Selkup Erotic

The Selkup are the last living branch of the southern Samoyedic peoples, a taiga nation of western Siberia whose own name for themselves means roughly "forest person." Their northern cousins, the Nenets, Enets and Nganasan, are tundra herders. The Selkup belong to the river and the forest. Their old homeland lies along the middle Ob and its tributaries in what is now Tomsk Oblast, the Ket, Tym, Parabel and Vasyugan. From the 17th century a second homeland took shape far to the north on the Taz and Turukhan rivers, in today's Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Krasnoyarsk Krai. Those two homelands produced two quite different peoples under one name. The Northern Selkup, centered on the village of Krasnoselkup, took up small-scale reindeer herding from Nenets neighbors and kept their language alive. The Southern Selkup of the Narym country stayed fishers and hunters, intermarried for centuries with Russians, Khanty and Kets, and have nearly lost it. Fewer than 4,000 people identified as Selkup in recent censuses, and only a fraction speak Selkup, a Uralic language whose closest relatives, Kamassian and Mator, died out in the Sayan foothills.

Before Russian conquest the Selkup were a small polity, not a scattered people. In the late 16th century the chieftain Vonya led what Russian chronicles called the Pied Horde, a union of Ob Selkup groups allied with the last khan of Sibir against Moscow's advance. The founding of the Narym fort in 1596 ended that resistance, and fur tribute followed. Tsarist officials lumped them with the Khanty as "Ostyak-Samoyeds," a label that lasted until Soviet ethnographers adopted the native ethnonym in the 1930s and built a short-lived written standard on the Taz dialect. The old religion ran on shamans with skin drums, a sky deity called Num shared with the Nenets, and a crowded world of forest spirits and household guardian figures. Orthodox baptism arrived in the 18th century and sat lightly on top of all that. Society was split into two exogamous halves, the Eagle and the Nutcracker, a division that still surfaces in surnames and clan memory, and the trickster hero Itja, who outwits a man-eating giant, anchors the oral tradition. Everyday life was built around fish: dried on racks, rendered into oil, pounded into flour for winter, caught from dugout canoes and, in the south, from long covered boats that whole families lived aboard through the summer. Today most Selkup live in Russian-speaking villages, and language revival rests on a handful of schools and the fluent elders of the Taz.