Wearing fish skin

The material used to make the robe is fish skin - about a hundred pieces! - all sown together. Mystifying, is it not? I imagine similar bewilderment was felt by some of the people who visited this region. The use of fish skin in clothing has been an iconic feature to outsiders. In Chinese sources, for example, the indigenous peoples of the Amur river region were known as Fish Skin Tatars (魚皮鞑子).

The Manchu description of the Fiyaka (who have been identified as the Nivkh) in 1751 in the Imperial Scrolls of the Tribute Bearers that was commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, says the following about their clothing:

Both the men and the women wear clothes made of dog fur. In the summer season, they make them with fish leather.

There are also accounts from further west. Leopold von Schrenck, a Russian ethnographer who travelled in the Amur region from 1854 till 1856 and wrote about the indigenous peoples of this region (albeit not always in a flattering manner and from the perspective of the anthropological paradigm of his time), gave an account of the Gilyak way of processing fish skin (Note: 'Giliyak' is an older term used for the Nivkh):

For the manufacturing of fish skin dresses, the Gilyak use the species of salmon most common in the waters of the Amur region: Salmo lagocephalus (Gily. lyghi-, on Sakhalin laghi-tscho). The skin is for that purpose disposed of its scales, which is done by pounding the softened skin in a wooden vessel. It is then cleaned by scraping off the muscle and fat particles, after which it is flattened and smoothened. The individual pieces are then sown together. Depending on how carefully these procedures are performed, a material emerges of varying quality. The dresses of a yellowish grey color that are meant for everyday use or as protection from rain are often without ornamentation and still clearly show where on the individual skins the scales were attached (tab. XVIII)

The Nivkh words given in the text are to be identified as leghi (as is attested in the Amur dialect) and laghi (as is attested in the East-Sakhalin dialect), which translates to ‘autumn chum salmon’. This is also what the given taxonomic name refers to: Salmo lagocephalus is a synonym of Oncorhynchus keta or chum salmon. The word written as 'tscho' is most likely co ‘fish’.

On the construction of fish skin robes as well as birch bark hats, Von Schrenck reports that the yarn used for sowing is made of different types of fish skin named after the fish species they originate from. Von Schrenck also reports the use of the skin of the chum salmon in clothing for other indigenous peoples of the Amur river region, such as the Ulch and Nanai (who lived further upstream from the Nivkh). In the description given by the Volkenkunde Museum, it says that the material this robe consists of may be carp rather than salmon.

Volkenkunde Museum, where this specific robe is kept, has three 19th century fish skin robes in total: one for men, two for women. More than a century later, the skill of processing fish skins has not been lost, as the video, which is a segment from a 2019 Russian television program, shows. In the video Ljudmila Xatxil, an Ulch woman, prepares fish skins for use in clothing. Although some slightly different utensils are used, the process is still very much like the one described by Von Schrenck.

The people that originate from this region still continue to find innovative ways to use this material. For example, the artist Anatol Donkan, inspired by his Nanai heritage, developed new techniques using fish skin, which is seen as waste by the fish industry, to create clothing, accessories and artworks.