Kereks Erotic

The Kereks named themselves after the water: ankalgakku, the people by the sea. That is more or less their whole geography, a thin band of Bering Sea coast in southeastern Chukotka running from Cape Navarin down toward the Gulf of Anadyr. No trees, wind off the water most of the year, fog that can sit for weeks. What separated them from every neighbor was that they stayed put. The Chukchi and the Koryak built their lives around reindeer and moved with the herds. The Kereks did not herd. They hunted seal from the shore and the ice, took fish at the river mouths, gathered eggs and greens and whatever the tide left, and they bred dogs. The dogs mattered more than that sentence suggests: Kerek dogs were sought after along the coast, and dog traction, not reindeer, was how a family moved anything heavy. It also made them vulnerable. Russian fur collectors reached the Anadyr in the middle of the seventeenth century, and through the eighteenth the expanding Chukchi raided the coastal settlements repeatedly, absorbing Kerek households as dependents. Soviet consolidation of small villages in the mid twentieth century finished the process by moving what remained into mixed settlements where Chukchi and Russian were the working languages.

Kerek belongs to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family, on the Chukotkan side, close enough to Koryak that some linguists have argued it is a dialect of it and most now treat it as its own language. It had two dialects of its own, one around Mainypilgino in the south and one around Khatyrka and Navarin in the north, reportedly quite far apart. It is gone as a spoken language, and what survives is a dictionary and a body of oral literature recorded largely by a single ethnographer, Vladilen Leontiev, in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of that material turns on Kutkynnyaku the Raven, the greedy, inventive, regularly humiliated creator the Kereks share with the Koryak and the Itelmen. Orthodox baptism arrived in the nineteenth century and settled on top of shamanic practice rather than displacing it. Because census takers routinely registered Kereks as Chukchi, they nearly vanished on paper before they vanished in fact. Russian census returns this century have counted them in single figures. They remain on the federal list of Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, and the handful who claim the name live in Beringovsky District and Anadyr.