Nivkh People - History

History

The Sakhalin Nivkhs populated the island during the Late Pleistocene period, when the island was connected to the Continent of Asia via the exposed Strait of Tartary. When the ice age receded, the oceans rose and the Nivkh were split into two groups. The earliest mention of the Nivkh in history is believed to be a 12th-century Chinese chronicle, referring to a people called Gilyemi (Chinese: 吉列迷 Jílièmí), who were in contact with the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty of China. In 1643, Vassili Poyarkov was the first Russian to write of the Nivkh, calling them Gilyak, a Tungus exonym, by which they would be referred until the 1920s.

Nivkh lands extended along the northern coast of Manchuria from the Russian fortress at Tugur, eastward to the mouth of the Amur at Nikolayevsk, then south through the Strait of Tartary as far as De Castries Bay.

For many centuries, the Nivkh were tributary to the Manchu Empire. After the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, they functioned as intermediaries between the Russians, Manchu and Japanese, the latter via their vassal, the Ainu. Early contact with Ainu people from southern Sakhalin was generally hostile, although trade between the two was apparent.

The Nivkh suffered severely from the Cossack conquest and imposition of the Tsarist Russians; they called the latter kinrsh (devils). The Russian Empire gained complete control over Nivkh lands after the Treaty of Aigun 1858 and the Treaty of Peking 1860. The Russians established a penal colony on Sakhalin, which operated from 1857 to 1906. They transported numerous Russian criminal and political exiles there, including Lev Shternberg, an important early ethnographer of the Nivkh. The Nivkh were soon outnumbered; they were sometimes employed as prison guards and to track escaped convicts. The Nivkh suffered epidemics of smallpox, plague, and Influenza, brought by the foreign immigrants and spread in the crowded, unsanitary prison environment.

Though the Japanese Empire never controlled the northern part of Sakhalin, Japan and Russia jointly ruled the island as part of the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda. From the 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg until the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, Russia governed all of Saxalin. From 1905 to 1945, Saxalin was partitioned between Russia and Japan along the 50th N parallel. Russia allowed Japanese entrepreneur fishermen were allowed in Nivkh lands from the 1880s until their 1948 expulsion. The Russian Priamur Governor-Generalship had difficulty finding Russian labor and allowed Japanese and Nivkh fishermen to develop the area, though they were heavily taxed. Russian authorities prevented the Nivkh from fishing in prior coastal and river systems via bans and high taxes from cached fish. The first of many incidents of over-exploitation of fisheries by the Japanese (and latter the Russians) on the Tartar Strait and lower Amur occurred in 1898. It drove many Nivkh peoples into starvation or they had to import expensive foreign – Russian – foods.

Russia underwent the Bolshevik Revolution forming the Soviet Union in 1922. The new government altered prior Russian Imperial polices towards the Nivkh that were in line with communist ideology. Soviet officials embraced the autonym Nivkh to replace the old term Gilyak, as a hallmark for new native self-determination. A brief Autonomous Okrug was created for the Nivkh. The government granted them extensive fishing rights, which were not rescinded until the 1960s. But, other Soviet policies proved devastating. The Nivkh were forced into mass agricultural and industrial labor collectives called kolkhoz. Nivkh fishermen were difficult to convert to agricultural practices because of their belief that ploughing the earth was a sin. The Nivkh were soon working and living as a second-class minority group among the massive Russian labor force.

These collectives irrevocably altered the life style of the Nivkh. The traditional hunter-gathering lifestyle disappeared. Soviet authorities showcased the Nivkh as a 'model' nation for a culture quickly transforming from the Neolithic age to a socialist industrial model. They banned the use of the Nivkh language from schools and the public square. The Russian language was mandated and russification of the Nivkh accelerated. Many Nivkh stories, beliefs, and clan ties were forgotten by new generations. From 1945 to 1948, many Nivkh, as well as half of the Oroks and all of the Sakhalin Ainu, who had been living under Japanese jurisdiction in the southern half of Sakhalin, were forced to move to Japan along with the ethnic Japanese settlers. Many indigenous people would later return to the area.

Dr. Chuner Taksami, an anthropologist, is considered the first modern Nivkh literary figure and supporter of Siberian rights. In the post-Soviet Russian commonwealth of nations, the Nivkh have fared better than the Ainu or the Itelmens, but worse than the Chukchi or the Tuvans. The Soviet government in 1962 resettled many of the Nivkh into fewer, denser settlements, such that Sakhalin settlements had been reduced from 82 to 13 by 1986. This relocation was accomplished via the Soviet collectives that the Nivkh had become so dependent on. The closure of state-funded amenities such as a school or electricity generator prompted citizenry to move into government-preferred settlements.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Kolkhoz collectives were abandoned. The Nivkh were dependent on the state-funded collectives, and with their dissolution, rapid economic hardship ensued for the already poor populace. At present, the Nivkh living in the North of Sakhalin island see their future threatened by the giant offshore oil extraction projects known as Sakhalin-I and Sakhalin-II, operated by foreign Western firms. Since January 2005, the Nivkh, led by their elected leader Alexey Limanzo, have engaged in non-violent protest actions, demanding an independent ethnological assessment of Shell's and Exxon's plans. Solidarity actions have been staged in Moscow, New York and later in Berlin. The monthly Nivkh newspaper, Nivkh Dif, established in 1990, is published using the west-Sakhalin dialect and is headquartered in the village of Nekrasovka.