SEAS Events

Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ainu Mosir (Hokkaido, Japan), this talk considers the crucial role that rivers play in Indigenous Ainu articulations of sovereignty and futurity. As an important medium through which kin-based, territorial, and cosmological rights and responsibilities continue to be expressed, rivers connect ancestral Ainu lifeways with visions of an Indigenous future. In their struggles for Indigenous rights today, Ainu activists continue to focus on rivers as the central locus of Ainu sovereignty and the origin from which Ainu cultural and territorial rights emerge, envisioning and enacting futures of flourishing and abundance that are rooted in ancestral relationships to their native lands and waters and the more-than-human beings who inhabit them. In so doing, they insist upon a future for the Ainu as an Indigenous people, challenging Japan’s ongoing settler-colonial structure of Ainu dispossession and elimination.

Dr. Michael J. Ioannides is a teaching postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. He received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of California Santa Barbara, in June 2026, with an interdisciplinary emphasis on environment and society. His research focuses on Ainu environmental and Indigenous rights activism in rural Hokkaido, Japan. Aside from his research, he is a contributor to the website AinuToday ( https://ainutoday.com/), as well as a saxophonist and independent music producer who regularly collaborates with Ainu artists.

Thank you so much! We really appreciate SEAS including our talk on your website. If you all ever have Japan-related activities or events, please feel free to reach out to me about cross-promotion!