Itelmen

The Itelmens are the indigenous people of the Kamchatka Peninsula, whose Itelmen language belongs, with Chukchi and Koryak, to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. They settled the peninsula's river valleys, above all the Kamchatka River, living by salmon fishing, sea-mammal hunting and gathering in villages of a few hundred around patriarchal households, and each river basin had its own dialect.

Russian Cossacks reached Kamchatka in the early 1650s, and annexation brought brutal suppression of revolts and an eighteenth-century smallpox epidemic that cut the native population sharply. The naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, with Vitus Bering's second Kamchatka expedition, recorded their customs in the 1740s, when villages had already shrunk to a few dozen inhabitants.

Intermarriage with Cossacks produced the mixed, Russian-speaking Kamchadal population, and the name Itelmen came to mean those who kept the old language.