抄録
It is known that Indigenous cultures along the North Pacific Rim are similar in many respects. European and North American scholars have attempted to explore the periods and routes of human migration from Asia to North America, as well as historical relationships among the cultures of the two continents. To accomplish this, the Jesup North Pacific Expedition Project led by F. Boas at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the Crossroads of Continents Project organized by W. Fitzhugh in the 1980s, and the Jesup II Project initiated by I. Krupnik were carried out in the USA. On the other hand, while the international Abashiri Symposium of Northern Peoples was begun by the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples in the mid-1980s, Hitoshi Watanabe's North Pacific Cultural Zone Study and Osahito Miyaoka's Comparative Research Project of Indigenous languages in the North Pacific Rim Regions in the 1980's to 1990's, and the National Museum of Ethnology's Special Exhibition project “Sea Otters and Glass Beads” in 2001 were conducted in Japan. This paper proposes a transdisciplinary comparative research project with a framework focusing on (1) historical change, current status, and future of Indigenous cultures and (2) cultural and social elements of Indigenous peoples along the North Pacific Rim from a perspective of Alaska and Northwest Coast research, after reviewing the above-mentioned major research projects.
