Yupighyt

The Yupighyt, or Siberian Yupik, call themselves Yupiget, meaning “true people”, and lived in coastal villages along the Chukchi Peninsula facing the Bering Strait, with related communities on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. Their Central Siberian Yupik language belongs to the Eskimo–Aleut family, and anthropologists regard them as descendants of Yupik groups who crossed back from Alaska into Siberia.

They hunted walrus, seal and whale, lived in dome-shaped yaranga dwellings and were organized into patrilineal clans and territorial tribes named after ancestral villages.

For centuries they traded across the Bering Strait with Alaskan natives, and from the early 1700s also with Russian seaborne traders, exchanging furs and walrus ivory while keeping their hunting grounds on the eastern Chukchi shore.