Traditionally anthropologists have reflected colonial powers by playing the role of experts as they study other cultures. This past summer, StoryCollab was privileged to work with a cultural geographer who understands that the true experts of a culture are its own storytellers.
Chie Sakakibara, a Syracuse University professor, contracted us to facilitate an in-person digital storytelling workshop with the goal of adding the voices of Ainu people to current anthropological studies. These are not oral histories, but digital stories in which the storytellers talk about people, moments, and the culture that has shaped them.
This workshop was part of the three-year project “Indigenous Northern Landscapes, Visual Repatriation, and Collaborative Knowledge Exchange,” which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (OPP#2330922) and the Engaged Humanities Network (EHN). Sakakibara serves as Principal Investigator, with her colleague Danika Medak-Saltzman, Assistant Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies, as Co-Principal Investigator.
Decolonization Efforts and Digital Storytelling Work
Like other Indigenous peoples around the world, the Ainu of Japan have endured colonization, and for centuries have been pressured into assimilating into mainstream Japanese culture. The Japanese government didn’t even recognize the Ainu as an indigenous group until 2008. They are Indigenous to what is now northern Japan, but their territory formerly included Sakhalin Island, northern Honshû, Hokkaidô, the Kuril Islands, and the Kamchatka Peninsula, once collectively referred to by Ainu peoples as Ainu Mosir. The contemporary generation of Ainu peoples are eager to reclaim their homeland through cultural revitalization and environmental activism.
StoryCollab is honored to bring our experiences in digital storytelling, social justice, and higher education into this specific project. This work draws on a collection of 80 photographs of an Ainu village taken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by German American photographer Arnold Genthe, which is housed at the Library of Congress and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College & Conservatory. Through the reintroduction of these images to the same contemporary Ainu community, Sakakibara hopes to help decolonize narratives about the Ainu people and honor their cultural integrity.
With her colleague Medak-Saltzman and their colleagues at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA), Sakakibara is working to foster relationships between the researcher and people at the focus of research. Instead of relying solely on ethnographic interviews or oral histories, Sakakibara brought StoryCollab to the University in July of 2024 to do in-depth interactive storytelling work with seven partners from the the Nibutani Ainu community. The storytellers selected images from the Genthe collection to weave into their own stories about their cultural heritage in order to connect the past with the vibrancy of current life in Nibutani.
The Storytellers and Their Stories
Mamoru Kaizawa is a woodcarver focusing on traditional Ainu designs. His wooden trays have been recognized as a cultural heritage craft by the Japanese Minister of Industry and Trade. His sister Maki Sekine is a designer, using traditional patterns on clothing, jewelry, tapestries, and signage, and their brother Masayuki Kaizawa is an Ainu chef and traditional cuisine expert. He works at his restaurant alongside their mother, where they share heritage recipes and continue to make culinary discoveries together.
In their digital stories, the siblings integrate some of the Genthe photos with their own family photos from the past through today. In all of their stories, they talk about the importance of family, tradition, and shared knowledge that bridge the temporal scale between the past, present, and future.
Maki’s husband Kenji Sekine, who is culturally Japanese with deep family ties to the Amami Islands, happened upon the Kaizawa family when he was traveling through Japan by motorcycle many years ago. His story reflects his fascination with the Ainu way of life. After his first summer there, he remained in Nibutani, hunted for mushrooms in the forest with the Kaizawa matriarch, and then married Maki. Naturally good at language, Kenji delved into the Ainu language which has largely been forgotten. In his story, he recounts his efforts to revitalize the language and teach it to the local children to ensure its survival.
Maki and Kenji’s daughter Maya Sekine made a beautiful digital story about how her pride in her culture evolved over time. At first hesitant to tell people she was Ainu, she noticed the stress of people outside her community and came to recognize the creativity, support, and joy for life she experiences as a member of the Ainu community. She is proud to be a member of such an influential and accomplished family that embodies the resilience of Ainu (meaning the real people).
Two other friends and supporters of the Ainu people also made compelling digital stories. Takeshi Shōno’s story traces his journey from childhood friend of Ainu children to the Director of the Ainu Cultural Museum of Nibutani. As a child, he played on a hill that he later discovered was sacred to the Ainu. He expressed that he wished he had known at that time how historically significant that spot was. He decided as an adult and superintendent of the Biratori Board of Education to work to integrate Ainu history into the school curriculum.
The final participant in our digital storytelling workshop is Kōji Yamasaki, or Yama-chan. He is a cultural anthropologist at Hokkaido University who has made Ainu material culture the focus of his studies. He is working to reconnect the people with the ancestral objects that were taken from them to other countries. Like Sakakibara, it is critically important to him to connect with the Ainu people and to include them in his work. He strives to approach the people he is researching as friends, mentors, and colleagues, not as subject matter.
Sharing the Stories
All but one of the digital stories made in the 3-day workshop were told in Japanese, and none of that could have happened without the tireless efforts of our team of interpreters: Chie, herself, Medak-Saltzman, and the two Japanese language faculty members at Syracuse University Tomoko Walter and Kenji Oda. Because of them we were able to make and record all of the stories in Japanese and then produce versions with English subtitles. Kenji Sekine recorded his story in Ainu, and we made versions with both Japanese and English subtitles.
At the request of the Nibutani community collaborators, Sakakibara plans to create a museum exhibition on the Ainu culture that will travel to museums in the United States and Japan. The digital stories from our workshop will play a pivotal role in helping people understand how vibrant Ainu heritage is and what it offers the Japanese people as well as the rest of the world.
Sharing Contemporary Cultural Heritage Stories
Indigenous cultures are often presented as frozen in time. In the eyes of the dominant colonizing cultures, they are often seen as the way they were when they were first absorbed or overtaken by colonial powers—black and white, like the original photographs that were taken by people like Arnold Genthe. By encouraging people to share stories like the ones told by Mamoru, Maki, Masayuki, Kenji, Maya, Takeshi, and Yama-chan, bridges across generations can be built and the evolution of cultures can be witnessed in real time.
—-------------------
Find more information on the storytellers here:
