Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

A Clash of Empires with the Khant, Buryat, Sakha, Ainu, Chukchi & Other Indigenous Peoples

The August 16 shooting of a Japanese fisherman by a Russian border patrol made me ponder again how Russia pushed its empire all the way from Central Asia to Siberia to Sakhalin and the Kuriles, with the wake of its conquest destroying the lives of many different traditional and Indigenous peoples.

And how the Ainu claim to the Kuriles has been eclipsed by the more recent claims of Russia and Japan...

Journalist Anna Reid's 2002 The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia is a beautifully written book about the destruction of the indigenous people of Siberia under Russian control. Benson Bobrick, author of East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia, has an great review in the New York Times:

TOWARD the end of the 16th century, Siberia fell to the Russians as an unexpected prize. When this conquest and occupation began, European Russia stood deep in its own ashes after a half-century of war, famine, plague and despotic rule under Ivan the Terrible, Russia's first czar. Ivan's imperial ambitions had been thwarted to the west by Poland and Sweden and to the south by the Crimean Tatars backed by the Ottoman Turks. Russia then turned to the east, and within the space of a few generations acquired a territory larger than the Roman Empire.

In statistical terms, that territory covers five million square miles (about a twelfth of the total land surface of the globe) and stretches from the Arctic to Central Asia, the Urals to the Sea of Japan. Its mineral wealth makes it potentially the richest resource area on earth. But ''not everything that counts can be counted,'' as Einstein once remarked, and after the geologist and the geographer have exhausted their estimation of its dimensions in numerical wonder, there remains its human heart. When the Russians first arrived, Siberia (like aboriginal America) already had a diverse life and culture of its own, and it is the idea of Anna Reid's captivating new book, ''The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia,'' to explore the impact of the Russian conquest on that aboriginal culture's fate...

Some part of Siberia's vanishing present will always be preserved by words that attend it with such care. But it is the plight of the indigenous peoples that is Reid's chief concern. Like other conquering powers, the Russians insisted on their colonial right to civilize the ''savage'' and make the wilderness their own. Ultimately, their way was cleared by slaughter, alcoholism and disease. Reid's account of her own journey – part history, part travelogue, part excursion through the outback of Siberian lore – more or less follows the progress of Russian domination eastward as the Khant, Buryat, Sakha, Ainu, Chukchi and other peoples are subdued.

It was not long before some of them were struggling simply to survive. In 1876, for example, there were said to be only about 1,600 Yukaghirs left, the pitiable remnant of a once-powerful tribe. Here and there, their ancient burial mounds could still be seen, containing skeletons with bows and arrows, spears and shamanistic drums, but the descendants of these mighty warriors had fallen into such indolence and addiction that their chief delight was a coarse Ukrainian tobacco stretched with dung.

Under the Soviets, the Yukaghirs and other small nomadic groups essentially disappeared. Stalin, in fact, distrusted all native peoples because they lacked an ''industrial proletariat,'' the only class to which he could pretend to relate. But in the parsing of native life, the new categories did not apply. ''The Small-Numbered Peoples,'' Reid explains, ''possessed no exploiters and exploited in the Marxist sense. . . . Owning a hundred deer did not make a man a kulak; prospective sons-in-law working out their bride-prices were not hired laborers; a shaman was not the same thing as a priest.'' No matter: it was not the people but the categories that counted, and collectivization programs proved as devastating to Siberian natives as to peasants in Ukraine.

The history of their obliteration has since been obliterated -- the erasure of an erasure, so to speak. In St. Petersburg's State Russian Museum, we learn, ''the sole evidence of the native Siberians' existence is an 18th-century ivory,'' while the vast collection housed by the Hermitage contains but a single ''china figurine of an Itelmen girl, one of a series of 'national types' produced by the Imperial Porcelain Factory in the 1780's.''

Forty years ago, it was still possible to find whole communities of the Khant, a west Siberian people, where their language was spoken. Today, only the elderly keep it alive...

In November 2005, Ainu groups delivered a joint statement to the Japanese Foreign Ministry and Russian Embassy in Tokyo, asserting that neither Japan nor Russia has the right to claim the disputed northern islands because they belong to the Ainu people. They added that the opinions of the Ainu people must be taken into account when the two countries negotiate over the four islands off Hokkaido, the statement said, adding the Ainu had initially inhabited these islands, known in Japan as the Northern Territories and in Russia as the Southern Kuriles.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki's fascinating and illuminating article,"Divided Lives: A Story of Indigenous People and the Pacific War, in Asia-Pacific Magazine No. 1 April 1996 recounts the ancient history and tug-of-war between Japan and Russia over these territories that belonged to the Ainu and other indigenous peoples for centuries:

Amidst all this controversy, however, there is one legacy of the war which has remained almost unnoticed. In March 1995 two women, Kim Yunshin and Nakagawa Lyuba, travelled from Sakhalin in the former Soviet Union to meet representatives of the Japanese government in Tokyo. They came to speak on behalf of the indigenous communities of southern Sakhalin: to ask for compensation and a fitting memorial for brothers and husbands whose lives were cut short by the Pacific War. It was, perhaps, to be expected that their story would not have been widely publicised, for the communities they represent are very small. At the beginning of the Pacific War the indigenous population of Southern Sakhalin – which was then the Japanese colony of Karafuto – numbered only about 2,500, and of these no more than 400 belonged to the Uilta and Nivkh language groups whom Kim Yunshin and Nakagawa Lyuba represent. Yet their story is worth re-telling because it vividly illustrates the tragedies of colonisation, national rivalries and war.

East Asian history is normally assumed to be the history of three states – China, Japan and Korea – states which not only dominate the region today but have done so for centuries. This triangular vision of the region's past, however, overlooks the mass of small communities, often without a formal state structure, which existed in the interstices between the dominant East Asian powers. Among these were the Ainu peoples of Hokkaido, the Kurile Islands and the southern half of Sakhalin, who in turn had close trading relations with the societies of Northern Sakhalin, the Kamchatka Peninsula on the easternmost fringe of Siberia.

Conventionally, these communities have been seen as exotic, isolated and static. Although they have been the subjects of some detailed anthropological studies, historians have seldom given them a glance, except when searching for the prehistoric origins of the dominant Chinese, Korean and Japanese ethnic groups. There has been little sense, therefore, that small non-state societies played an active part in the recent history of the region.

But in fact the small societies of East Asia were far from static. On the contrary, they formed part of a complex pattern of cultural and economic exchange, both with one another and with their larger neighbours...

Yet between about the 4th and the 13th centuries AD the island formed part of a still mysterious cultural realm to which archaeologists have given the name "Okhotsk Culture". Although the bearers of the Okhotsk Culture are sometimes romantically referred to as the "Asian Vikings", it is not in fact known whether they were a single ethnic group or spoke a single language. What is known is that all around the southern half of the Okhotsk sea, from north coast of Hokkaido to the Kurile Islands and the northern tip of Sakhalin, people followed a broadly similar way of life based on fishing, sealing and whaling combined with the keeping of pigs and dogs. Their large underground houses were carefully designed to keep out the winter cold, and their spiritual life found expression in superb carvings of bears and of strange, long-headed people. Chinese coins excavated at Sredniya on the northernmost shores of the Okhotsk Sea testify to the extensive trade routes which crossed these frozen waters, linking the Okhotsk peoples both to the Chinese Empire and to their far northern neighbours.

The gradual disappearance of Okhotsk culture between the 10th and the 13th centuries may have reduced contact between the people of Sakhalin and their eastern neighbours, but links with the Asian mainland remained strong. From around the end of the 17th century the Chinese empire established a tributary relationship with some of the island's communities, and trading posts were set up along the Amur River near the coast of the Asian mainland. Here representatives of many ethnic groups from the surrounding regions would gather to present tribute to the Chinese empire, buy and sell merchandise, exchange news and arrange marriages. The Japanese explorer Mamiya Rinzo, who travelled to the trading post of Pul in the early 19th century, describes a lively if sometimes chaotic scene of market stalls laden with sable and fox furs, gemstones and metalware, and all around a babel of languages as traders bargained, quarrelled, greeted old friends and played with one anothers' children.

In this way, the narrow straits between the island and the mainland became a vital bridge in what is sometimes called the "northern silk route", linking China to Japan via Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Exquisite brocade garments, traded by Chinese merchants in exchange for precious furs, were bought by the people of Sakhalin and sold in turn to Japanese merchants, their designs helping to stimulate the development of Japan's own silk industry.

By the time the "northern silk route" was established, Sakhalin was inhabited by three groups of people speaking distinct languages: the Ainu, who also lived in Hokkaido and as far south as the northern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu; the Nivkh, who also inhabited parts of the eastern shore of Siberia, and the reindeer-herding Uilta, who spoke a Tungusic language related to that of many groups on the Siberian mainland. Although their differing languages attest to distinct origins, the three groups had developed closely inter-related lifestyles, with each group developing its own niche within the delicate northern ecosystem.

Legends survive of fierce battles between the Uilta and Ainu; yet the relationship was largely a peaceful one. Myths, legends and beliefs were shared amongst the three groups, as were craft techniques and artistic designs. During the long summer evenings men carved wooden dishes and boxes with the beautiful, curving wave-like motifs which are characteristic of Uilta, Nivkh and Ainu art alike, while women embroidered similar patterns onto the hems of garments and fur boots. Skill at embroidery was the most prized accomplishment for women, and metal needles, which were obtained through trade with the Chinese or Japanese, were among a woman's most valued possessions. A 19th century traveller to Sakhalin describes how a Russian once came upon a Nivkh family all weeping bitterly. "'Why are you crying?' he asked, 'Is somebody dead?' 'No! What is death? It would have been better had somebody died. The needle is lost!'"

Enthusiastic traders that they were, the people of Sakhalin exchanged ideas, not just with one another, but also with outsiders. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as first Japanese merchants and fishermen and then Russian traders and settlers moved into their region, they acquired and adapted techniques from the outsiders. Little by little tobacco, rice, potatoes, and Russian-style shirts and handbags (embroidered, none the less, with distinctive Sakhalin designs) became part of their way of life, and by the late nineteenth century, the traditional spears, harpoons and arrow-traps were beginning to be supplemented by the use of hunting rifles.

But, for all their adaptability, the small societies of the north lacked the population and military strength to protect themselves from the inroads of powerful nation-states. Their modern history, in fact, is in many ways similar to the modern history of other small, non-state societies, such as native North American and Aboriginal Australian societies. The people of far northeast Asia, however, had the particular disadvantage of living in an area which came to mark the border between two of the most powerful, and most bitterly antagonistic, states of the modern world...

Previous ........... Next
Back to Ten Thousand Things index page...