Evesel

The Evesel are the coastal Evens, the Tungus people whose self-name in the plural is evesel and whom their Yakut neighbours called Lamut, the sea people. Their grounds stretched along the Sea of Okhotsk from the Taui and Yana bays eastward toward Gizhiga.

Seventeenth-century Russian sources knew them as the Okhotsk reindeer Tungus: nomadic herders who moved with their reindeer between tundra and coast, where they also fished and hunted seals. Ivan Moskvitin heard of Tungus clans on the Taui in 1639, and Mikhail Stadukhin built the Tauisk ostrog at the river mouth in 1653 to collect their fur tribute.

Orthodox missionaries worked among them from the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth the Evens were counted among the most thoroughly Christianized peoples of the Russian North, though shamanist customs survived.