« Settlers bureaucrat: Elizabeth Strakosch, Julie Lahn, Patrick Sullivan, ‘Australian Indigenous Policy at the Intersection of Bureaucracy, Colonialism, Neoliberalism and Race’, in Julie Lahn, Elizabeth Strakosch, Patrick Sullivan (eds), Bureaucratic Occupation Government and First Nations Peoples, Springer, 2024, pp. 23-44
Settlers mistreat: Nicole A. Thomas, Anne L. Ersig, Lonnie A Nelson, Brenda Owen, Kyle Powys Whyte, Bram Wispelwey, Lisa C. Bratzke, ‘Identifying Settler Colonial Determinants of Indigenous Health Within the United States: A Discursive Paper’, Public Health Nursing, 2024 »

Settlers evade: Roslynn Ang, ‘Swapping time between contemporary Ainu and Kaitaku settler colonial history’, in Yunci Cai (ed.), The Museum in Asia, Routledge, 2025

04Jan25

Abstract: Japan’s museums have been critiqued by local and foreign scholars for their representations of the Indigenous Ainu as primitive, non-coeval and depolitised of their resistance and revival movements. The Hokkaido Museum attempted to address this critique when they refurbished their galleries in 2015 by re-ordering the permanent exhibit on Hokkaido’s cultural, natural, economic and political history. Through a combination of discourse analysis of the old and new exhibits at the museum, I show how the linear discourse of modern development history is backgrounded while the presence of contemporary Ainu is foregrounded. I argue that the temporal shifts in the museum’s Ainu exhibits, from primitive to coeval, are laudable trends, but the violence of Japanese settler colonial history is evaded in the process.


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