Grades 10–13 · College · University · History Classes

Siberia and the North — The Peoples Who Stood

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

Orders were given. Peoples fell by the thousand. And then — they did not disappear.

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Across Siberia, Taiwan, the Philippines and the European North, the documented machinery of destruction is real: tribute at gunpoint, epidemics, boarding schools, child removal, forced relocation. What this class follows is what happened next — because in land after land, the ending the paperwork predicted never came.

1. Siberia — tribute, smallpox, and falls of seventy percent (Documented Fact)

Russian expansion from 1581 ran on the yasak, fur tribute taken under hostages. Smallpox reached western Siberia in 1630; east of the Yenisei in the 1650s it carried away up to 80 percent of the Tungus and Yakut populations, and in the 1690s it cut the Yukaghir by an estimated 44 percent (Richards's demographic summary). The Yakut population fell about 70 percent in forty years. The Itelmen of Kamchatka — 12,000 to 25,000 before contact — rose in 1706, 1731 and 1741 and were crushed; the smallpox of 1768–69 carried off three-fourths of Kamchatka's natives, and the 1827 census counted 1,800–1,900 Itelmen. The Unangan (Aleut) of the Aleutian chain fell from about 25,000 to 1,491 in the 1910 census under forced labour, massacre and disease, their families resettled by the Russian-American Company to empty islands as a workforce. And every one of these peoples stands today — the Sakha near half a million, the Itelmen about 3,000, the Yukaghir recovering in the counts, the Unangan over 13,000 in the 2020 United States census. Their languages are endangered, several critically. Collapse is documented. Extinction is not — because it did not happen.

2. The order that failed — the Chukchi, 1742–1747 (Documented Fact)

The Chukchi refused the tribute and were never conquered. After campaigns of mass killing and enslavement under Major Dmitry Pavlutsky (1730–31), Empress Elizabeth ordered the Chukchi and Koryaks "totally extirpated" in 1742 — extermination, written down as imperial policy. Pavlutsky campaigned again from 1744. In 1747 Chukchi fighters killed him, and Russia abandoned the war, leaving the Chukchi "not completely subdued" and largely self-governing for another century and a half. The Chukchi number about 16,000 today. The census files the order in the record of intent — and files no extinction, because the people the order named refused it. The Koryak, who resisted through 1745–56, likewise stand.

3. The endings that did happen in Siberia — and their exact class (Documented Fact)

Two southern peoples ended as separate peoples by absorption, their descendants continuing inside others — the census's middle class, counted separately and never merged with extinction: the Mator, whose language ended in the 1840s as they shifted to Turkic speech, and the Koibal, whose descendants stand today as a subgroup of the Khakas. And one guard line: the Kamas language's last native speaker, Klavdiya Plotnikova, died in 1989 — yet a small Kamasin people still identifies, and a book to revive the language was published in 2024. From the 1930s the Soviet state added collectivisation, forced settlement and Russian boarding schools across the North — documented suppression, inside peoples who stand.

4. Taiwan — the people the record called absorbed (Documented Fact)

Taiwan's plains peoples, the Pingpu — Siraya, Taivoan, Makatao, Ketagalan, Pazeh, Papora, Babuza, Hoanya and their neighbours — took the first and longest pressure: Dutch, then Qing, then Japanese, then Mandarin rule; land taken, surnames imposed, languages displaced. Siraya was last in regular use in 1908. For a century the official story was absorption. The peoples' answer came in their own institutions: families who kept the identity (the surname Wan, from the Siraya Talavan), a Siraya Culture Association from 1999, the language retaught from the Dutch-era manuscripts from 2002 — and then the law. In 2022 Taiwan's Constitutional Court held their exclusion from Indigenous status unconstitutional, unanimously. A plains-peoples status act followed in 2025, and on 30 July 2026 the Siraya were recognised as Taiwan's 17th Indigenous people. The other plains peoples remain unrecognised and in process — printed as a live process, not a closed one. No plains people is filed extinct in this course. The record that called them gone was the thing that was wrong.

5. The Philippines — a war toll is not an extinction register (Documented Fact · Debated)

The Aeta peoples of Luzon stand — living communities under documented land pressure: ancestral-domain titles granted to some, refused to others across decades, families ordered evicted for the New Clark City development in 2019, some 35,000 displaced by the Pinatubo eruption in 1991. Separately, the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) killed, on the US State Department historians' line, as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians from violence, famine and disease — with scholarly estimates contested up to 321,000, 600,000 and beyond, the higher figures disputed by name (Gates). This course prints those figures as what they are: a colonial war's civilian toll on a whole population, with reconcentration camps and torture documented in the war's own records. It does not dress a war toll as an Indigenous extinction count, and the word "genocide" for this war is carried as Debated / Claim — used by some historians, rejected by others, entered by no official body.

6. The Sámi — a century of Norwegianization, then a parliament (Documented Fact)

From the 1850s to the 1960s Norway pursued Norwegianization: Norwegian-only schooling, boarding schools that took Sámi children from their language, land law tied to speaking Norwegian — with parallel assimilation in Sweden and Finland. Two Sámi languages ended inside the living people: Kemi Sámi in the 19th century, and Akkala Sámi, whose last fluent speaker, Maria Sergina, died in 2003. The turn came with the Alta controversy (1979–1981) — hunger strikes outside parliament against a dam — and then, in sequence: the Sámi Act (1987), a constitutional promise (1988), the Sámi Parliament, opened 1989, King Harald V's apology in 1997 for the "harsh Norwegianization policy," and the Finnmark Act (2005) on Sámi land. Nine Sámi languages live, all endangered. The people were never extinguished; they were governed against — and they now sit in parliaments of their own.

7. Greenland — the children taken, the village moved (Documented Fact)

In 1951 Denmark took 22 Greenlandic Inuit children, most of them not orphans, to be re-educated as "little Danes." Six were adopted in Denmark; sixteen came back to a Danish-speaking orphanage, forbidden their language, and never lived with their families again. Denmark's prime minister apologised in writing in 2020 and in person to the six living survivors in 2022: "What you were exposed to was wrong. It was inhuman, it was unreasonable and it was heartless." In 1953, to expand an American air base, 116 Inughuit — 26 families — were told on 25 May and removed within days to Qaanaaq; their houses were later burned. Denmark's Supreme Court in 2003 called it a lawful expropriation and awarded limited damages; the people's own organisation carries the name Hingitaq — the people's own account: "the deported" — and the two words for the same event are printed side by side, unreconciled. Greenland's Inuit stand, self-governing since 2009, their language official. What was done to them is in this record at full strength — as harm to a living people, not as an ending.

8. What this class refuses to do

It refuses to print round popular figures as counts — the "150,000 Itelmen" of web essays is not carried, because the scholarly range is 12,000–25,000 and a census does not inflate. It refuses to convert language-extinction lists into dead nations: in this whole region, languages ended far more often than peoples. And it refuses a region total. What stands is per-land and exact: in Siberia, Taiwan, the Philippines and the North, the documented machinery of destruction ran at full force — and the peoples, in their own names, are still there.

Sources for this class

Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia (1992) • Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors (1994) • Richards, Siberian smallpox demographic summary • Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire (Yukaghir figures) • US National Library of Medicine, Native Voices • US Censuses 1910–2020 (Aleut counts) • UNESCO, Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Mator; Akkala Sámi) • Constitutional Court, Taiwan, Judgment 111-Hsien-Pan-17 (2022) • Plains Indigenous Peoples Status Act (2025); Siraya recognition, 30 July 2026 (Global Voices) • US Department of State, Office of the Historian, The Philippine–American War, 1899–1902; Gates on the toll • Hingitaq 53 and Others v. Denmark, European Court of Human Rights (the 1953 relocation facts) • Reuters (2022), the experiment-children apology • Government of Norway / Sámediggi record (Sámi Act 1987; Finnmark Act 2005; apology 1997). Full research file: Asia and the North, Genocide Record, Region 4; census section: World Census — Asia & the North.

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