The Ainu are an Indigenous people whose ancestral lands and cultural connections extend across Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands. Ainu histories, knowledge, language, and cultural practices have been shaped through deep relationships with the land, water, community, and more-than-human world.

Through histories of colonization, discrimination, and assimilation, many aspects of Ainu language and cultural knowledge were suppressed or placed at risk. Yet Ainu culture has never simply disappeared. It has continued through families, communities, artists, knowledge holders, and everyday practices, sometimes quietly and sometimes through acts of cultural assertion.

Today, Ainu people are actively creating, reclaiming, and transforming cultural knowledge in ways that speak to the present. Artists and younger generations draw on inherited knowledge while also developing new forms of expression. Tradition is not fixed in the past; it lives, moves, and changes with us.

This ongoing cultural movement is also deeply connected to the pursuit of Ainu rights, self-determination, and recognition as an Indigenous people. Through art, language, performance, research, and community practice, Ainu voices continue to shape what Ainu culture can be—and what it can become.

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Photo©️Susan Dine and Kanako Uzawa