At the time of the Russians’ arrival on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Itelmen were the most widespread and populous tribe on the peninsula (see image 1). Thriving on the harvest of Kamchatka’s massive salmon runs, their villages were located along the rivers of both Kamchatka coasts from the Tigil and Uka rivers in the north to the Golygina River in the south.

In these villages the Itelmen made seasonal use of two types of dwellings: winter dugouts, underground living quarters dug into the ground that were entered through a hole in the timber and earthen roof; and summer, wooden, stilt houses “balagans” that were built on the banks of rivers and inhabited for two and a half to three months during Kamchatka’s summer fish run. Winter dwellings stretching down the coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk were usually found thirty to eighty kilometers inland, where the sea’s punishing winds and persistent, chilling fog are less prevalent. In such cases fishing stations were placed on the shore, near the river’s mouth, and the majority of the village’s residents relocated for the duration of the summer. 

Itelmen origins remain an unsolved riddle. They consider themselves aboriginals of Kamchatka and their mythology and legends make no reference to other lands or migration. Indeed their very name for themselves, “Itehnmehn” (“Itelmen” in Russian), means “native inhabitant” and comes from the root words “it’eh” or “it’ehnan” meaning “former, longtime”, and “mehn” – “person”.

The Itelmen language is held by linguists to be of a separate family than that of the Koryaks and Chukchis (their neighbors to the north). Digs at the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula have unearthed traces of an Itelmen settlement dated to be 5,200 years old and, while some archeologists assert that the Itelmen migrated from the Lake Baikal region, there is genetic evidence that they are the descendants of a proto Aleut-Eskimo culture which arose towards the end of the Paleolithic age.

A soviet era anthropologist who studied the Itelmen for more than forty years postulates that their most ancient forbears arrived on Kamchatka from the south, by sea: from Micronesia. She puts forth a wealth of interesting similarities between the Itelmen culture and traditional cultures of Micronesia and Oceania – from methods of food preparation, to canoe design, to decorative grass headdresses - in support of her theory.