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Paper short abstract:

This paper argues ideas about Indigenous peoples bore a significant influence on early U.S./Japan relations. An Indigenous Studies perspective on this era is employed to consider how Ainu peoples were impacted, how spectral and indelible ideas about "Indians" influenced these early relationships.

Paper long abstract:

Using the life and career trajectory of U.S. citizen and oyatoi gaikokujin Horace Capron, I argue that the influence of ideas about Indigenous peoples bore a greater influence on early U.S./Japan relations that has been considered. Capron is best known in Japan, and in the literature about Japan's use of oyatoi gaikokujin, as an advisor to the Kaitakushi. However, a different image of why he might have been selected for this role emerges when his career trajectory is examined as more than a sum of it's parts. Considered this way, questions about the influence of U.S. American Indian Policy, and of ideas about "Indians" more generally, on Japan's Meiji era interactions with Ainu people begin to emerge. Capron's time as a Kaitakushi advisor, considered in concert with his earlier career (as an Indian Agent, a General in the U.S. Civil War, and as the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) allows for his position as an oyatoi gaikokujin to become an obvious next step in a career spent acquiring key settler colonial skills rather than an anomaly. I argue that it is this career trajectory--that involved the managing of lands and people Indigenous to those lands, protecting those same lands from those who sought to take it away, and then developing those same lands to feed the settler nations--that influenced how Capron understood and carried out his role in Hokkaido. This paper presents an Indigenous Studies perspective on oyatoi-gaikokujin, that also considers how Ainu peoples were impacted during this time of flux, and how spectral and indelible ideas about "Indians" influenced Capron, in particular, and early U.S./Japanese relationships more generally. Using my theoretical frame, "specters of colonialism," I will show how the ghosts of colonial goals influence the choices scholars make when using archives, that function to elevate the importance of some details while dismissing the significance of others. In short, this paper examines how understudied elements the United States' colonial mentorship of Japan have the potential to reshape thinking about US foreign policy/use of colonial technologies abroad.