The Yaroslavsky Museum is Yakutsk's main museum of regional history and ethnography. Its collection covers the Yakut people and the smaller indigenous nations of the Sakha Republic — Evenki, Evens, Yukaghirs, and Chukchi — with displays of clothing, shamanic equipment, hunting tools, and everyday objects.
There is a strong section on the early Russian explorers and Cossacks who founded Yakutsk in 1632, and another on the gulag system that drove much of the Soviet-era development of the region. It is housed in a yellow neoclassical building near the centre of town.