Chukchi people
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Chukchi | |
|---|---|
| Total population | 15,000[citation needed] |
| Regions with significant populations | Russia |
| Language | Russian, Chukchi |
| Religion | Shamanism, Russian Orthodoxy |
| Related ethnic groups | other Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples |
Chukchi, or Chukchee (Russian: чу́кчи (plural), чукча (singular)) are an indigenous people inhabiting the Chukchi Peninsula and the shores of the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea in the Russian Far East. They speak the Chukchi language. The Chukchi originated from the people living around the Okhotsk Sea.
The majority of Chukchi reside within Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, but some also reside in the neighboring Sakha Republic to the west, Magadan Oblast to the southwest, and Koryak Autonomous Okrug to the south. Some Chukchi also reside in other parts of Russia, as well as in Europe and North America. The total number of Chukchi in the world is slightly over 15,000.
The Chukchi are traditionally divided into the Maritime Chukchi, who had settled homes on the coast and lived primarily from sea mammal hunting, and the Reindeer Chukchi, who nomadised in the inland tundra region with their herds of reindeer. The Russian name "Chukchi" is derived from the Chukchi word Chauchu ("rich in reindeer"), which was used by the 'Reindeer Chukchi' to distinguish themselves from the 'Maritime Chukchi,' called Anqallyt ("the sea people").
Beginning in the 1920s, the Soviets organized the economic activities of both coastal and inland Chukchi and eventually established 28 collectively run, state-owned enterprises in Chukotka. All of these were based on reindeer herding, with the addition of sea mammal hunting in the coastal areas. Chukchi were educated in Soviet schools and today are almost 100% literate and fluent in the Russian language. Only a portion of them today work directly in reindeer herding or sea mammal hunting. Several Chukchi have university degrees, with some becoming poets, writers, politicians, teachers, and doctors.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state-run farms were reorganized and nominally privatized. This process was ultimately destructive to the village-based economy in Chukotka, and the region has still not fully recovered. Many rural Chukchi, as well as Russians in Chukotka's villages, have survived in recent years only with the help of direct humanitarian aid.
In Chukchi religion, every object, whether animate or inanimate, is assigned a spirit. This spirit can be either harmful or benifitial. Chukchi religious practices were prohibited by the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
The Chukchi stereotype is a source of numerous Russian jokes, due to their leaning towards rural life. Contemporary Chukchis also tell jokes about Russians and other ethnic groups.
It is popularly thought that an ancient Chukchi custom dictates that if a man should take in a traveler for the night, he should "lend" the traveler his wife for the night as well as part of his hospitality. This impression probably has more to do with the imagination of the observer than with actual Chukchi practices. Since Chukchi men did at one time frequently travel long distances in order to engage in trade, many of them did establish special reciprocal partnerships with families in distant settlements that they regularly visited and overnighted with. This could involve intimate relations with the wife in a partner family, and could even result in a man having children by another woman living in a distant village, while his own wife might have a child by the husband in his partner family. Thus, this was not a matter of "lending" one's wife to any traveler who stopped for the night, but rather of establishing a close, reciprocal relationship with a particular family over a long period of time. While contemporary Chukchi do not continue this practice (at least not in any systematic way - those old travel patterns were disrupted by Soviet collectivization), there are living Chukchis who suspect they have siblings in other parts of the region as a result of this former practice.
[edit] References
- Patty A. Gray, 2005, The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North (Cambridge)
- Anna Kerttula, 2000, Antler on the Sea (Cornell University Press)
- Waldemar Bogoras, 1909, The Chukchee (Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History)
- The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire
- All Things Arctic
