In 2019, MOA was thrilled to welcome Indigenous Ainu singers Mayunkiki and Tomoe Yahata for a special Hokkaidō 150 event hosted by the Centre for Japanese Research (CJR) at UBC and MOA. The Ainu peoples are Indigenous to Hokkaidō of Japan and the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands of Russia.

In this follow up event, Dr. Uzawa will explore Ainu performing arts, through discussion and performance, as an important element of Indigenous knowledge. Dr. Kanako Uzawa is an Ainu scholar, advocate and artist. She will be participating in the Intercultural Indigenous Choreographer Creation lab at the Banff Centre this July. She is also a participating artist in the A Soul in Everything: Encounters with Ainu from the North of Japan exhibition at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, Germany and is currently involved with planning the upcoming Ainu exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as a guest curator.

She is a multilingual cultural scholar who speaks Japanese, English, Norwegian, and limited Ainu and has lived in six different countries. She obtained her doctorate from the Arctic University of Norway in 2020, and is the founder of Ainu Today.

Presented by Centre for Japanese Research + Museum of Anthropology at UBC and SFU’s David Lam Centre.

The event is made possible through the generous financial support of the David Lam Centre, School for the Contemporary Arts, the Institute for Performance Studies, and the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University; the Centre for Japanese Research, and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Please note: the event is free, but does not include access to the Museum, which will be closed during the event. Registration is not required, but capacity in the Haida House is limited so we suggest arriving early to avoid disappointment.

Photo by Mats Gingvik