Grades 10–13 · College · University · History Classes

The Andaman Register — and the Ainu, Who Stand

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s Indigenous history research, standing on its own website. Indigenous cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: Documented Fact · Tradition — the people’s own account · Debated / Claim. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. The method is the first lesson: a people is counted exterminated only when people, language and culture are all three missing, verified line by line. This class is built to teach the contrast — the Andamans are this region's one genuine extinction register, and the Ainu are the guard against inflating suppression into extinction. Two disciplines: (1) keep the living peoples in — the Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese paragraphs are part of the reading, not an appendix; a class that prints only endings teaches a lie of omission; (2) where the research files a judgment call (the five Great Andamanese lines carry a printed caveat about mixed descent on Strait Island), teach the caveat with the line — students should see exactly where the judgment sits.

One archipelago where peoples ended. One people who were pressed to the edge — and stand.

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. This class tests, land by land, the claim that Indigenous peoples were destroyed all over the world. In the Andaman Islands the record answers with names and dates. In Japan it answers differently — and the difference is the lesson.

1. The ten peoples of Great Andaman (Documented Fact)

The Great Andamanese were ten distinct peoples, each with its own language and territory, listed north to south by the anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (fieldwork 1906–08): Aka-Cari, Aka-Kora, Aka-Bo, Aka-Jeru, Aka-Kede, Aka-Kol, Oko-Juwoi, A-Pucikwar, Akar-Bale, Aka-Bea. Beside them — never part of their register — stood the Jarawa, the Onge, the Jangil of Rutland Island, and the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island.

2. 1858, and the fall in the counts (Documented Fact)

Britain established a penal settlement at Port Blair in 1858. The Great Andamanese then numbered about 5,000. Punitive killing followed their resistance; then introduced diseases — measles, influenza, syphilis — swept a population with no immunity, worsened by the "Andaman Homes" where captured people were gathered. The census line tells the rest: 625 in 1901 · 455 in 1911 · 207 in 1921 · 90 in 1931 · about 19 in 1961. In 1949 the survivors were gathered to Bluff Island, and in 1969 the last 23 were moved to Strait Island, where their community — about fifty people today — still stands.

3. The endings, tribe by tribe (Documented Fact)

The census record (van Driem, 2001) dates the separate endings: the Aka-Kol tribe extinct by 1921; the Oko-Juwoi and Aka-Bea by 1931 — for Aka-Bea the linguistic record states that the last speaker was also the last member of the people; the Aka-Kede and Akar-Bale soon after. The Jangil of Rutland Island, last encountered in 1907, were gone by the 1920s, most likely by disease; not one word of their language was ever recorded. These six peoples meet the three-missing test — people, language, culture — and are filed exterminated, with this caveat printed on their lines: the Strait Island community carries descent from across the ten tribes, so the filing rests on the test of the separate people, language and practice community — no separate Bea, Kol, Juwoi, Kede, Bale or Jangil community stands.

4. The language that ended — and the people who did not (Documented Fact)

Boa Sr, the last speaker of Aka-Bo, died on 26 January 2010, aged about 85. World headlines said a tribe had died with her. They were wrong in a way this course exists to catch: the Bo language ended, but people identifying as Bo stand on Strait Island today. The census files Aka-Bo as ended in the record, descendants continue — a different class from extinction, kept different on purpose. The same discipline covers A-Pucikwar, whose partial descendants are recorded among the living.

5. What still lives in the archipelago (Documented Fact)

The southern and central languages merged, in part, into Present-day Great Andamanese — based mainly on Aka-Jeru — still spoken on Strait Island by a handful of speakers and rememberers: critically endangered, not extinct. Beyond the register: the Jarawa (378 in the 2011 census), the Onge of Little Andaman (101 in 2011), and the Sentinelese, who refuse all contact, whose island the law protects from approach, and of whose language and life nothing is known — because they have chosen that it not be. They are printed here so no reader mistakes the archipelago for emptied.

6. The Ainu — suppression inside a living people (Documented Fact)

Japan's Ainu met a different machinery. In 1869 their island was renamed Hokkaido and taken into the state; their land, hunting and fishing were taken or banned, their language and customs suppressed. The 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act labelled them "former aborigines," allotted poor farmland, schooled their children separately — and stood in law until 1997. The Ainu language is now critically endangered (UNESCO): about ten to twenty native speakers remain, with a growing second-language revival; the Sakhalin variety ended in 1994. Recognition came late: a court first named the Ainu an Indigenous people in 1997, the Diet resolved it in 2008, and the 2019 Ainu Policy Promotion Act wrote it into law — a law Ainu critics note carries no apology and restores no land or fishing rights.

7. Why the two halves of this class are filed differently

The Ainu suffered land loss, a century of legal assimilation and the near-loss of their language — and the Ainu stand: a living people, organising, litigating, reviving. That is filed language endangered, people living — never as extinction. To file the Ainu beside the Aka-Bea would not honour the Ainu; it would erase them a second time, on paper. The count stays honest only if it can hold both truths at once: six peoples in the Andamans are gone entirely, and in Japan a people the state tried to assimilate away is still here to say so.

Sources for this class

Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (1922) • Census of India, Andaman reports (1901–2001) • van Driem, Languages of the Himalayas (2001) • Abbi, grammar and dictionary of Great Andamanese (2012–2013) • Basu, “Resurrecting the Linguistic Past,” Cadernos de Linguística • Survival International, statement on the death of Boa Sr (2010) • Minority Rights Group, Andaman Islanders profile • UNESCO, Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Ainu) • Hokkaido University Centre for Ainu and Indigenous Studies / ANSIPRA record on the 1899 Act • Diet of Japan resolution (2008); Ainu Policy Promotion Act (2019); Tokyo Review (2020). Full research file: Asia and the North, Genocide Record, Region 4; census section: World Census — Asia & the North.

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