Siberian Tribes

It is popularly thought by most people that the Siberian Husky is a direct descendant of the dogs of the Coastal or "Dog-breeding" Chukchi tribe of extreme eastern Siberia. This misapprehension has been caused and encouraged by the breed mythology published by the Siberian Husky Club of America and its supporting authors. The New Complete Siberian Husky by Michael Jennings, for example, contains an entire chapter (without a single supporting reference) that attempts to build a case for the existence of a "Chukchi sled dog" that existed as a purebred for three thousand years but is now utterly extinct except for its supposed descendant population, the A.K.C. Siberian Husky!

In fact it is much more likely that the Siberia imports that eventually gave rise to registered Siberian sleddogs came from several different Siberian tribes and not exclusively from the Chukchi. Leonhard Seppala himself claimed that he imported dogs from "many parts of Siberia," adding that some of his dogs came from as far west as the Indighirka River, from Kolyma and Anadyr river basins, from the coast east of Kolyma, and from Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka.

What is more, nineteenth-century explorers and anthropologists state that it was not unusual for Siberian hunters to wander from village to village and from region to region with their teams, trading dogs occasionally as they went along. Such circumstances make the breed-club claim that the so-called "Chukchi sled dog" was "purebred for three thousand years" sound utterly ludicrous.

In all probability, besides the Chukchi, the Chuvans, the Koryak, the Itelmen or Kamchadal, the Yukaghir, the Yakut, the Evenk and other tribes all contributed in one way or another to the gene pool that ultimately was transferred to Alaska in the early 1900s.