The Ainu Speak of Famine: How Oral Traditions Reflect and Inform Historical Analysis of Changing Food Practices and Trade Relations in Early Modern Period Hokkaido (1603-1868)

TL;DRAbstract

The Ainu are an indigenous people who historically inhabited the north of the Japanese archipelago and have the legacy of a culture and completely oral language distinct from their mainland Japanese neighbors. Since the Ainu had no written language, most documentary sources for the premodern period are Japanese. Historians are therefore reduced to viewing Ainu history largely through the eyes of often mistaken and prejudicial Japanese accounts and overlook mutable oral traditions as sources for historical analysis. I claim that the preserved body of Ainu oral narratives, when used with other archeological and recorded historical data, can serve as equally illuminating historical sources, which represent how Ainu viewed their changing circumstances. Unlike the written texts and myths of many cultures which are fixed in time, Ainu narratives have an adaptive quality as a direct result of being from a solely oral tradition. That means that the content of the stories altered as the social,

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