12 Indigenous Place Names in the Senyavin Strait Area, Chukotka

MICHAEL A. CHLENOV

Translated by Katerina Wessels

On the Russian side of the Bering Strait lie the Providensky and Chukotsky Districts of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, which face the United States territory of Alaska, on the other side of the international dateline.¹ The history of Russia’s northeastern frontier is very complex, and its historical upheavals are reflected in its place names, or toponyms. Unfortunately, notwithstanding a number of very valuable publications (notably Dobrieva et al. 2004; Leont’ev and Novikova 1989; Menovshchikov 1972), these place names had never been systematically recorded and analyzed. Consequently, many of them were lost, along with various other elements of Indigenous tradition that were not transmitted to younger generations of the Yupik and Chukchi peoples who live on the Chukotka Peninsula.

During my fieldwork in Chukotka in the 1970s and 1980s, I recorded the place names described in this chapter from Yupik and Chukchi elders, for whom Russian was not their native language.² They were engaged in traditional subsistence activities—marine mammal hunting and reindeer herding. The contributions of two people, Vladimir Tagitutqaq (1922–1999) and Yuri Virineut (1925–?), were especially generous and truly irreplaceable.

Tagitutqaq (figure 12.2) was born in the small Yupik community of Napakutaq, on southeastern Itygran Island, and then moved to the village of Siqlluk (Russian, Siklyuk), on the island’s north coast, where he lived for twenty years. After the local Soviet administration emptied the village in 1951, he was resettled on the mainland to the south of the island in the community of Chaplino (Ungaziq), on Cape Chaplin, which subsequently became known as Staroe Chaplino (Old Chaplino). He was moved again in 1959, together with the other residents of Chaplino, to a site further south named Novoe Chaplino (New Chaplino), where he lived in his retirement. Although he continued to visit the Senyavin Strait area with Chaplino hunting crews in the 1960s and early 1970s, he had not been there for any extended time, mostly staying in the village on the mainland at the fjord-like Tkachen Bay [Novoe Chaplino]. I met him there in 1981 during our survey of the so-called “Whale Bone Alley,” an ancient archaeological site next to his former home village of Siqlluk (Arutyunov, Krupnik, and Chlenov 1982). By that time, Tagitutqaq was already recognized as the oldest living man to have been raised in the area. We spent a lot of time together visiting the Itygran and Arakamchechen Islands and the areas belonging to the Novoe Chaplino and Yanrakynnot village councils adjacent to the strait. Most of the Yupik toponyms he provided, which he remembered from the time of his youth, were recorded in 1981.

Yuri Virineut (figure 12.3), nicknamed “Tamara,” lived quite a different life. He was born in the mainland Chukchi community of Yanrakynnot, also in the Senyavin Strait area but further to the north, into a family of reindeer herders. They had very few reindeer, however, so they moved from one place to another, combining reindeer herding with the hunting of marine mammals. Chukchi was Virineut’s native language, and, when we met in 1981, he didn’t speak Russian very well, although he understood it. In 1964, when he was already a a fairly elderly man by Chukchi standards, he and his family moved to Arakamchechen Island, to the south of Yanrakynnot, which was by then essentially uninhabited. There he became a monitor at the Arakamchechen walrus haulout site, the largest in Chukotka at the time. He also trapped for Arctic foxes during the winter.

The history of the walrus haulout site is related to the almost forgotten story of how the newly arriving Soviet authorities in the Senyavin Strait area fought with the shamans, whom the Russians deemed to be “class enemies” of the local Indigenous people. In the 1920s, a certain Chukchi shaman by the name of Akyr gained exclusive control over the haulout site and announced that he was its “owner.” In 1929, by decree of a recently established local body of the Soviet administration then located in the Yupik village of Ungaziq, Akyr was forcibly removed from the haulout site and stripped of all his power (Arutyunov, Krupnik, and Chlenov 1982, 63; Krupnik and Chlenov 2013, 232–234). Virineut’s wife, Zina, was none other than Akyr’s granddaughter.

It is striking how differently these two men, who belonged to two different cultures, the maritime Yupik and the tundra-dwelling Chukchi, demonstrated deeply rooted features of their ethnic background in the way that they perceived the space around them. Tagitutqaq recited toponyms systematically, as if he was sailing along the shore. It was as if, for him, the area was a line with notable landmarks on it—so, as he said, “it would be easier to tell where you were, where you came from; that is why the names are given [this way].” His reference point was the shore, and he was at a distance from it, looking at it from the sea. For Virineut, the land was not a shoreline but a circular space, with he himself in the centre of it. When I asked him to name Chukchi place names on Arakamchechen Island, he started naming them in what seemed to me a completely chaotic order, jumping from the southern shore to the northeastern, then to the northwestern, not in any way following the actual position and order of these sites on a map. Only later did I understand that, in his mind, all of these sites were connected by radial lines, and he was standing in the center of an imaginary circle at their convergence.

In general, Indigenous place names along the Russian shore of the Bering Strait are exceptionally multilayered. One of my local acquaintances, Vladimir S. Lyashenko, director of Geroy Truda state farm in Uelen, characterized it very accurately when I talked to him in 1986. Lyashenko was not involved in the study of toponyms, but he happened to be living in that area and, among other matters, commented on place names:

There are several place name systems in the area: the Yupik [system] is almost forgotten, maybe five to ten people remember it; the Chukchi [system] is very vibrant and is used among the Chukchi people; the local Russian [system], for tourists—First River, Second River, Death Valley, Naukan, Old Naukan, and such; and the Russian maritime [system], in which the word “Dezhnev” identifies many different points: Naukan, Dezhnevo Post, and, finally, the entire area. It is interesting that no one is familiar with the place name Cape Peek, which appears on all maps. (Lyashenko, pers. comm., 1986)

However, my main task was to record the “almost forgotten” Yupik place names, which, as I suspected, can very quickly disappear from the memory of local inhabitants and be replaced by something else. There were several very compelling reasons for undertaking this work. The first one was related to the geography of the area where we worked. When I speak of the “Senyavin Strait area,” I mean the southern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula from Mechigmen Bay as far south as the northern shore of Cape Chaplin (see figure 12.4), including Itygran and Arakamchechen Islands, as well as several smaller islands that surround them. Today, this area is used by Yupik and Chukchi people from Novoe Chaplino and Chukchi people from Yanrakynnot, as well as some of that community’s Yupik residents. Both communities are in the Providensky District of Chukotka.

It is possible that as recently as two, but definitely three, centuries ago the whole shoreline in this area was inhabited by Yupik people, but they may not have occupied it continuously. The coastal area thus formed part of the Siberian Yupik toponymic region. Over the course of the past few centuries, historical and cultural developments led to the ongoing assimilation of Yupik-speaking people by the Chukchi, with the coastal Yupik groups shifting to the Chukchi language and the emergence of a new coastal Chukchi community.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the date of our earliest linguistic records, the Yupik language was spoken in Uelen, the now Chukchi-speaking community on the Russian Arctic coast next to Cape Dezhnev, the easternmost point of Northern Asia facing the Bering Strait. Place names indicate that a Yupik substratum is omnipresent over the area from the shores of the Chukchi Sea all the way south to the Gulf of Anadyr, which is today exclusively a Chukchi region (Chlenov 2006; Krauss 2005, 164–170; Leont’ev and Novikova 1989, 21–23; Titova 1978). Linguistic evidence also suggests that speakers of Naukanski Yupik, who occupied a separate enclave on the promontory of rocky Cape Dezhnev, arrived on the Chukotka Peninsula at some later date than speakers of Central Siberian Yupik (Chlenov 1988; Krauss 2005). Until the appearance of coastal Chukchi in the area of the Bering Strait, Central Siberian Yupik occupied a Z-shaped area from Kolyuchin Bay, on the coast of the Chukchi Sea to the northwest of Uelen, down along the entire Russian coast of the Bering Strait south to Provideniya Bay and, finally, east to Sivuqaq Island, also known as St. Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea (Krauss 2005, 174).

In other words, almost all the shore zone of the Chukotka Peninsula was occupied by speakers of the Chaplinski dialect of Central Siberian Yupik, who, in all likelihood, created the Yupik toponymical area on the peninsula. In the southwest they shared borders with speakers of the Sirenikski Yupik language, now extinct, and on the promontory of Cape Dezhnev they shared borders with speakers of Naukanski Yupik. In addition, according to Michael Krauss, in the northern Chukotka Peninsula, along the coast of the Chukchi Sea to the west of Kolyuchin Bay, was an area occupied by speakers of Iñupiaq, an Inuit language, who could have migrated from Point Hope (Tikiġaq), on the northwestern coast of Alaska facing the Chukchi Sea, in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century (Krauss 2005, 171–180). In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, speakers of Chaplinski Yupik were once and for all pushed out into the fjord area of southeast Chukotka Peninsula, which lies between Sireniki in the west and the Senyavin Strait islands in the east.

The region under consideration is thus divided into two sections. The southern section, which was until recently part of the Yupik toponymic area, includes Cape Chaplin and, moving north along the coast, Rumilet Bay, Inakhpak Bay, and part of Aboleshev Bay, as well as Itygran Island. The northern section is part of the Chukchi toponymic area; it includes Arakamchechen Island and, across from it on the mainland coast, Penkigney Bay (Qalareq) north to Mechigmen Bay. The southern shore of Arakamchechen, which up until the middle of the twentieth century was used by Chaplino Yupik, is a transition zone, in which Yupik place names survive alongside Chukchi place names, which are the more prevalent. Interaction between the Yupik and Chukchi cultural components in the area was quite intense. In the southern region, the Yupik component dominated (at least until recently), while the Chukchi component underwent Yupik adaptation. In the northern region, the reverse occurred: Yupik names were retained only for large and prominent places, such as Masiq (modern Mechigmen) and Nuqaq (modern Lorino) while all other Yupik place names underwent Chukchi adaptation or were simply replaced with Chukchi names.

Several details about place names on the Chukotka Peninsula are worth mentioning. Neither Yupik nor Chukchi peoples gave names to major geographical features of the sort that were of importance to Western sailors (mainly Russian, American, and British)—that is, seas, large islands, large straits, and gulfs. Among the local place names one will not find analogues to names like Chukotka, the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Anadyr, Alaska, or the Bering Strait. Presumably, it was always the case with respect to Indigenous cultures in and of themselves. Settlements, capes, visible or prominent rocks, large brooks, and natural landmarks or points of reference were almost always named, but there were other features, usually smaller but sometimes quite prominent, that were not named. Thus, for example, the two large islands in the Senyavin Strait, Arakamchechen and Itygran, did not traditionally have names in Chukchi or in Yupik but were instead known by reference to certain of their named features, such as settlements, natural landmarks, or notable capes.

What were taken to be Indigenous names for the islands as a whole began appearing on maps only after arrival of European sailors. The name Itygran was, for instance, borrowed from the name of the Estegraq locality on the western end of Siklyuk Bay, on the island’s north shore, while Qigi, a name given to Arakamchechen Island, derived from the name of the island’s easternmost cape. Similarly, St. Lawrence Island was named Sivuqaq after the name of the island’s westernmost cape. Discrete names were given only to uninhabited islands where bird colonies were located, such as Nunangighhaq and Qiighhqaq. Most Yupik place names in the list below designate inhabited sites (communities), capes, rocks, brooks or creeks, lagoons, and natural points of reference, such as a coastal area between two capes, or between any other notable features, such as lakes or lagoons.

Another feature characteristic of Yupik place names in the Senyavin Strait area is the blurring of the line between place names and common nouns used as appellatives. Often a geographic feature is simply called by an appellative term. A good illustration is the name of a rather large lake on Cape Chaplin, which is called Naayvaq, the Yupik word for “lake.” Yupik place names are generally formed from a base consisting of an appellative noun, but in rare cases the base is a personal name. For example, Akatam peghivigha, the name of a cliff on Itygran Island, derives from the name of a man named Akatak, who is said to have stored meat at a particular spot on the cliff to keep it safe from bears.

Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, Russian place names were layered on top of the complex bilingual pattern of Yupik and Chukchi place names. The first layer was laid down by Russian promyshlenniki, or fur traders, and Cossacks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examples of place names in this layer include Cape Russkaya Koshka, at the mouth of Anadyr River, Cape Chukotskiy, and two capes called Serdtse-Kamen’, one in Kresta Bay and the other on the coast of Chukchi Sea. The second, much more substantial layer consists of place names created by Russian seafarers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among them, the most significant contribution was made by the 1826–1828 Russian exploratory expedition under the command of Fyodor P. Litke: “Senyavin Strait” was named after their sloop Senyavin (Litke 2014).

Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, oceanographic exploration parties named numerous places, and twentieth-century topographical and geological parties continued the process, which remains ongoing. Some of the most recently created place names, such as Zvonkiy Ruchey (“resounding creek”) or Mys Ostryy (“sharp cape”), simply mimic traditional toponymic styles. There are also many place names that were formed from personal names—such as Cape Mertens or Glasenap Bay. A special group is formed by Chukchi and, less often, Yupik, toponyms that were phonetically adapted to the Russian language.

English names assigned by English and American seafarers in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries are also part of the Chukotka toponymic “Babylon.” These names, such as Khed’ (Head) Bay and Estikhet (East Head), both an old village and a mountain, are mainly concentrated in the Provideniya Bay region.

Historical reconstruction of the distribution of Yupik languages on the Russian side of the Bering Sea suggests that the Yupik toponymic substrate in the region of the Senyavin Strait should be related specifically to Central Siberian Yupik. That proves to be true: most place names in the Senyavin Strait area can rather easily be etymologically explained on the basis of Central Siberian Yupik. However, several toponyms contain elements that appear to derive from other Yupik languages of the Bering Strait, namely, Old Sirenikski or Naukanski Yupik. These toponyms have Yupik bases that are not present in Central Siberian Yupik. The names Inghiluqaq, a cape on Itygran Island, and Inghisaget, a groups of mountains on Arakamchechen Island, can both be traced to the Proto-Eskimo root *iingghiq, “mountain,” which does not occur in modern Central Siberian Yupik (where mountain is naayghaq) but is present in other Yupik languages (for example, Naukanski iingghiq and Old Sirenikski inggheΧ) and in Inupiaq, an Inuit language, as ighiq. In this case, however, there is no reason to suspect a direct relationship to Naukanski Yupik or another Eskimo language. It is more reasonable to suppose that these two toponyms date to a time when the root *iingghiq did exist in a local dialect of Central Siberian Yupik, now extinct.

The same can be said about Pagilleq, the name of a cape on the southern shore of Arakamchechen Island. The name can readily be traced to the Proto-Eskimo root *pagi-, *pagu-, “cormorant.” While this root does not appear in either Central Siberian Yupik or Naukanski Yupik, it is present as pagelleΧ in Old Sirenikski and as pagulluk in Inupiaq. Other toponyms, such as Inqetuq, Qelengayen, Nashqaq, and Qeyuvaggpak, cannot be etymologically traced to Central Siberian Yupik either, although they can all be explained on the basis of the other two Yupik languages of Chukotka. It is significant, however, that the list below does not contain a single place name that can be etymologically derived from a base that occurs exclusively in Naukanski or Old Sirenikski or Inupiaq. This supports the conclusion that the toponymic substrate in the Senyavin Strait area is founded on roots and derivatives present in the Central Siberian Yupik spoken on the Chukotka Peninsula.

I thank Lyudmila Ainana (Aynganga) for her valuable assistance in collecting and analyzing the toponyms of the Senyavin Strait area and Igor Krupnik for bringing my work to the attention of volume editor Ken Pratt and assisting in various ways during the publication process. I am grateful as well to Katerina Wessels for her translation of the original Russian text and to Katerina Bogoslovskaya for sharing a number of the photographs taken in 1981 by the late Sergei A. Bogoslovskiy. I and Igor Krupnik both wish to extend our thanks to Igor Zagrebin for allowing us to include several of his beautiful landscape photographs in this chapter. Finally, I thank Dale Slaughter for redrawing my maps (originally prepared by Andrey Yashin) for publication in English.

1. 1 An autonomous okrug is one of several administrative units in the Russian Federation. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet government initiated the creation of what were then called “national okrugs,” with the intention of granting some degree of autonomy to Indigenous peoples of the Russian North, while at the same time effectively cordoning off ethnic minorities. Historically, autonomous okrugs (the name was changed in 1977) have been part of larger federal units, most often oblasts (provinces). Today, Chukotka is a separate constituent unit of the Russian Federation. —Eds.
2. 2 A large number of people were contacted in the course of this study, the genesis of which is tied to the fieldwork of the late Lyudmila Bogoslovskaya in the Chukotka area. The Senyavin Strait area falls under the administrative jurisdiction of two villages: the Yupik village of Novoe Chaplino (New Chaplino), which replaced the traditional village of Ungaziq in 1958, and the Chukchi village of Yanrakynnot. During the 1970s and 1980s, Novoe Chaplino was home to some 400 Yupik and Chukchi people, and Yanrakynnot housed about 350 people, primarily Chukchi. Both communities also had a substantial share of newcomers, primarily Russians but also people from other ethnic groups in the former Soviet Union. Our research team was in contact with practically all the older Yupik and Chukchi residents of Novoe Chaplino (about fifty to sixty persons), as well as with some three to five Chukchi and Yupik elders from Yanrakynnot. During our travels along the strait, we were normally accompanied by hunting crews from Novoe Chaplino and Sireniki. In the northern area of the strait, we spoke with Chukchi and Yupik (some of them Naukan) individuals both in Lorino (Lugren) and in the administrative center of Lavrentiya. So slightly less than a hundred persons were involved in the study of place names in the Senyavin Strait. But an estimate of the total number of Indigenous people we met and managed to communicate with during the twenty years of our fieldwork activities (1971–90)—that is, people from all of the tribes, including the Naukan, Sireniki, Central Siberian Yupik, and Chukchi individuals who lived along the Russian shore of the Bering Strait—would be somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 1,200 persons. Many people whom we met during that period still remembered life in old, abandoned settlements like Ungaziq and Naukan quite well, slightly less so in the case of Qiwaq, Avan, and Siqlluk—but no one could recall life in Chechen or Old Plover Bay in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The Yupik living in the village of Ungaziq, located at Cape Chaplin, were resettled not far from there in the Tkachen Bay area—so their hunters were able to continue using the old area. Much more tragic was the situation with the Naukan people, but because they live outside of the Senyavin Strait area, they are not discussed in this chapter.—Au.

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