Tozhu Tuvans Erotic

Among Tuvans, the Tozhu are the people of the forest rather than the steppe. Most of Tuva grew up with horses, sheep and felt yurts in the open southern basins. The Tozhu made their living in the larch and Siberian pine taiga of the republic's northeast, riding reindeer instead of horses and trapping fur animals through long winters. That difference in how they live, more than any line on a map, is what sets them apart. Russia formally lists them as one of its small-numbered Indigenous peoples of the North, separate from Tuvans at large.

Their homeland is the Todzha basin, a high depression full of lakes, ringed by the Eastern Sayan and cut by the upper streams of the Yenisei. It is still one of the hardest parts of Tuva to reach. The Tozhu speak their own dialect of Tuvan, a Turkic language of the Sayan group, and it sits closer to the speech of other taiga peoples than to the Tuvan of the steppe. Their nearest kin across the mountains are the Tofalars of Irkutsk Oblast. Across the Mongolian border are the Dukha, reindeer herders whose ranks include families who crossed south from the Tuvan taiga in the twentieth century. Ethnographers trace much of Tozhu ancestry to older forest peoples who spoke Samoyedic and Yeniseian languages and took up Turkic speech over centuries.

Here reindeer are ridden, loaded with packs and milked rather than hitched to sleds. This Sayan style of herding is one that some researchers count among the oldest forms of reindeer keeping anywhere. Families traditionally moved between seasonal camps in conical tents covered with birch bark or hides, and furs from the hunt went out as tribute and trade. Religion is practical and local. Shamanism holds a stronger place here than the Tibetan Buddhism of the steppe, and people still leave offerings for the spirit masters of passes, springs and hunting grounds as part of moving through the land.

The Soviet period rebuilt all of this. Herds went into collective and state farms, and nomadic families were drawn into villages. When those farms fell apart in the 1990s, reindeer numbers dropped sharply, and keeping the animals alive came down to individual families and their persistence. Today most Tozhu live in settlements and speak Russian alongside Tuvan, while a smaller number of herding families still keep camps out in the taiga.