Salmon fishers, sea-mammal hunters and dog breeders of the Amur mouth and northern Sakhalin, who traded with Chinese, Manchu, Ainu and Japanese for centuries without submitting to any of them.
Not an ending: independent until the Aigun and Peking treaties handed the Amur to Russia in 1858-60, the Nivkh were then collectivised off the sea; some 4,600 people identified as Nivkh in the 2010 Russian census.
A century of Nivkh history on Sakhalin from Shternberg's fieldwork through Soviet resettlement — the standard English monograph on the Nivkh.