Decolonize Futures Vol. 3 "Ainu and De/colonization"『アイヌと脱／植民地化』

In contemporary Japanese society, there is a colonial structure that commodifies and consumes Ainu people and culture within the frameworks of promoting SDGs, diversity, and addressing environmental issues. This consumption extends beyond the market to academic and intellectual discourse. Treating Ainu people as mere academic topics and ideas leads to overlooking the history of racism and poverty resulting from colonialism, and the suffering and deaths of many Ainu people.Furthermore, when discussing the Ainu people and colonial structures, understanding the reality in binary terms such as insider/outsider, perpetrator/victim, colonizer/colonized can render invisible the voices and existence of those who do not fit into these dichotomies.In this issue, we interviewed mai ishihara, an anthropologist at the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies at Hokkaido University and herself of Ainu descent, on how to resist tokenization/encoding and consumption and think about decolonization regard