Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives

10. Our Ancestors’ Handprints: The Evolution of Ainu Women’s Clothing Culture

153 10 our Ancestors’ Handprints The Evolution of Ainu Women’s Clothing Culture Tsuda Nobuko Foreword and translation by ann-elise lewallen foreword As noted in the introduction to this volume, subsistence practices such as foraging and fishing, combined with the lack of a text recognizable as writing , provided the rationale for archaeologists to assign Ainu culture to a lower evolutionary tier. Here Tsuda Nobuko proposes a system for reading Ainu clothing. [The extracts below in italic stem from a March 23, 2010, dialogue with Tsuda.] From her standpoint, Ainu clothing culture served as an index of economic and political prowess; a record of technical skills and available tools; and as a legacy of individual artists across the Kurils, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido.1 In Tsuda’s view, each stitch—including the paths taken for the original basting stitches—serves as a signpost tracking the artist ’s labor and human relationships in Ainu communities from the moment of composition to today. For this analysis, she examined Ainu textiles currently located in Europe and Japan made between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. She supplements this work with research of older vintage Ainu-e (Ainu genre paintings) to work toward an ambitious goal: to devise a methodology for reading Ainu textiles. On the one hand, this innovative approach will guide curators and researchers in assessing the many thousands of Ainu textiles held in museums worldwide, many lacking sufficient documentation. On the other, this methodology offers something more for 154 Tsuda Nobuko Ainu artists, and therein lie Tsuda’s true aspirations: her efforts to “read” the social histories of these cloth narratives make possible a path toward restitution . Even while the original clothing remains housed on museum storage shelves, Tsuda’s work furnishes Ainu with the means to regain control of their cultural meaning and enable their (re)production. For communities of Ainu artists across Japan, however, Tsuda’s methods offer restitution through reproductions and knowledge transfer, and thereby enable empowerment for Ainu revivalists and artists. Tsuda brings decades of embroidery, weaving, twining, and basketmaking experience to her attempt to devise a methodology for reading Ainu textiles. Her interest in reviving earlier material culture led her to probe the notion of traditional culture as used by contemporary Ainu practitioners and to conduct an archaeology of Ainu material culture collections around the globe, concentrating mostly on Europe. Although Edo period collectors were fascinated with the frontier zone represented by Ezo, Sakhalin, and the Kurils, and sought to retain samples of cultures thought to be “vanishing ,” the science of collecting and anthropological field research was not systematized until the late nineteenth century. As a result, many of the world’s oldest collections of Ainu objects are poorly labeled and misclassified (Kreiner 1993b). In this chapter, Tsuda presents evidence from her analysis of Ainu women’s textile collections in Germany, Russia, and Japan, and argues that the cloth practices Ainu women of today class as “traditional ” represent one stage in a much longer evolution. Combining analysis from Ainu genre paintings, physical objects, and oral histories collected from living culture bearers, Tsuda lends weight to the position that clothing practices invoke a changing Ainu worldview and relations with the human and nonhuman environment. In March 2010, I held a conversation with Tsuda to better understand the import of her research for the broader Ainu community. When I visited her office at the Hokkaido Ainu Association in Sapporo, she explained how the longue durée of Ainu history resists contemporary artists’ efforts to master these complex techniques. “Our sincerest efforts to make precise reproductions of our ancestors’ work,” Tsuda argued, “ensure that these skills are passed down to future generations mostly intact. When things are locked away in glass cases, we Ainu can only study them from a distance, no different from Wajin” (interview, March 23, 2011). In her experience, observers see Ainu belonging as tethered to material culture fluency, or, as Our Ancestors’ Handprints 155 authenticated by culturalism. In other words, if a woman can express herself in the language or the arts of her ancestors, she can demonstrate that her heritage is bound by more than biology. Many younger Ainu object to the notion that identity must be undergirded by cultural fluency to be authentic . Tsuda agrees, but as a personal choice, “simply inheriting [Ainu] blood wasn’t enough to carry my heart.” For her, the core of Ainu identity is manifest in language, or...