Itelmens

Common card · No. 384008

The Itelmens (Itelmen: Итәнмән, romanized: Itənmən; Russian: Ительмены, romanized: Itel'meny) are an indigenous ethnic group of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. The Itelmen language is distantly related to Chukchi and Koryak, forming the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family, but it is now virtually extinct, the vast majority of ethnic Itelmens being native speakers of Russian. Native peoples of Kamchatka (Itelmen, Ainu, Koryaks, and Chuvans), collectively referred to as Kamchadals, had a substantial hunter-gatherer and fishing society with up to fifty thousand natives inhabiting the peninsula before they were decimated during the Russian conquest, both by brutal repressions of the rebellions of locals and by a major smallpox epidemic, in the 18th century. So much intermarriage took place between the natives and the Cossacks that Kamchadal now refers to the majority mixed population, while the term Itelmens became reserved for persistent speakers of the Itelmen language. By 1993, there...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Kamczadałka, CC BY-SA 3.0