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The Chukchi, or Chukchee (, ḷygʺoravètḷʹèt, o'ravètḷʹèt), are a Siberian ethnic group native to the Chukchi Peninsula, the shores of the Chukchi Sea and the Bering Sea region of the Arctic Ocean all within modern Russia. They speak the Chukchi language. The Chukchi originated from the people living around the Okhotsk Sea.
According to several studies on genomic research conducted from 2014 to 2018, the Chukchi are the closest Asian relatives of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, as such they are descendants of the settlers of Beringia who remained on the Russian side when the sea levels rose.
The majority of Chukchi reside within Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, but some also reside in the neighboring Sakha Republic to the west, Magadan Oblast to the southwest, and Kamchatka Krai to the south. Some Chukchi also reside in other parts of Russia, as well as in Europe and North America. The total number of Chukchi in the world slightly exceeds 16,000.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called the Chukchi "tribes without rulers". They often lacked formal political structures, but had a formal cosmic hierarchy.
Early Russian ethnographers observed that Chukchi shamans were said to be called by spirits, dreams, or omens, and were believed to be capable of flight, exorcism, and healing. Some shamans were called by mystical forces to engage in a form of ritualized homosexual relations with other men. This ritual typically involved a gender change through a religious ceremony that, it was believed, transformed his genitalia into that of a female. After the change, he might dress in women's clothing and behave in feminine ways. He was then believed to "lose" masculine traits like hunting skill, and instead take on "feminine" traits, like healing and nurturing. Some of these shamans would take male lovers, and could even marry other men, and the shaman would take on a "wifely" role. (1992). 9780824072278, Garland Pub. ISBN 9780824072278 (1987). 9780029094808, Macmillan. ISBN 9780029094808
Beginning in the 1920s, the Soviet Union organized the economic activities of both coastal and inland Chukchi and eventually established 28 collectively run, state-owned enterprises in Chukotka. All of these were based on reindeer herding, with the addition of sea mammal hunting and walrus ivory carving in the coastal areas. Chukchi were educated in Soviet schools and today are almost 100% literate and fluent in the Russian language. Only a portion of them today work directly in reindeer herding or sea mammal hunting, and continue to live a nomadic lifestyle in yaranga tents.
The Chukchi were generally ignored for the next fifty years because they were warlike and did not provide furs or other valuable commodities to tax. Armed skirmishes flared up around 1700 when the Russians began operating in the Kamchatka Peninsula and needed to protect their communications from the Chukchi and Koryaks. The first attempt to conquer them was made in 1701. Other expeditions were sent out in 1708, 1709 and 1711 with considerable bloodshed but little success and unable to eliminate the local population on the large territory. War was renewed in 1729, when the Chukchi defeated an expedition from Okhotsk and killed its commander. Command passed to Major Dmitry Pavlutsky, who adopted scorched earth, burning, driving off reindeer, killing men and capturing women and children.
In 1742, the government at Saint Petersburg ordered another war in which the Chukchi and Koryak were to be "totally extirpated". The war (1744–47) was conducted with similar brutality and ended when Pavlutsky was killed in March 1747. It is said that the Chukchi kept his head as a trophy for several years. The Russians waged war again in the 1750s, but some Chukchi did survive these extermination plans in the very far northeast.
In 1762, when Catherine the Great was crowned, Saint Petersburg adopted a different policy. Maintaining the fort at Anadyrsk had cost some 1,380,000 rubles, but the area had returned only 29,150 rubles in taxes, so the government abandoned Anadyrsk in 1764. The Chukchi, no longer attacked by the Russian Empire, began to trade peacefully with the Russians. From 1788, they participated in an annual trade fair on the lower Kolyma. Another was established in 1775 on the Angarka, a tributary of the Bolshoy Anyuy. This trade declined in the late 19th century when American whalers and others began landing goods on the coast.
The first Christian missions from the Eastern Orthodox Church entered Chukchi territory some time after 1815. The strategy worked, and trade flourished between the Cossacks and the Chukchi. As the annual trade fairs where goods were exchanged continued, a common language between the two peoples was spoken. The natives, however, never paid yasak (a fur tribute), and their status as subjects was little more than a formality. The formal annexation of the Chukotka Peninsula did not happen until much later, during the time of the Soviet Union.
Population estimates from Forsyth:
Chukchi jokes are a staple of Soviet humorJuha Janhunen, "Gendai Sobieto shakai no minshuu-denshoo to shite no Chukuchi-jooku." ("Chukchee jokes as a form of modern Soviet folklore", transl. by Hiroshi Shoji). – Kotoba-asobi no minzokushi. Ed. by EGuchi Kazuhisa. Tokyo 1990, 377–385, where they are depicted as primitive, uncivilized, and simple-minded, but clever in their own way. Бурыкин А.А., Анекдоты о чукчах как социокультурное явление in: Анекдот как феномен культуры. Материалы круглого стола 16 ноября 2002 г. СПб.: Санкт-Петербургское философское общество, 2002. С.64–70(retrieved March 10, 2015)
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state-run farms were reorganized and nominally privatized. This process was ultimately destructive to the village-based economy in Chukotka. The region has still not fully recovered. Many rural Chukchi, as well as Russians in Chukotka's villages, have survived in recent years only with the help of direct humanitarian aid. Some Chukchi have attained university degrees, becoming poets, writers, politicians, teachers and doctors.
In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2022, the Chukchis have been reported as one of Russia's ethnic minority groups suffering from a disproportionally large casualty rate among Russian forces.
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