Itelmens
An Itelmen (1862)
|
|
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (3,193 (2010 census)) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Russia: Kamchatka Krai | |
 Russia
|
3,193 |
 Ukraine
|
18 |
| Languages | |
| Itelmen, Russian | |
| Religion | |
| Polytheism, Shamanism, Russian Orthodoxy | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Chukchi, Koryaks | |
The Itelmen, sometimes known as Kamchadal, are an ethnic group who are the original inhabitants living on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. The Itelmen language (ethnonym: Itelmen) 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. A. P. Volodin has published a grammar of the Itelmen language.
The Itelmen had a substantial hunter-gatherer and fishing society with up to fifty thousand natives inhabiting the peninsula before they were decimated by the Cossack conquest in the 18th century.
So much intermarriage took place between the natives and the Cossacks that Kamchadal now refers to the majority mixed population, and the term Itelmens at some point became reserved for persisting speakers of the Itelmen language. By 1993, there were less than 100 elderly speakers of the language left, but some 2,400 people considered themselves ethnic Itelmen in the 1989 census. By 2002, this number had risen to 3,180, and there are attempts at reviving the language. According to the 2010 census, there were 3,193 Itelmen in Russia.
Ethnographic maps shows the Itlemens as residing primarily in the valley of the Kamchatka River in the middle of the peninsula. One of the few sources describing the Itelmen prior to total assimilation with the Russians is that of Georg Wilhelm Steller, who accompanied Vitus Bering on his Great Northern Expedition (Second Expedition to Kamchatka).
Itelmen tended to settle along the various rivers of the Kamchatka Peninsula. At the time of the arrival of the first Cossacks to the peninsula, in the early 1650s, villages numbered between 200 and 300 residents, a number which had dwindled to 40 or 50 at most by the time of the composition of Steller’s account in 1744. Each village was centered around a single patriarchal household. Generally, young men seeking marriage joined the village of their wife. When a village became too large to sustain itself, it was divided and a portion of the villagers would create a settlement at another point along the same river. Steller describes a great variation of dialects from river to river, as the Itelmen predominantly communicated with communities which shared the river.
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Wikipedia