Okriti Highlanders

The Okriti highlanders are the various Okriti tribes inhabiting the highly mountainous east of the island of Onomat, the largest island of Okrit.

History

The Okriti highlands have the prestige of being the region with oldest known evidence of human presence within Okrit, with the oldest known evidence of habitation dating to 32nd century TT, with no human habitation of any part of Okrit dating any further back. The ancestors of the highlanders were likely highly diverse to begin with, but over time spread and continued to change culturally and socially. The first habitation of the Onomati lowlands is thought to have been by ancestral highlanders, however they did not stray too far from their mountainous homeland. Over the centuries the highlands have seen a multitude of migrations and cultural & social developments, however very few details can be gleaned outside of archeology prior to the 15th century TT when legible writing from the ancestral Ukubians begin at their earliest.

Culture

A multitude of different cultural and linguistic affinities are found within Okrit's highlands, with varying degrees of shared attributes among them, often in correlation to geography. The highlanders whom have had the most interaction with the Lowlanders being those in the west

Ethno-linguistic groups of the Okriti Highlands

Cultural groups

The different peoples of the Highlands live in dozens of their own separate familial and cladistic groups, however they can be grouped into 18 broad "tribes" based on shared language and cultural traditions, themselves split into 4 endemic families based on Language.

The most well known highlanders are the Kassafret, who occupy the a large area of the western highlands bordering the regions of Okso and Moklo. The Kassafret are the most ubiquitously known highland group due to their long history of interaction with the Lowlands, being often mentioned in the Ofot folk legends of the Gimrani Matafar. The Kass belong to the West-Highlander language family alongside the Amarte, Semserai and the historical civilization of the Ukubians. The various clans of the Kass are diverse between themselves, but are still much closer to each other than they are to the Amarte and Semserai, who are closer relatives of the Ukubians. Alongside linguistic ties, all west-highlander clans practice tattooing and piercing simultaneously, as well as sharing totem animals and various ceremonies and traditions.

The largest of the highland denominations are the Odomic peoples, whose diversity and spread is by consensus attributed to recent migrations during the late 3rd century TT. Odomic languages exist along a dialect continuum, though still maintain a large degree of intelligibility due to recent divergence. Cultural practices definitive of the Odomic clans include bodily piercings, circumcision and ritual bloodletting alongside ritual cannibalism and bodily part preservation. A number of these traits have spread to neighbuoring groups, however the people themselves are seen as warlike and often disliked by other highlanders. The Odomic peoples consist of the Maikalat, Tewec-Tewec, Baibarak, Kenyealeu, Daht, Merw-Merw and Kaang tribes.

Traditions

A variety of practices and cultural beliefs are shared amongst the Highlanders. While some of these are general traits which are shared with other Okriti cultures, multiple are characteristic of the highlands in particular, such as tattooing, body piercing as well as the preservation of body parts and corpses. It is a common belief that the end of each year is a time of great spiritual activity, and thus incurs a variety of ritual activities. Often, children born within the last month of the year are considered to have great spiritual power, and are often given talismans to protect them from malicious spirits during the month of their birth.

Along with this, the highland clans often believe that the body's individual components have spiritual power, and that one can enhance their overall power through modification of this bodyparts. This is often through tattooing or piercing, and sometimes both, as in the case of the Ukubians. Certain clans will remove and preserve certain body parts to be turned into talismans for this intended purpose, most often parts of the head, internal organs and parts of the genitalia, such as the foreskin.