Sayan Samoyeds Erotic

The Sayan Samoyeds were a cluster of small taiga peoples who lived in the Sayan Mountains of southern Siberia until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the last of them were absorbed by their Turkic and Russian neighbors; their descendants are found today among the Khakas, Tofalars, Todzha Tuvans, Soyots and the Russian villagers of southern Krasnoyarsk Krai. What made them a group was language. The Mators, Taigis, Karagas, Kamasins and Koibals all spoke Samoyedic tongues, relatives of Nenets and Nganasan on the Arctic coast, yet they lived over a thousand kilometers to the south, in mountain forest along the upper Yenisei and its tributaries: the Tuba, the Kan, the Mana.

That position is why scholars care about them. Since Matthias Castrén traveled through in the 1840s, the Sayan has been argued over as a possible cradle of the whole Samoyedic family, with these peoples as the ones who stayed while others drifted north. They hunted sable and elk, fished, dug lily bulbs, and kept small herds of reindeer for riding, packing and milk rather than meat. Some researchers count the Sayan among the earliest centers of reindeer domestication. Families lived in conical tents covered with birch bark in summer and hides in winter, and shamans handled illness, hunting luck and the spirit world.

From the seventeenth century they were squeezed between powers. Russian forts on the Yenisei demanded fur tribute, and so did the Yenisei Kyrgyz and the Mongol and Dzungar khans to the south, leaving some bands paying twice. Surrounded by larger Turkic populations, most shifted language within a few generations. The Koibals became a division of the Khakas, the Karagas became the Tofalars, and Mator was already gone when Castrén went looking for it: what survives was pieced together from eighteenth century word lists. The Kamasins split in two, steppe dwellers who took up stock raising and Turkic speech, and taiga hunters who held on to Kamassian longest.

Kamassian is the one Sayan Samoyedic language with a real record. The Finnish linguist Kai Donner worked with its last speaking community between 1912 and 1914 in the village of Abalakovo, where the taiga Kamasins had given up their reindeer and farmed like their Russian neighbors. The final speaker, Klavdiya Plotnikova, was recorded by Estonian linguists in the 1960s and 1970s and died in 1989. With nobody left to talk to, she reportedly kept the language alive by praying in it. The languages are gone, but the Sayan Samoyeds remain in Sayan river names, in clan names carried by Khakas, Tofalars and Tuvans, and in the reindeer riding that Tofalar and Todzha herders still practice.