Chuvan

The Chuvan were a Yukaghir people of the Anadyr basin, roaming the upper tributaries of the Anadyr and the Anyuy in present-day Chukotka. They lived by hunting, fishing and reindeer breeding and spoke their own Yukaghir tongue, of which a word list was taken down in 1821.

In the eighteenth century Chukchi raids broke their clan lands: one part of the people retreated west to the Kolyma, where they gradually adopted Russian speech and ways, while the rest were absorbed by the Koryaks and Chukchi. Mountain and coastal Chuvan groups kept their identity in the Anadyr tundra into the nineteenth century.