Yukaghir

The Kolyma Yukaghirs are the Yukaghir clans of the Kolyma River basin in northeast Siberia, heirs of the Neolithic Ymyyakhtakh culture. They lived by fishing, hunting wild reindeer and elk and breeding reindeer for transport, and spoke the Kolyma, or Odul, variant of Yukaghir, whose wider kinship remains uncertain.

At Russian contact their largest tribe was the Omoki of the lower Kolyma and Omolon, six hundred and twenty people in eleven clans in 1659; the word omok itself means clan or tribe. Tribute, intertribal wars and epidemics reduced them to fifty-four people by 1693.

The upper-Kolyma Kogime, the clan of the Great Raven, fared better, and present-day Upper Kolyma Yukaghirs trace their descent chiefly from them. In the colonial centuries many Kolyma Yukaghirs merged into Yakut, Even and Russian communities, while clan shamanism and the old nomadic hunting life lingered on.