Nivkh

The Nivkh are the indigenous people of northern Sakhalin and the lower Amur. They are believed to descend from a microlithic people who reached the Amur region from Transbaikal, and their tongue is a language isolate. Semi-nomadic hunters and fishers, they held a winter Bear Festival, in which a bear raised by the village was ceremonially feasted and sacrificed.

A twelfth-century Chinese chronicle records them as the Jiliemi; from 1263 they were allied to the Mongols against the Ainu until peace in 1308. Under the Ming their headmen brought sable tribute to the Nurgan commission after 1409; the Qing knew them as the Feiyaka.

The Cossack Vassili Poyarkov described them to Russians in 1643 as Gilyak. After the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 they became intermediaries between the Manchu, Russian and Japanese worlds.