Kerek

The Kerek are a small Chukotko-Kamchatkan seafaring people whose autonym, angqalghakku, means seaside people. Their villages dotted the Bering Sea coast from the Anadyr estuary south to the Opuka. Archaeologists trace an ancient Kerek culture on this coast to about 500 BC.

They lived from sea-mammal hunting and fishing, kept sled dogs and only the southern clans herded a few reindeer, remaining animists untouched by Christianity. During the Chukchi-Koryak wars of the eighteenth century the Kerek were caught between both sides, their men killed and women and children carried off; epidemics later in the century reduced them to a remnant, whom nineteenth-century observers usually classed with the Koryaks or the Chukchi.