Uilta. General information

The Uilta (Ulta, Orochen/Orochon, Orok) are an ethnic group with some of the smallest numbers in Russia.

The northern and southern Uilta groups mostly live in the Nogliki (the village of Val, Nogliki urban type settlement) and Poronaisk (the city of Poronaisk) districts of the Sakhalin region; they used to speak the Northern and Southern dialects respectively. Censuses record a small group of the Uilta living in the Okha and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk districts (and on Sakhalin Island as well). Available sources put their total numbers at 320–340 persons in the 20th century and at no fewer than 600–700 persons in the 19th century.

The total number of Uilta, according to the 2020 All-Russian Population Census, is 269 people (125 men and 144 women).

The Uilta have traditionally lived along the rivers (with the Tym and the Poronay being the largest ones) and close to the marine bays on Sakhalin Island. They were nomads who hunted (including hunting marine animals), herded reindeer, fished, and gathered wild plants. The history of the Uilta is closely connected and intertwined with the histories of all the peoples who used to live and still live on the islands and the mainland in the Russian Far East; special mention should be made of one can particularly note the mutual cultural influences existing in the long-standing ethnic environment of the Amur and Sakhalin between the Uilta and the Ulcha, Nanai, Ewenki, Nivkh, and Russians.

The Uilta were first mentioned in the late 1630s. For centuries, their small numbers and absence of an established name in the statistical records of the 19th and 20th centuries generated incorrect reporting of the Uilta numbers. The linguist Juha Janhunen studied the etymology of the Orok ethnonym and noted that the entrenched scholarly opinion on this word being linked to the Tungus word for reindeer is incorrect. This name likely became attached to “Orok” via the languages of their neighbors, Sakhalin’s Ainu and Ghilyak (known today as the Nivkh). Unlike the Ghilyak and the Ainu, and unlike the Ulchi on the mainland, “Orok’” livelihood was based on reindeer herding, but the name “Orok” is older than their reindeer herding tradition.

Alexander M. Pevnov (Pevnov, 2022) made an important attempt to explain the origins of the name or ό kko in the language of this Tungusic community. Once borrowed into their language, the “Orok” ethnonym took on a life of its own: neighboring peoples used it. In the Soviet era, “Orok” was the prevailing form, which generated incorrect reporting of their numbers. Consequently, in the early 1990s, their representatives applied to the authorities to have the name “Ulta” officially enshrined as their ethnonym.

The many confusing ethnonyms confounded those who attempted to research the question of the Uilta’s numbers and population distribution; they predictably arrived at different figures. Scholars of the late 19 ^th --early 20th century and censuses of the late 18 ^th --early 20th century put the numbers of the Uilta community at 350–773 persons in the mid-20th century. Information in the censuses may be incorrect owing to confusing ethnonyms: census forms had the ethnonym “the Orochon,” and that was the name applied in different times to members of other Tungusic-speaking ethnic communities. The Sakhalin Calendars for the years 1898 and 1899 give the same numbers of the Orochon (and no Orok at all) recorded in the Tymovskoye (231 men and 206 women) and Korsakov (276 men and 157 women) districts, that is, a total of 774 Orochon ( Sakhalin Calendar , 1898, 1899). When Russians first met “Tungusic-speaking communities” who “rode reindeer and used them as pack animals,” they called them “reindeer Tungus,” and in the late 18th century, the Manchu name “ Orunchun ” came to be applied to some of them. After his travels to Sakhalin in 1855 and 1856, Leopold von Schrenck called this ethnic community “a nomadic tribe of the Orok” along the river Tym. It is important to note that Russians did not call members of this people Oroks, and it is therefore unclear why this particular term came to be used so extensively in official documents in the 20th century. In the 1960s, Taisia I. Petrova studied the materials of Rinzo Mamiya, Fyodor Schmidt, Pyotr Glen, Leopold von Schrenck, Serafim Patkanov, Boris Vasiliev, Lev Shternberg, and concluded that the etymology of the “ul’ta ~ ujl’ta (as well as the Ulchа) is unclear.” “Oroks” themselves do not use this ethnonym and consider it foreign to them. And the term “Ulta” should be etymologically traced to those languages that use it to refer to Oroks: Ewenki, Neghidal, and other Tungusic languages. In Ewenki, for instance, the world “ ulta ” may be linked with words that have the same root, “ uil ” (whirlpool), “ ula ” (river). The ethnonym “ ulta ” was likely given to people living along the rivers as opposed to the Ewenki and Oroks who were reindeer herders.

Since the late 20th century, both the Northern and Southern Uilta interpret their name as derived from the word “ ul aa ” (even though in the 20th century, the Southern group mostly focused on fishing, and in the 21st century, the same applied to the Northern group as well). Thus, the community’s perception of their self-identity transformed over the many centuries of their history. A common group identity of the two reindeer “Tungusic” peoples of Sakhalin (the Uilta and Ewenki) was recorded a hundred years ago. For instance, Taisia I. Petrova noted in 1967, “The 1927 and 1959 Censuses recorded Oroks together with the Sakhalin Ewenki.” In 1880–1916, birth, marriage, and death registers recorded them as “Orochen.”

The same documents of the early 1930s alternatively used three ethnonyms: “Orochen,” “Orok,” and “Ulta.” In 1986, the Sakhalin regional authorities tried to replace passports that listed “Orok” instead of “Orochen” in the “ethnicity” line. This decision ran into major opposition from the Orochen community, and the authorities were forced to revoke their decision. The 1989 Census once again attempted to record the Orochen/Orochon as Orok. Similarly-sounding language names “Oroch” and “Orochen” resulted in native speakers of Orochen being recorded as Oroch. And similar words for the feminine gender-specific ethnic names ( Orochka/Orochenka ) resulted in 212 Oroch being recorded in Sakhalin in addition to 120 Orok, and 136 Oroch recorded in the village of Val (as reported by the village council), where not a single Oroch in fact lived. People were first officially recorded as Orochen in their passports in 1932 in Northern Sakhalin, and after 1945 also in Southern Sakhalin, which influenced several generations’ perception of their ethnic identity. In the 1990s, however, elderly people who were still fluent in their native tongue unequivocally claimed Uilta identity. In 1990, residents of the city of Poronaisk and of the village of Val petitioned to have their people renamed into the Ulta (shown by results of field research conducted by Alexey I. Kuznetsov and Liudmila I. Missonova of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the RAS in 1990–1991). The 2002 Census enshrined “the Uilta” as their official ethnonym.