Koryak

The Koryaks are the indigenous people north of Kamchatka, from the Bering Sea coast and Anadyr basin in the north to Tigil in the south, their language belonging with Chukchi to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. They follow two ways of life: coastal Nemelan, village dwellers fishing and hunting sea mammals, and inland Chaucu, reindeer-rich herders of the tundra.

Their ancestors shaped the first-millennium Okhotsk culture. The name Koryak, a neighboring word for reindeer people, entered records with Vladimir Atlasov's 1695 Kamchatka campaigns.

Warfare ran from 1708 to 1715, and in 1745 reindeer Koryaks rose with Chukchi and Yukaghir, crushed only in 1757. War and the smallpox epidemic of 1769 to 1770 cut their numbers from ten or eleven thousand in 1700 to four thousand eight hundred by 1800; peace, trade and Russian settlement then slowly transformed their life.