CJS Noon Lecture Series | Rivers and the Politics of Temporality in Ainu Mosir
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This lecture will be held in person in East Hall 4448 and virtually on Zoom. If you are attending in person, we recommend entering East Hall using the Church Street entrance and taking the elevator to the 4th floor. If you would like to attend via Zoom, please register for the Zoom webinar at: https://myumi.ch/kVx6z.
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.
See all of our Fall 2026 lectures at https://ii.umich.edu/cjs/news-events/events/japanese-noon-lecture-series.html
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.
See all of our Fall 2026 lectures at https://ii.umich.edu/cjs/news-events/events/japanese-noon-lecture-series.html
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Where is it happening?
East Hall, 548 Church St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2563, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherUniversity of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
