"The Coriacs were a very peculiar pure-blood people who lived here for 15,000 years and were not officially recognized until more than two hundred years ago, and in order to protect their land, they took up bows and arrows and bayonets to fight the invaders, and even in order to maintain the fighting power of the group, they asked teenagers to fight brown bears to prove their adulthood."
In 1697, when Atlasov, an emissary of Tsar Peter the Great, landed on the Kamchatka Peninsula, he thought he had broken into the Territory of the Mongols: these people had various tattoos on their faces, backs, and arms, and were small but very lean, yellow-skinned, flat-skinned, tented, fur-clad, reindeer and fishing for a living. But as he learned more, Atrasov came to understand that this was a new people that had never been recorded in Tsarist Russia, so he named it "Korak", which means "reindeer" in The Chukchi language.
Despite Russia's claim that "the origin of the Corillaks is unknown", anthropologists still give "only two possible" explanations, one is that during the Ice Age (about 12,000 years ago) Eurasia and North America were connected by land bridges or ice surfaces, and the ancestors of the Corians, indians, crossed the sea to reach the Kamchatka Peninsula; the other possibility is that the ancestors of the Corians may have been nomadic peoples of northern Asia, who followed the migration route of reindeer to the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The Soviet ethnographies "Yabei" and "Northern Jiangsu", published in 1934, also described that the Kolyak people lived in groups of clans, ranging from as few as twenty or thirty people to hundreds of people, and every summer gathered on the coastline and fished along the ancient Chinese (Tang Dynasty) fishermen to barter, exchange venison and bear deer skins for cloth salt oil, and so on.
In fact, the Tang Dynasty has long referred to the Kamchatka Peninsula as the "Land of Drifting Ghosts", and the "Tale of Tang Shu Dongyi" contains that "the Kingdom of Liu Ghosts" is fifteen thousand miles away from Chang'an, blocking the sea on three sides and connecting land on one side; the "Northeast Border Defense Essentials" is more detailed: in the fourteenth year of Zhenguan (640 AD), the "Liu Ghost Kingdom" sent three tributes and knights; in the fourteenth year of the new century (725 AD), the Governor of Heishui was set up, and the inland governor Shi Shi was sent to assist in the governance of the "Liu Ghost Country".
According to the New Book of Tang Dynasty, The Biography of the New Book of Tatars, Changshi, who was sent to assist the "Ghost Nation", set off from Boli (near the Black Blind Island) for 30 days to the other mouth of the Heilongjiang River, and then crossed the Sea of Okhotsk for another 15 days before landing on the Kamchatka Peninsula. From the foregoing, it can be concluded that the Chinese discovered and used the large arc route of Vladivostok, kuril islands and Kamchatka Peninsula as early as 1300 years ago, a full thousand years before the Russians.
Due to the ice and snow of the "ghost country" for many years (volcanic eruptions), the local agricultural and economic and trade conditions, and the Qing court's short-sightedness and direct closure of the country, so that Tsarist Russia was able to successfully encroach on the vast land in the Far East, and even when Tsarist Russia changed the "ghost country" to "Kamchatka Province", the Japanese shogunate could not see it and accused the "dove occupying the magpie's nest", but the Qing court pretended not to know silence, resulting in the indigenous Koriaks who had lived on the peninsula for ten thousand years being either killed or enslaved by the Russian expeditionary force, and finally disappeared 90% of the population because of a smallpox virus.
At this point, the Koryaks had to submit to Tsarist rule, some of the clans were forced to intermarry with Russian immigrants, giving birth to a new ethnic group "Itelmen", only the remaining coastal clans are still resisting the Russians, and even refuse to marry foreign tribes in order to preserve the purity of blood, and now it is this part of the Koryaks who negotiate land disputes with the Russian Federation.
The Guide said: The Koryaks were regarded by the Russian Federation as an "unsociable and warlike Gentile people" because they did not like to have contact with other ethnic groups, did not want to learn Russian, and did not allow the Russian Federation to develop their lands, so they could only be "Gentiles" and not "natives".
This statement was agreed by the Koryak linguist Zokova introduced by the guide, as a rare Kolyak university student, Zokova chose to study her own language, relying on scattered historical materials and records, she spent 5 years visiting thousands of indigenous people, compiling 5 dialect versions, a total of 5,000 words of the "Korillak Dictionary", closer to the Soviet era compilation of the "Nimilan-Russian Dictionary" (Korillak was renamed Nimilan), and also published the first edition of the Koryak language "Korillak Dictionary" Riddles, Poems and Festivals".
Zakova told me that the existing 14,000 Kolyaks can be divided into two categories, about 8,000 people living in towns, although they are accustomed to intermarrying with their own people, but the original shamanic beliefs have been changed to Orthodox, the languages learned are basically Russian, and only some of the elderly still insist on using Korillak. The remaining 6,000 people are scattered in hundreds of coastal and river bends on the peninsula, they are only foreign festivals, still use their own language and customs, in order to maintain the fighting power of the younger generations, 10-15 years old teenagers must learn to fish reindeer, some tribes even require teenagers to snatch salmon from the mouth of brown bears, and bring salmon with brown bear tooth marks back to the tribe to be recognized as "warriors".
The elders will train teenagers to fight with bear deer around the New Year's Festival, until they learn to dismember reindeer with one hand and break the deerskin rope with two fingers before entering the actual combat link, which is also the main reason why the Koryaks are described as a "belligerent nation" by the Russian Federation.
So why are the Corillacs so belligerent? In response to my question, Zorkova replied solemnly: The Koryaks are not belligerent, they are only protecting their land and their people.
Originally, the Kamchatka Peninsula had been listed as a "bitter cold place" until the 20th century, and both the Qing court and the Tsar regarded it as "not suitable for a long time", but the Koriaks, who had long been accustomed to the climate of the peninsula, created another "living method", they reindeer in the plain meadows in the summer, waited for the late autumn and early winter to go to sea or fish along the river, cooled down and locked the reindeer in shacks for the winter, relying on the harvest and venison to survive the winter and then come out to come out, although life is hard, but also unrestrained reproduction to this day.
Until the Tsarist Russia brought chukchi, Cossacks and other far Eastern foreign races, the invaders not only robbed the grass, rivers and coasts, but also sneaked into the villages of the Koriaks every winter to steal deer, the natives at first chose to rest in peace, but did not expect these people to become more and more arrogant, and even blatant robbery, intolerable to begin to resist.
To this day, however, these foreigners, with the support of the Russian Federation, still go their own way, occupying the section of the salmon migration river to prevent the indigenous people from fishing, and in order to protect the ecology, they have illegally fished salmon for high-priced caviar. Outside of salmon season, the Chukchi will also block the traffic intersections of various villages and towns to collect "tolls", and the Russian Federation is even more so, as long as the oil and gas survey is almost all forcibly developed, although no specific reserves are announced, but according to the act of laying pipelines, the reserves should be considerable.
When the Russian Federation announced that the per capita annual income of Petropavlovsk, the capital of the Kamchatka Peninsula, was about 350,000-400,000 rubles, the per capita annual income of the indigenous people living in the remote area was less than 250,000 yuan, equivalent to a monthly salary of 2,000 yuan, while the Kamchatka Peninsula could only be connected to the outside world by air and sea, and the local prices were naturally not low, except for seafood, jam and meat products, the prices of most of the necessities of life were comparable to Japan.
In order to reduce the cost of living, Korillac women will occasionally receive tourists, selling deerskin coats, shoes and hats, etc. to supplement their livelihoods, because of the national legend that "wood fire can avoid unclean things", the local natives rarely buy fuel, burn wood and hay for heating and cooking, wear special fishskin thin clothes in summer, and change into full sets of deerskin or bearskin clothing in winter, and the nomadic reindeer Koriaks still use tents as their main residence, and will return to fixed villages and towns for the winter after cooling.
According to the tourism data of the Russian Federation, about 70,000 foreign tourists traveled to the indigenous activity area in 2018, and the women of Korillak gradually began to "stay behind", they specially sold seafood in the places where tourists concentrated, mainly various salmon, the price was eye-popping, and in the peak season, it sold only 50 rubles per kilogram, or 4 yuan.
Interestingly, the natives would sell caviar in subdivisions, namely pink, saffron, chinook, silver, red, and orange, according to the guide, the more expensive the caviar, the more red the caviar is bitter. What's even more surprising is that the local natives don't like salmon and rarely eat caviar, their favorite is chicken and vegetable salad, if you bring a bowl of chicken vegetable salad, the locals will exchange it with you with a large pot of caviar.
The guide's younger brother is a merchant who specializes in the purchase of indigenous caviar, in his experience, the local indigenous people's understanding of the economic value of salmon is far inferior to that of foreigners, when high-end restaurants regard eating caviar as a vip symbol, the natives regard it as a broom, 10 rubles can buy a bowl of fresh caviar on the street, without a grain of taste bursting pulp delicious, swallowing, and even holding a whole bucket of caviar as a meal is not painful.
In addition to caviar, the Korillac natives also do not like to eat king crab, Arctic crab and Kamchatka crab, unless tourists want to eat by name, otherwise the locals will only smoke salmon, raw venison as a feast for vitro guests, it must be noted that the spiked Kamchatka crab eats a bit "mouthy", must use pliers to break the shell and then use scissors to take the meat.
(Next article Focuses on the volcanoes and main attractions of kamchatka)