The Nivkh

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The water is narrow. At its slimmest the Tatar Strait, which divides the island of Sakhalin from the Asian mainland, closes to a few miles of cold sea, and in a hard winter it freezes across. On both of its shores, within living memory, a people would take a bear cub from the forest, carry it into the village, and raise it for two or three years as a member of the household — feeding it, speaking to it, letting the women of the clan tend it like a child — and then, in the deep of winter, dress it, feast it, and send it home to the gods of the mountains, killed so that its spirit might return enriched and speak well of the people who had kept it. To the south, on the island and beyond, this was the work of the Ainu. To the north, along the estuary of the great river Amur, it was the work of the Nivkh.

They call themselves Nivkh — in the plural, Nivkhgu — and the word means, plainly, “person,” “human being.” The Russians who pushed east to the Amur in the seventeenth century did not learn that name. The Cossack Vassili Poyarkov, who reached the river’s mouth on his expedition and left the first Russian written notice of the people in 1643, called them Gilyak — a term now understood to be an exonym, borrowed from a neighboring Tungusic tongue, that clung to the ethnographic literature for three centuries and has since been retired in favor of the people’s own word for themselves.

A people of the estuary

The Nivkh live where the Amur meets the sea and on the northern half of Sakhalin across the strait from it — today, in the administrative language of the Russian Federation, in Khabarovsk Krai on the mainland and in Sakhalin Oblast on the island. It is a country of river mouth and coast, of salmon streams and tidal flats and the long forested interior called the taiga. Their neighbors set them off sharply. To the south, across the Tatar Strait, are the Ainu; sharing Sakhalin with them are the Uilta, the reindeer-herders also known as the Orok; and on the mainland the Nivkh border the Amur Tungusic peoples — the Ulch, the Nanai, the Negidal. Almost all of those neighbors speak Tungusic languages, kin to one another and to Manchu. The Nivkh do not.

Their language stands alone. Nivkh — sometimes called Amuric — is a language isolate, not demonstrably related to any other tongue on earth, and it is often described less as a single language than as a small family of two or three mutually unintelligible varieties: one of the lower Amur, and those of North, East, and South Sakhalin, of which the East Sakhalin and Amur speakers, by the accounts of specialists, cannot understand one another. Attempts to fold Nivkh into a wider grouping — a loose “Paleosiberian” bracket of unrelated northern languages, or speculative ties to Korean or to the languages of the Americas — have never held. An isolate in a sea of Tungusic speech is a linguistic fact with a deep meaning: it marks the Nivkh, like the Ainu to their south, as the surviving remnant of an old and distinct population of the northeast Asian coast, in place before the Tungusic peoples spread to the Amur.

A Nivkh summer fishing settlement, photographed around 1905. Unknown photographer, from the photographic collection of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

They lived by the water and its yield. The Nivkh were semi-nomadic fishers, hunters of seal and other sea mammals, and breeders of dogs — the dog being at once draft animal, wealth, and, on occasion, sacrifice. The rhythm of the year moved them: in summer, settlements on the coast and the river bank, when the salmon ran and the sea was open; in the cold months, a withdrawal inland along the rivers to winter houses, following the fish and sheltering from the weather. Dried salmon, seal fat, the flesh of the taiga’s game, the roots and berries of the forest — the harvest of the wild, taken in its season, was the whole of subsistence. Agriculture, in the ordinary sense, had no part in it. The dog teams drew sledges over the winter ice and snow; salmon-skin was worked into clothing; birch bark was folded into vessels and the coverings of the summer huts. It was a coastal and riverine life, adapted with great exactness to a hard and generous edge of the world, and it kept the Nivkh, for centuries, out of the reach of the farming states to the south and west.

A Nivkh canoe, photographed by the ethnographer Bronisław Piłsudski in the early twentieth century. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Beneath the practical order lay a kinship order of great precision. Nivkh society was arranged into clans — the khal — each patrilineal, tracing descent through the fathers, and each exogamous, so that a person married always outside the clan. More than that: the clans were bound to one another in a fixed circle of exchange. A given clan stood, toward another, as a taker of wives, and toward a third as a giver of wives, the direction settled and asymmetrical, so that women moved through the community along set channels of obligation from wife-givers to wife-takers. It was this system — its rules of who owed a marriage to whom — that a young Russian exile would record on Sakhalin in the 1890s and read as a survival of something very ancient, with consequences that reached far beyond the Amur.

The bear sent home

The Nivkh world is full of persons who are not human. Mountains and seas and rivers and the forest each have their master — the yz, in the plural yzng — an owner-spirit who holds the game and the fish and grants them, or withholds them, according to whether the people keep faith. The master of the sea sends the seals; the master of the taiga holds the land animals; and above the whole stands the god, or gods, of the mountains. To live well is to stand in right relation with these masters: to hunt and fish within their rule, to make the offerings, and, above all, to honor the one guest who came down among people wearing the body of a beast.

That guest was the bear. In the Nivkh understanding the bear is no mere animal. It is a sacred being, an earthly form of the ancestors and of the mountain gods, spoken of as the son of the master of the taiga come to dwell for a time among human beings. And so the central act of Nivkh religious life was the reception of that guest: the bear festival, over which a shaman presided and which stood, for the Nivkh as for the Ainu, at the very center of the sacred year.

A bear cub would be taken from the forest and raised inside the settlement, penned in a special corral, for two or three years. It was reared almost as a child — fed, tended, and cared for by the women of the clan, who were said in some accounts to nurse it — because what was being kept was not livestock but a visitor of high rank, to be treated with the honor due a guest who does not yet know he is a guest. The festival itself fell in the depth of winter, usually January or February, and was very often held in honor of a kinsman of the clan who had died, so that the sending of the bear and the mourning of the dead were bound into a single rite. When the time came, the bear was dressed in a made ceremonial costume, feasted, and led through the settlement among the gathered clans; and then, with elaborate ceremony, it was sent home — killed, so that the spirit clothed in that worn body might return to the gods of the mountains carrying with it the hospitality and the gifts the clan had lavished upon it. Freed and honored, it would report to the mountain how well it had been received, and the mountain, satisfied, would send game and fish in abundance in the season to come.

Over all of this presided the shaman — the ch’am (чам) — the one who could pass between the human world and the world of the yz. In the séance the ch’am beat a drum, the ghas, and the noise of the drum and of the metal pendants hung about the shaman’s belt carried the spirit on its journey and its negotiation with the higher powers. The shaman was the mediator: the figure through whom the clan’s honor was conveyed to the masters of the game and the answer brought back.

Two things were happening at once in the bear festival, and neither can be reduced to the other. The first was a theology — a whole account of how humans and gods are meant to deal with each other. It is a moral economy of reciprocity: the divine person comes as a guest, is received and honored and given gifts, and is sent home enriched so that he will come again and bring the gift of the hunt with him. This is not a worship offered across an unbridgeable distance, and still less a fear of the wild dressed up as ritual. It is an exchange between two peoples, the human and the more-than-human, each standing in need of the other’s good faith. The second thing was social. The festival gathered the wife-giving and the wife-taking clans in one place to witness the sending, to exchange gifts, and to feast; and in the gathering the bonds of the marriage-exchange were renewed, the whole net of obligation re-knit around the honored guest. Cosmology and kinship were, in the bear festival, the same act.

None of this was peculiar to the Nivkh alone. Across the Tatar Strait the Ainu kept a rite of the same shape and the same meaning — the iyomante, the bear-sending, in which the mountain bear-god comes as a guest, is raised in the village, and is returned home rich with gifts to bring the hunt again. The Ainu bear-god and the Nivkh son-of-the-taiga are not the same figure, and the two peoples speak languages with nothing in common; but the grammar of the rite — the guest received, honored, and honorably sent home to the mountains — is one grammar, worked in two idioms on two shores of the same narrow sea. It belongs to a wide circumpolar pattern of the honored bear that reaches around the northern world, and along this coast its makers included the ancient sea-mammal hunters of the Okhotsk culture, whose settlements have yielded bear remains handled with ceremony, and among whom scholars have looked for one of the sources of the historical bear cult of the region. What the Nivkh kept was not a survival of “primitive nature-worship” but a coherent order of persons and gifts, held in common with their neighbors and reasoned through in its own terms.

Outsiders, and a hard century

Outsiders reached the Nivkh early and studied them hard. In 1890 Anton Chekhov, already famous, made his long journey to the Sakhalin penal colony and met the people the Russians still called Gilyak; he described them with unusual sympathy in the book that came out of the trip, Sakhalin Island, serialized in the journal Russkaya Mysl in 1893 and 1894 and issued complete in 1895 — a work of sober social observation rather than fiction, and one of the more humane nineteenth-century portraits of the people.

The foundational student of the Nivkh, though, came to them not as a traveler but as a prisoner. Lev Shternberg, a Russian law student arrested in 1886 for his part in the revolutionary movement of the People’s Will, was banished to Sakhalin, and from 1889 to 1897 — the years of his exile — he gave himself to the Nivkh, recording their language, their folklore, their kinship, and their bear festival, and conducting in 1891 and 1892 a census of the Gilyak, the Oroch, and the Ainu of the island. What he found in the clan system — the fixed circle of wife-givers and wife-takers, the classes of kin a person might or might not marry — he read as a surviving case of “group marriage,” a living relic of an archaic stage of human kinship. The reading carried far. Shternberg’s material reached Friedrich Engels, who seized on the Gilyak as long-sought evidence for the primitive social forms described in his account of the family and the state. Whether the Nivkh system was ever “group marriage” in the sense the evolutionists wanted is very doubtful; but the episode fixed the Nivkh, for a generation of European theory, as a window onto the human past — a role the people themselves had not asked for.

The twentieth century fell on them with a heavier hand than any ethnographer. Under Soviet power the Nivkh were pressed into collective farms, the kolkhozy, and their scattered coastal and riverine settlements were consolidated by the state into a handful of larger centralized villages — on Sakhalin the number of Nivkh settlements was cut from eighty-two to thirteen by 1986, a reorganization that pulled people off the water and the winter rivers where the old life had been lived. At the same time the language was driven out of the schools and out of public life. A people who in 1897 had been essentially all Nivkh-speaking became, within three generations, a people who spoke Russian. The figures are stark: the 2010 Russian census recorded fewer than two hundred people — about 198 — who still spoke Nivkh fluently, and the language is now classified as severely endangered, kept alive by a shrinking number of elders and by the documentation and teaching efforts built around them.

The people endure, but their numbers are small and, in the recent counts, falling. The Russian censuses give 5,287 Nivkh in 2002, 4,652 in 2010, and 3,842 in 2021, concentrated still in Khabarovsk Krai and on Sakhalin. The bear festival, which was once the axis of the whole religious year, is no longer kept as the sacrifice it was; where it is observed now, by modern Nivkh, it stands less as an operative rite than as an assertion of who they are — a public sign of a surviving culture, held alongside the work of writing down the language and teaching it to the young. The corral in the winter village is gone. What remains is a living nation of the Russian Far East, kin across the frozen strait to the Ainu in the great circle of the honored bear, and the improbable, unpartnered language — related to nothing, owed to no one — that a few hundred people still carry in their mouths.

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