Kamchadals
The Kamchadals ( Russian камчадалы ) belong to the indigenous peoples of the Russian Far East .
The first census of the Soviet Union in 1926 showed 4,216 people with the ethnicity (commonly referred to as "nationality" in Russian) "Kamtschadale". As an independent ethnic group, they then disappeared until the 2002 census of the Russian Federation, in which 2293 members were counted. In the 2010 census, 1927 people were recorded as Kamschadals. The majority of them live in the Kamchatka region (2010: 1,551 people), a minority in the Magadan Oblast (2010: 280 people). The Kamchadals live mainly in the places Klyuchi , Milkowo , Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Ust-Kamchatsk .
Language and culture
The Kamchadals are a mixed ethnicity of native inhabitants of the region ( Itelmen , Koryak , Tschuwanen ) and Russians . They speak Russian as their mother tongue (all Kamschadals in the Kamchatka region stated in the census that they speak Russian, and only a few also other languages such as Itelmenian ). The Kamtschadals with religious affiliations are Orthodox Christians .
The Kamchadals traditionally make their living from fishing, fur hunting and fur trading as well as agriculture (mainly vegetable growing and dairy farming).
Because they have culturally adopted quite a few customs of the Itelmen, they are sometimes mistakenly classified as the same or as a subgroup of the Itelmen. This is also a result of the fact that, after the Russian colonization of Kamchatka in the 18th century, the entire indigenous population of the peninsula, predominantly Itelmen, was referred to as "Kamchadals" in Russian. The current meaning of the term only developed later, up to the 19th century, on the Okhotsk coast of Kamchatka, where today only a few Kamchatka live.
Web links
- Article Kamtschadalen in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)