Michael John Ioannides

MICHAEL J. IONNIDES, then a graduate student at University of California, Santa Barbara, California, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Infrastructures of Sovereignty: Indigenous Environmental Activism and the Politics of Temporality in Settler Colonial Japan,” supervised by Dr. Casey J. Walsh. The grantee spent twelve months conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Hokkaido, Japan — a settler-colony built on the traditional homeland of the Ainu people. Research focuses on Ainu Indigenous rights, infrastructure development, and environmental conservation. Participant-observation, interviews, and document analysis were his primary forms of data collection during fieldwork, and his approach is informed by Indigenous research methodologies. The fieldwork was wide ranging, taking the grantee from the forests and fields of the Saru River region — working as a farmhand gathering wild plants, and studying Ainu music, dance, and embroidery — to the bustling streets of Sapporo’s Chuo-ward, where the project engaged in Ainu rights advocacy and performed in the city’s vibrant jazz scene. This research will describe how Ainu people are actively re-interpreting what it means Indigenous in Japan, consistently evoking traditional ecological knowledge to stress the need for environmental conservation and the creation of territories set aside for the continuation of Ainu traditional livelihoods. Inspired by Indigenous communities abroad, Ainu activists are committed to creating the physical, legal, and ethical infrastructures of Indigenous sovereignty in contemporary Japan.