MEET THE TEAM

DR. KANAKO UZAWA - FOUNDER

Dr. Kanako Uzawa is an Ainu scholar, advocate, and artist. She is a multi-lingual and multi-faceted cultural scholar who speaks Japanese, English, Norwegian, and limited Ainu and has lived in six different countries. She spent her childhood and youth in the Ainu community of Nibutani, Hokkaidō, and in Tokyo. She grew up in both Ainu and Japanese cultures and states that “the Ainu people and culture are part of my everyday life just like Japanese people and culture”. She describes her Ainu people as the kindest and warmest people, with a rich culture and a lot of inspiration. She is a member of the Association of Rera in Tokyo, where she learned Ainu songs and dances from elders and became a cultural performer and international advocate for the Ainu community. 

During her youth, she encountered negative representations and discrimination towards the Ainu and discovered a stark contrast between the general public view and her people. She began to wonder what does it mean to be Ainu in the twenty-first century?  This gave her motivation to explore a way to express the contemporary livelihood of the Ainu.

She obtained her master in Indigenous Studies and doctorate degree in Community Planning and Cultural Understanding from the UiT Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø in 2020. She’s held an internship in the Project to Promote ILO Policy on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (PRO 169) at the International Labour Organisation, Geneva Switzerland. She is currently an affiliated researcher at the Research Faculty of Media and Communication at Hokkaido University and contributes to collaborative research and Ainu performing art on the multifaceted articulations of Indigenous knowledge. She also engages with the ArCSII (Arctic Challenge for Sustainability) as a research collaborator. She is an editorial board member of AlterNative: an International Journal of Indigenous Peoples in New Zealand, Aotearoa.

SABRA HARRIS - CONTRIBUTOR

Sabra Harris is PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An anthropologist and ethnographer, she is in the East Asian Culture Studies program, researching Indigeneity and contemporary Ainu identities. She received her masters in folklore from the University of Oregon in 2016, writing on digital storytelling and editing in anime music videos.  

She was first introduced to Ainu during her undergrad in Asian Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. When she first began to study the myth of homogeneity in Japan, she came across Oki Dub Ainu Band, which not only challenged her perception of contemporary Japan but of contemporary Indigenous identity as well. The AinuToday platform is important because it challenges stereotypes that relegate Indigenous people to an ossified past. AinuToday collects and organizes materials that show how Ainu cultures are not relics, that they do not only exist in museums and history. They celebrate their identities in innovative ways and continue to affect the present.

Sabra first communicated with Dr. Uzawa through Sabra’s academic mentor at UCSB, ann-elise lewallen, who is also a friend and colleague of Dr. Uzawa. They spoke more and became better acquainted after Sabra attended Dr. Uzawa’s lecture on Ainu Resilience, which was hosted by the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Japanese Research in 2021.  

DR. SCOTT HARRISON - CONTRIBUTOR

Dr. Scott Harrison (Ph.D., History) is Senior Program Manager, Engaging Asia at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, a not-for-profit organization focused on Canada-Asia relations. His research examines global indigeneity and indigenism with a focus on the Asia Pacific, Canada-Asia business, policy and strategies; paradiplomacy; building Asia-related competencies for Canadians; Japan history, diplomacy and politics; and Asia Cold War history. He is (slowly) working on a book project on Indigenous peoples and the Cold War, and two co-authored journal articles related to Ainu delegations to China during the 1970s and 1980s. Publications include, “Canadian Provinces and Foreign Policy in Asia,” International Journal (with C.L. Labrecque) (2018); “The Cold War, the San Francisco System and Indigenous Peoples,” in The San Francisco System and Its Legacies, (2015); and “The Indigenous Ainu of Japan at the Time of the Åland Settlement,” in Northern Territories, Asia-Pacific Regional Conflicts and the Aland Experience (2009). He has also written over a dozen policy pieces for APF Canada, many of which look at Indigenous engagement and business between Canada and the Asia Pacific.

Dr. Kanako Uzawa’s AinuToday platform is a critical and timely Ainu-led initiative. Non-Ainu scholars and pundits have dominated much of the past and current Ainu-related literature and discussions in English and Japanese. But this is changing. AinuToday is one such example of this. Dr. Uzawa’s efforts to spearhead AinuToday will make it a key platform for highlighting Ainu scholarly and artistic works. AinuToday also offers significant potential for partnering with Ainu on initiatives that are not merely academic muses but that will have a tangible impact on issues that matter to Ainu. As far as I know, this is likely one of the first Ainu-led initiative outside of Japan, besides museum exhibits, that aims to highlight the work of Ainu scholars and artisans for an international audience.

While I have known of Dr. Uzawa and her work for many years, it wasn’t until Dr. Mark Watson formally introduced us that we began to discuss shared interests and ideas. I am looking forward to working with Dr. Uzawa and the growing Ainu Today team towards promoting a future full of understanding, respect, inclusivity and life-long partnerships.

MICHAEL J. IOANNIDES - CONTRIBUTOR

Michael J. Ioannides (MA, Oregon State University; MA, UC Santa Barbara) is a 3rd year PhD student in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been studying contemporary political movements among the Ainu people for over a decade. His bachelor’s honor thesis at the University of Chicago (2010) discussed contemporary Ainu identity in relation to cultural competency and authenticity, while his master’s thesis at Oregon State University (2017) examined and critiqued the Saru River Development Project (including the Nibutani Dam and Biratori Dam) and its impacts on Ainu residents. For his PhD dissertation project, Michael hopes to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Ainu Mosir to work and live alongside Ainu environmental restorationists, in the hopes of learning how their work might present a challenge to the Japanese government’s “construction state” paradigm of regional development as well as ongoing settler colonial dispossession in Ainu Mosir. He grounds his ethnographic engagement in an ethic of responsibility and relationality that derives from his commitment to Indigenous methodologies as a means of collaboratively producing non-extractive and non-exploitative scholarship that is accountable to community needs and desires. 

Having been first exposed to Dr. Uzawa’s publications through his classes with professor ann-elise lewallen—who is Michael’s dissertation co-chair—Michael first reached out to Dr. Uzawa to introduce himself after seeing her presentation at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Japanese Research in March 2021. Michael was thrilled when asked to contribute to AinuToday. This exciting and important project provides a portal for English-language readers into the issues that matter most to contemporary Ainu people. It also seeks to elevate and amplify the voices of Ainu people themselves, so that English-language readers can be exposed to perspectives that have too often been marginalized or ignored in the past. Michael wishes such a resource had been available ten years ago, when he was first getting started learning about the Ainu people’s struggle for justice. He is honored to contribute to such an important project.

María Victoria Díaz-González - Website Design

María is an aspiring journalist based in New York City. Her writing revolves around the issues and experiences of minority populations in the New York region. 
 
She met Dr. Kanako Uzawa in the summer of 2016 as a college student while completing an internship with Dr. Jeffry Gayman at the Media and Communications Department at Hokkaido University (Japan). Through that internship, she spent a reasonable amount of time with Dr. Uzawa and her family and the Ainu community. Her time with Dr. Uzawa made her feel, for the first time, that she could be herself: mixed-race, and an immigrant and ethnically fragmented – and also be whole. 
 
As someone steeped in ethnic studies, she knows that scholarship about minority populations often focuses on what kills us: discrimination, disparate health outcomes, lack of economic access, and the like. Maria strongly believes in Dr. Uzawa’s work because she is forward-looking and emphasizes the positive aspects and all that her Ainu community has to live for instead. 
Nairne Brown's headshot. A young woman with black hair and round gold glasses.

NAIRNE BROWN - CONTRIBUTOR

Nairne Brown is a recent MSc in Japanese Studies graduate at the University of Oxford. She first developed an interest in Ainu language and culture during her undergraduate degree programme (MA Hons Japanese & Linguistics, University of Edinburgh) whilst undertaking a self-directed research project during the summer of her first year. Since then, she has gone on to complete her undergraduate dissertation on the topic Ainu and Kaurna: A Comparative Overview of Language Death and Revival, and in December 2024 published a paper entitled Ainu Language Death and Indications of Change in a Japanese-Dominant Environment in the student-led Michigan Journal of Asian Studies.

During her studies, Nairne first became aware of Dr. Kanako Uzawa’s work through her AinuToday blog, and would later meet her during her first term at the University of Oxford. Later, she would take a series of courses at the Hokkaido Summer Institute (Hokkaido University), where she would (under Dr. Uzawa’s instruction) come to engage with a wide range of topics surrounding Ainu culture, art, and land to a level which she had found little opportunity to do so before.

AinuToday has proven itself to be an invaluable resource to students worldwide who have limited access to resources and/or instruction on the topic of Ainu studies, particularly in the realm of English language literature. Nairne was overjoyed when the opportunity to join the AinuToday team arose, and she wishes to continue to build AinuToday’s platform as a means of amplifying Ainu voices and scholarship, and increasing the accessibility of Aynupuri literature and art to current and future audiences.

MIA KIVEL - CONTRIBUTOR

Mia Kivel is a settler-scholar and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History of Art at the Ohio State University. Her forthcoming doctoral dissertation—tentatively titled “Against Colonial Aphasia: 21st-Century Art in Ainu Mosir” —centers on the work of contemporary Ainu artists and the myriad ways their work seeks to encourage reflection on issues pertaining to Indigenous rights that often go overlooked. For example, she argues that a wooden carving of a wolf might be read not just as an expression of a particular creative tradition, but also as one piece of an emerging discourse surrounding the Ainu right to stewardship over their ancestral homelands, as is promised by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. She has also been responsible for developing curricula at the Ohio State University focusing on Indigenous art in Ainu Mosir and beyond, and has presented her research at conferences including the Association for Asian Studies and the East-West Center’s International Graduate Student Conference.

Mia began researching Ainu art in the completion of her MLitt dissertation at the University of Glasgow in 2021. This project, which focused on the political landscape surrounding the opening of Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park, led her to encounter Dr. Kanako Uzawa’s research and performance practice, which has greatly informed her thinking about the way Ainu art is approached by non-Indigenous audiences. In the summer of 2025, she received research funding from her university to travel to Japan to take a course led by Dr. Uzawa at Hokkaido University. Working with Dr. Uzawa has left a significant impact on Mia’s perspective on her own research and responsibilities as a researcher, and she hopes to carry the lessons she learned with her through the completion of her Ph.D. and beyond.