A Short History of the Yukaghir from their "Discovery" by the Sakha and, Subsequently, the Russians

The Yukaghirs are the oldest of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. This arctic culture, based on wild reindeer hunting and fishing, dates, according to archaeologists, to the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE.

In the 17th century, the Yukaghir still occupied vast territories in the north-east of Siberia, from the Lena River to the Anadyr (from the west to the east) and from the arctic shore to the upper reaches of the Yana, Indigirka and Kolyma rivers (from the north to the south). Sakha legends attest to the presence of many Yukaghir in the past.

In the first part of the 17th century, the Sakha, followed closely by the Russians, began to expand in to Yukaghir territory. This invasion brought with it the extermination of entire tribes and a general retreat of the survivors into less important areas: the upper reaches of the Omolon, Indigirka, Alazeya and Kolyma rivers, and along the Anadyr and the Korkodon rivers. [in the area centred on about 150° E, 65° N]

Yukaghir legends and folklore tell of this simultaneous invasion of the Russians and the Sakha, beginning an age of decline and ethnocide for the Yukaghir.

The Sakha Invasion

The expansion of the Sakha into peripheral regions was due, in large part, to the punitive expeditions launched by the Cossaks against the Yakut batallions at the end of the revolts. Reaching new territory, the Sakha flung themselves against the inhabitants they found there and managed to force them to retreat, a result of their better arms and greater numbers. The Russians who followed them had only to absorb the territories liberated from their first occupants.

The Russian Conquest

From 1638, the Cossacks begin the conquest of the north-west of Siberia. Along the Yana the people (Tungus) were subjugated without much difficulty. In revenge, on the Indigirka, the Russians threw themselves against the hostility of the Yukaghir clans, who took flight, nevertheless, frightened by the Russian artillery. Subjugated by force, the Yukaghirs suffered heavy casualties. In 1643, the Cossak Semion Dheznev led his first campaign against the Yukaghir of the Alazeya. He encountered a heavy resistance to "yasakisation" [or tribute paying]. On the Kolyma, the Yukaghir were beaten in the course of bloody combat. Because of their extreme dispersal, the different Yukaghir clans were unable to offer effective resistance to the Russians. They were subjugated one after the other.

In 1649, Dheznev arrived in the upper reaches of the Anadyr River. He imposed the yasak on the local peoples, the Anaouls, Khodynts, and Chuvan (Yukaghir tribes).

In 1650, a new detachment, led by M. Stadokhin, installed itself in the region and tried to extract the yasak a second time from the indigenous inhabitants. Hideous battles took place during the course of which whole tribes were massacred. The Anaouls were exterminated.

The Epidemics

Epidemics of smallpox and measles, new illnesses introduced by the Russians, also ravaged the non-immunized Yukaghir. Towards the end of the 17th century, there were still about 4,800 Yukaghir. In 1692-93, a smallpox epidemic caused many deaths.

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How Soviet Ideology Caused a Veritable Ethnocide of the Yukaghir

Original in French: http://yakoutie.free.fr/Youkaguirs/Sovietisyouk.html

The first years of Soviet power permitted a relative improvement in the general condition of the aboriginal peoples of the North, of Siberia and of the Far East after more than three centuries of colonial exploitation by the tsarist regime. For the first time in the history of humanity, a state adopted a policy of protectionism toward the ethnic minorities. This policy permitted, in the space of several years, the creation of administrative regions and local self-government structures for the indigenous peoples, literacy training with the creation of written languages for several of these oral peoples, and the construction of cultural bases (composed of a school, a kindergarden, an infirmary, a veterinary service, a meteorological station, and occasionally, a little Lenin museum), the basis of a system for training aboriginal administrators, etc....

From the 30s, a neo-colonial policy is put in place, hidden behind an internationalist and egalitarian facade. It is the beginning of a huge enterprise of the industrialization of the country, in the first instance of Siberia and the Great North. Collectivization, the "class struggle" (a hunt for shamans and for owners of large reindeer herds), education of nomad children in boarding schools, and the transformation of the kolkhozes into sovkhozes, accompanied by a campaign of liquidation of "villages without a future" and the relocation of the inhabitants of the tundra and taiga into scattered communities dominated by Russian speakers all had horrible, consequences, some disasterous for the aboriginal minorities. In fact, it took the form, on the one hand, of increasing uncertainty and impoverishment of groups of hunter-fishers and reindeer herders and, on the other, an acceleration of assimilation and intermarrying under conditions of cultural loss and imposed marginalization.

The Yukaghirs were, one might say, victims of ethnocide, for by the time Soviet policy favoured the renaissance of a good number of peoples, nothing was done to develop Yukaghir culture, which remained without a written language until 1982. The first Yukaghir writer and intellectual, Tekki Odulok, was shot by firing squad in 1937 for having dared to denounce the Tsarist regime as architects of the extermination of the Yukaghir.

Now a new generation of Yukaghir intellectuals has grown up, and writers, artists, poets have taken the destiny of their people in hand. Among them are, for example, the brothers Kurilov: Gavril Kurilov is, among other things, the author of the first Yukaghir alphabet and of a law on the Suktuul, a form of Yukaghir local self-government, adopted in 1998. In the villages where the last Yukaghir live, tentatives moves are being made to revitalize their ancient language, which only the elderly are able to speak fluently. In these villages, the schools assure children of instruction in Yukaghir language, history, culture and traditions.

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The Yukaghir: A People on the Edge of Extinction

Original in French: http://yakoutie.free.fr/Youkaguirs/Chiffresyouk.html

The Yukaghir, today, are among the most minor peoples in Russia. Very dispersed, it is only in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) that there remains a few knots of relatively compact settlement. The two last principal groups of Yukaghir are centred in the Kolyma region, in the north-east of Yakutia: in the Upper Kolyma, the descendendents of different clans of the taiga, hunters and fishers are clustered in the village of Nelemnoe, situated on the Yasachnaya River and at Zyryanka. In the Lower Kolyma, the descendents of the tundra, specialized in reindeer breeding, live at Andryushkino and at Kolymskoye. At Nelemnoe, as at Andryushkino, the Yukaghir live alongside Even, Russians and Sakha.

In the last census, held in 1989 in the USSR, 1142 people declared themselves as Yukaghir, of which
In the Sakha Republic : 534 people, among whom...

- 42,3% lived in the district of Nizhnekolymsk (Lower Kolyma),
- 34,8% lived in the district of Verkhnekolymsk (Upper Kolyma)
- 17,8% lived in the district of Allaikhovsk.

In Chukotka : 160 people.
In Magadan Oblast: 45 people.

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Yukaghir Legends about the Yakut and the Russians

Original in French:  http://yakoutie.free.fr/Youkaguirs/Legendyouka.html

The first time the Yukaghir saw Yakut warriors:

"Not far from the Adiyia, the Odul saw one day something they had never seen before and which, to them, seemed inexplicable: they saw white and black reindeer, lacking antlers, whose feet were round and the tail of such very long hairs that they touched the ground. These 'reindeer,' large like elk, were ridden by men armed with lances and iron swords, much deadlier than the lances and arrows of the Yukaghir, whose points were made of bone and stone. This spectacle paralyzed all those who saw it. These creatures with six legs, two heads, four eyes and a long tail, swore themselves to be human. They were also made of blood, bone and flesh. The Yukaghir, valiant defenders of their lands, intrepid warriors and without fear, did not attack upon this first encounter with these reindeer, that is to say the Yakut horses, thinking that they were the worse danger, and did not pay any attention to the riders. It was that which caused the defeat of the Yukaghir and the triumphant victory of the Yakut."

The first time the Yukaghir saw a Russian man:

It was a summer day at the mouth of the Korkodon, at the time when the leaves on the sorbiers were open, when the grasses in the fields had regrown, when the birds in the forest began to sing again... A small group of Odul lived there who ate the fish they caught in traps or on a line. One evening they saw a man on the river who travelled towards them, his face covered with hair, with a huge nose--like the bulge of a birch--and, instead of nostrils, two black holes like ermine burrows. This man, tall as a tree, had seen that some young girls danced, naked, on the bank in the shade of the forest, stopped and approached them, grabbed one of them, and dragged her into the forest. Seeing this, the men ran with their lances and arrows, killed him and then threw his corpse into the river saying: "Take him and carry him back to where ever it was that you brought him from!"

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On the Ethnonym "Yukaghir"

Original in French: http://yakoutie.free.fr/Youkaguirs/Ethnoyouk.html

The ethnonym "Yukaghir" is a word of Tungus origin meaning "the people of the ice."

It is the name that the Russians decided to use to refer to a group of tribes they encountered in the course of the conquest of the north-east of Siberia in the 17th century, in the regions of three large rivers of the North-East: the Yana, the Indigirka, and the Kolyma.

This name, given by the Russian colonizers, like those of the Eskimo for the Inuit, the Yakut for the Sakha, has, nevertheless, been adopted by these people who do not claim to any great extent their ancestral ethnonym...

In the beginning, the Yukaghir called themselves something else: "Odul" was the collective name for all the Yukaghir-speaking communities, which were thought, from the start, by the Russians as a single people, which many specialists now refute. According to them, in the past there were about ten Yukaghir peoples (the Chuvan, the Khodynt, the Alais, the Omok, etc.), but today only two remain: the Odul at Nelemnoe, and the Vadul at Andryushkino.

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