Abstract: Indigenous people are often depicted as helpless victims of the forces of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial empire building: forces that were beyond their understanding or contr
Abstract: Indigenous people are often depicted as helpless victims of the forces of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial empire building: forces that were beyond their understanding or control. Focusing on the story of a mid-nineteenth century diplomatic mission by Sakhalin Ainu (Enchiw), this essay (the first of a two-part series), challenges that view, suggesting instead that, despite the enormous power imbalances that they faced, indigenous groups sometimes intervened energetically and strategically in the historical process going on around them, had some impact on the outcome of these processes. In Part 1, we look at the story of one Sakhalin Ainu family over multiple generations in order to highlight the strategic place of the Sakhalin Ainu in cross-border relationships – particularly in the relationship between China and Japan – from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
The Mission
In late December 1853, about six months after US Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Uraga Bay on his mission to ‘open’ Japan to the world, a Sakhalin Ainu (Enchiw) elder named Setokurero set out from the village of Nayoro on the west coast of Sakhalin island on his own crucial diplomatic mission.1 He travelled in a convoy of fifteen dog sleighs through the winter blizzards, accompanied by a retinue of some twenty Ainu elders from surrounding villages and one Nivkh man from the Amur region of mainland Asia.2 They were heading for Kushunkotan on the southern shores of Sakhalin, where the Japanese had established a fortified trading post in the early nineteenth century, and where the Russians had also recently landed to stake their rival claim to the island. The aim of the Ainu elders’ mission was to learn more about Russo-Japanese competition for control of Sakhalin, to express their own views on the matter, and to seek Russian help in resisting Japanese exploitation of the Ainu.
The Ainu of Sakhalin, Hokkaido and the Kurile Islands, like the Nivkh and Uilta indigenous peoples who also inhabited Sakhalin, lived in small self-governing villages and did not have any single dominant chief, but Setokurero was a particularly well known and influential elder. He was respected for his oratorical skills3, and his village and family had a special place in Sakhalin history (which we will explore further). His coastal community of Nayoro was – in terms of the modern concept of towns or even villages – tiny. In 1853, it consisted of six houses on either bank of a small marshy river, containing a population of around fifty people.4 But it was a crossroads and emporium on a far-reaching trade route whose tentacles stretched, at one end, deep into the heartland of the Chinese Empire, and at the other end to the Shogunal capital of Edo (soon to become Tokyo) and beyond.5 From the Chinese side, items like silk brocade, cotton cloth, metalware, decorative blue beads, tobacco and smoking pipes flowed into Nayoro and other points on the Sakhalin trade route, and some of these goods (particularly Chinese brocades) travelled on to the luxury goods markets of Japan. From the Japanese side came items such as rice, saké, miso paste, and pots and pans. The medium of exchange was ‘soft gold’ (as the Russians called it): fur, in the form of the pelts of sable, fox, sea otters and other animals hunted by the indigenous people of the region.
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https://apjjf.org/2020/22/Morris-Suzuki.html