The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan by ann-elise lewallen (review)

WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF JAPANESE SETTLER COLONIALISM, they usually think about imperial Japan and World War II. However, Japanese settler colonialism did not end with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Jewel Voice Broadcast. In The Fabric of Indigeneity, the cultural anthropologist ann-elise lewallen urges "readers to confront a new reality, the reality that settler colonialism inside Japan continues" (3). Although Japan was stripped of its external colonial holdings, including Korea and Taiwan, at the end of World War II, Japanese settler colonialism continues in the "internal colonies" of Okinawa and Hokkaido (6).

With her eyes set to present-day Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's main islands, lewallen investigates how its Indigenous Ainu population resists settler colonialism. While Ainu men participate in trials, legal battles, and other confrontational programs against the Japanese state, Ainu women produce cloth and reproduce culture. Clothwork, lewallen argues, is a politically meaningful act and a gendered response to settler colonialism. Clothwork is also deeply personal. At the heart of lewallen's story is how Ainu women individually self-craft "identities as Ainu and as Indigenous through practices of clothwork" (1). This analysis shifts the discussion of Indigeneity away from blood and "being Ainu" to individual agency and "becoming Ainu" (1). In all, lewallen reveals how Ainu identity is a conscious choice—one that helps unsettle Japanese settler colonialism.

The Fabric of Indigeneity is a complex book, thus it is perhaps best to analyze it chapter by chapter. At the foundation of each chapter is lewallen's ethnographic fieldwork, her experiences in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing, and museum and archival materials.

In chapter 1 lewallen explores how Ainu address their Indigeneity and modernity to "straddle two realms bifurcated by settler society—the traditional and the modern" (38). This chapter shows how assimilationist narratives position modernity and Indigeneity as antithetical to each other. Ainu refuse this false dichotomy by reclaiming ancestral motifs, music, and art and adapting them to new mediums and technologies. This practice of cultural revival, according to lewallen, is an attempt to link ancestral space with the present day, an expression of culture, and a political act. Next, in chapter 2, lewallen shows how Ainu women negotiate Japan's new multi-cultural policies and pursue self-craft through clothwork. By producing cultural fabric, Ainu women "are explicitly in dialogue with state policies that promote Ainu heritage and traditional production" (70). Clothwork not only serves as an exercise in self-determination for Ainu women but also is a healing, or therapeutic, act. In chapter 3 lewallen examines how heritage through blood lineage has become "normalized to the exclusion of alternative modes of asserting indigeneity" and is used by colonial authorities and states to police identity (100). Yet lewallen reminds us that "blood is inherently unstable" and that Ainu make strategic choices about whose blood identifies them (100).

Chapter 4 is particularly illuminating and is perhaps the most important chapter in the book. In it lewallen shows how colonization and assimilation produced gendered subjects. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, Japanese settlers assigned Ainu men to corvée labor far away from their home villages and committed sexual violence against Ainu women under the euphemistic "local wives" system (128). These policies, lewallen writes, "amounted to state-sanctioned sexual assault in many cases and precipitated the breakdown of Ainu families" (129). From the mid-eighteenth through the twentieth century, Ainu women were sequestered to the domestic sphere. In a way, this shielded Ainu women from assimilationist policies. Ainu men were forced to adopt Japanese language and culture because of their work in the public sphere. Meanwhile, Ainu women preserved and maintained Ainu language, practices, and material culture because of their distance from the public sphere. This produced what lewallen calls a "gendering of ethnicity" (126).

Chapters 5 and 6 are also quite strong. In chapter...