Malemiut

The Malemiut, or Malimiut, are an Iñupiaq people of the northern Seward Peninsula and the Kotzebue Sound shore, whose historic villages included Koyuk, Shaktolik and the summer gathering place of Qikiqtaġruk. They speak the Malimiutun dialect of Iñupiaq and lived by coastal seal and beluga hunting and by fishing the rivers that drain into the sound.

Qikiqtaġruk had long served as a trade fair visited even by peoples from the Asian side of the Bering Strait. The Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue surveyed the sound in 1818, after which the Malemiut became increasingly drawn into the Russian fur trade of northwestern Alaska.