Ainu Mosir
Ainu Mosir (mosir : terre, monde, pays)
The name the Ainu give to their own land—Hokkaidō, the Kurils, Sakhalin—before the Japanese state renamed it *"Hokkaidō"* and turned it into a province to colonize. Shigeru Kayano, elder of Nibutani and the first Ainu elected to the Japanese Diet (1994), explains it himself in his memoir: *Ainu Mosir* means *"a peaceful land for humans."* The word *mosir* (land, world, country) is not exclusive to humans: in the divine chants (*yukar*), it also names the *kamuy mosir*, the *"land of the gods"* where the *kamuy* reside. Two neighboring worlds, a single word to name them both—linguistic trace of a cosmology where the gods are not above humans, but beside them.
We are no "former aborigines." We were a nation who lived in Hokkaido, on the national land called Ainu Mosir, which means "a peaceful land for humans." The "Japanese people" who belonged to the "nation of Japan" invaded our national land.
Mosir means land, world, country. Paired with Ainu (human, in the Ainu language), it names Hokkaidō, the Kurils, and Sakhalin as the Ainu called them before the Japanese administration saw them as mere territorial extensions to be settled. Shigeru Kayano, whose father was tried as a “criminal” for fishing salmon in his own rivers, rejected the label the state imposed on him—“former indigenous”—and countered it with a name: his land already had one, and it meant something precise, “a peaceful land for humans.”
It is not an isolated word. In the divine chants transcribed by Chiri Yukie, the world of the kamuy—the gods, non-human persons who visit the world of the living—bears the same root name: kamuy mosir, the land of the gods. The same word designates the country of humans and that of the gods, as two neighboring territories rather than two planes of existence separated by an abyss. What the administration later renamed “national forest” before selling it to a financial group was not, then, an empty land awaiting a name: it already had one, which spoke of the peace lived there and the kinship kept with the gods.