The Indians of Russia

The term “Indian” for native North Americans is of course wildly inappropriate, based on a 500-year-old error in geography, but the term is now thoroughly embedded in language and literature. Americans tend to have a provincial viewpoint that “Indians” are limited to the United States, or even to the American West. Those with a broader perspective extend the appelation to native Canadians, Mesoamericans, and South Americans.

Now consider Russia, the ancestral home of the peoples who in prehistoric time migrated to the New World.  The picture above comes from a photoset depicting the Itelmen inhabiting the Kamchatka peninsula in northeast Russia.  Since the eighteenth century there has been extensive intermarriage with Cossacks, so that the term Kamchadal is now used for the resultant mixed population, but some ethnic Itelmen are making a valiant effort to preserve their culture and language.

Like Native Americans, the aboriginal Itelmen thrived on the immense salmon runs of the North Pacific; their dwellings and religious beliefs also have strong parallels with those of Native Americans.  It’s not clear whether the dress and adornments exhibited in the photoessay reflect a parallel cultural evolution, or whether the modern Itelmen have back-adapted the trappings of their more well-known North American counterparts.

Link to English Russia photoessay.  More info here and here.