Lamutk

The Lamutk take their name from the Lamuts, the old Russian and Yakut name for the Even people: lamu meant the Okhotsk Sea in the Tungusic languages, so the Lamuts were the people of the seaboard.

Related to the Evenki and speaking the Tungusic Even language, they roamed east of the Lena to the Okhotsk coast, having spread from the Baikal region in the first millennium and absorbed Yukaghir groups along the way.

Seventeenth-century Russian records divide them into the Okhotsk reindeer Tungus, or Lamut proper, and other clans, alongside sedentary fishing groups. Nomadic reindeer herders who used their animals mainly for transport, they also hunted, trapped and fished from conical skin tents. Cossack fur-tribute collection drew them into the Russian orbit from the 1600s, and by the nineteenth century most Lamuts were formally Orthodox Christians while retaining shamanic practices.