interesting to consider, since the Japanese settlers were living on crown land, as Ainu land ownership was not recognized. Even after the Former Aborigines Protection Act, against Santotsutei's wishes apparently, Ainu land was not privatized, but was maintained as crown land parcelled out to families who became formally wards of the state until the land was adequately developed. 

Reading notes on Ogawa Masahito: "5th, 8th Imperial Diet 'Former Aborigines Protection Act' Examination Special Committee Records"

第5、8回帝国議会「北海道土人保護法案」審査特別委員会会議録

I'm working through a collection of documents edited by Ogawa Masahito related to the Lower House debate over the so-called Former Aborigines Protection Act (旧土人保護法) in the early 1890s. While this seems to have been originally prepared for his own use, the files he's included look extremely useful in that we get a glimpse of not just the process of drafting the law, but of the attitudes behind it.

One passage particularly stands out, which is a sharp criticism by Councilor Tsuzuki Keiroku:

土人ト内地人ノ区別明ラカナラズシテ如何ナル範囲マデハ土人トシテ本法ノ権利ヲ付与スベキヤヲ決定スルバ甚ダ難シイ戸籍簿ニハ土人モ内地人同様ノ氏名ヲ付シアルヲ以テ果タシテ純然タル土人ナルヤ又ハ内地人ノ久シク北海道ニ移住セルモノナルヤ否ハ戸籍簿ヲ以テ区別スル能ハス且ツ又特ニ土人タルノ名称ヲ付セラルルヲ嫌ヒ風俗習慣ナドモ漸ク内地人ヲ擬シ殆ント内地人ト異ナラザルモノ、存スルニ至レリ行政上ノ処分ニ於テハ内地人ト土人トヲ区別スルニハ甚タシキ困難ナシト雖モモ法律ヲ以テ一ノ権利ヲ一方ニ与ウルニハ此間確固タル区別ノ標準無ルヘカラス然ラサレハコレガ実施ノ上ニ於テ甚タシキ困難ヲ感スヘシ第二第四条ニ於テ第一件ノ効力ヲ保タシメタリト雖モ尚ホ養子緑組ヲ禁セザル以上ハ完全ノ効力ナシ第三土人ノ農業ヲ厭ウニアリ明治八年スイスカル（対雁）ノ土人明治十八年バルモシャ（幌筵）ノ土人ヲシコタンニ移住セシメシモ其結果甚タ佳ナラズコレ北海道土人ハ尚ホ未々狩漁時代ノ民ニシテ農耕時代ノ民ニアラザル如シ蓋シ数年又ハ数十年後ノ結果ヲ予想シテ未開ノ荒地ヲ開拓スル如キハ彼等能力ノ及ハザルトコロニシテ目前利益ノ顕ハルル狩漁ニ依リ生活ヲ営ミ水草ヲ逐ウテ移転スルニ過ザルナリ故ニ本案ニ依リ土人ニ保護ヨ与ウルモ却テ其利益ヲ他人ニ占メラル、ノ結果ナキヲ保スヘカラズコレ政府ガ本案ニ反対セザルヲ得ザルノ理由ナリ

Which is to say, Tsuzuki argues that:

1. Because because Ainu names were registered in a similar fashion as Japanese settlers on family registers
2. Because many Ainu -- who understandingly didn't like being called dojin/"the natives" -- tried to pass as Japanese using distinctly Japanese-sounding names on the their registers
3. Because some Japanese settlers had been in Hokkaido a long time (sometimes for generations)
4. Because many Ainu children were adopted into Japanese families (and, though Tsuzuki doesn't mention it, some Japanese children were adopted into Ainu families)

it, according to Tsuzuki, became increasingly difficult to distinguish between the Ainu and the Japanese in a way that would allow a law like the Protection Act to function properly.

This is not true, in the sense that (and I'm not sure how at this point) the Japanese state was efficiently able to separate family registers for Ainu and ethnic Japanese, and the applicability or unapplicability of the Protect Act to an individual itself became a racial marker or whether they were Ainu or Japanese. With that being said, Tsuzuki's other criticisms are sharp and prescient. For example, given that many or most Ainu preferred to hunt or fish instead of raise crops, and the Protection Act aimed to transform them into farmers within a generation as short term way of "colonizing undeveloped wasteland" (未開の荒地を開拓する),* the law was doomed to fail. Where Tsuzuki was wrong is the simple assumption that Ainu simply hated farming, as though it's something they're genetically predisposed to, as opposed to a question of resistance to assimilation and a simple preference for one's own lifeways rather than that of the colonizer. But, in large part, Tsuzuki's criticisms foreshadow the major problems that the Protection Act had, including both deepening the racial essentialization of dojin as a category distinct from Japanese, and the catastrophic effect that forced movement onto farms had on many Ainu.

The irony of this assumption that the Ainu, whose economy subsisted primarily of hunting and fishing, hated agriculture or were somehow lacking basic instincts that would allow them to thrive as farmers because they were "natives" is that England's first colony in what became the United States, the Roanoke colony, ended in absolute disaster, with British townsfolk with no experience in farming expected to sustain themselves on agriculture in a totally unknown environment. The settler discourse almost came full circle, of the dangers of the colonial space on the fragile bodies of the colonizers to the colonized as fragile and doomed for extinction.

What warrants further study are the questions of slippage: by the 1890s, how easy was it to distinguish an Ainu from a Japanese? Was this law designed in part to distinguish them on paper? Moreover, was it true that Ainu family registers were kept separate? I've found files with Ainu family registers-- were these separated by the archivists, or were they always kept separate? Moreover, if it was the case that Ainu family registers were completely merged into Japanese family registers, what criteria were used to determine if a family were Ainu? Was it geography? Were the original Ainu family registers from the 1870s kept on file and used in conjunction with the contemporary records in the 1890s to define a population of "aborigines" to be "protected"? Finally, if it wasn't clear who was and wasn't Ainu, there must have been many cases where Ainu were overlooked because they didn't match whatever criteria was set out. But there must have also been cases, if it was done from on high and if it was as vague as Tsuzuki claimed, where "old stock" settlers were mistaken as Indigenous. At any rate, I can't help but feel that the state or the Hokkaido government had a clear population that they had in mind defined as "dojin", or else it would have been absolute chaos trying to sort out who is who, confirm it, deal with cases of mistaken identity, deal with cases of non-Ainu who may have wanted to pose as Ainu to reap whatever benefits they may have thought they could get from the Protection Act. There are endless questions that can come out of this. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to read through the transcripts, start to go over Katō Masanosuke's Diet speeches, and try to hunt for clues.

* It's interesting that Tsuzuki was so clear and unambiguous about the purpose of the Protection Act as a way to mobilize the Ainu as stand-in Japanese settlers and effectively colonize their own land on behalf of the Japanese state. This was exactly what the first provision of early drafts of the Protection Act stated, and was cut from the final law which was passed.