Chukchi

The Chukchi are aboriginals of the Chukchi Peninsula and the Arctic and Bering shores of far northeastern Siberia, whose ancestors lived on the Chukotka coast since the turn of the third millennium BC. Their self-name Luoravetlan means genuine people; they divide into settled Maritime Chukchi hunting seal and walrus, and nomadic Reindeer Chukchi of the inland tundra, the Russian name coming from their word for rich reindeer owners.

Russians reached the Kolyma in 1643 and built Anadyrsk in 1649, but early eighteenth-century expeditions against them failed. Major Dmitry Pavlutsky ravaged their camps from the 1730s; the extermination war of 1744 to 1747 ended with his 1747 death, his head kept as a trophy.

After conquest failed the empire abandoned Anadyrsk in 1764; annual Anyuy fairs from 1775 and Kolyma fairs from 1788 drew them into the fur economy without subjecting them.