Tubalar Erotic

The Tubalar are a people of the dark taiga, and that is a matter of record, not just atmosphere: Russian officials filed them for two centuries as the Chern Tatars, from chern, the black fir and Siberian pine forest that covers the low mountains of the northeastern Altai. Where the southern Altaians were horsemen on open high country, the Tubalar hunted, trapped, fished, gathered, and hoe farmed small clearings of barley long before Russian settlers arrived. Their homeland is the Biya basin and the northwestern end of Lake Teletskoye, in the Turochak and Choya districts of the Altai Republic. Before the Dzungar state fell in the 1750s they paid fur tribute twice over, to Russian collectors and to Dzungar overlords. Fewer than two thousand people now claim the name.

They call themselves Tuba, or Tuba-kizhi, a name that recurs across the Sayan and Altai country and is shared in some form with the Tuvans and the Tofalar. Their language belongs to the Northern Altai branch of Turkic, close to Chelkan, Kumandin and Shor, and far enough from Southern Altai that calling it a dialect is a political decision rather than a linguistic one. It carries what came before it: the northern Altai peoples descend in part from Samoyedic and Yeniseian speaking forest hunters who took up Turkic and kept the hunting. It is spoken now mainly by the old, with Russian doing the daily work. The Altai Spiritual Mission, based at Ulala from 1830, pressed hardest here, so Orthodoxy sits more heavily on the Tubalar than on the southern Altaians, who went their own way with Burkhanism after 1904. Underneath runs a working relationship with place: mountains, passes and springs have masters who are addressed with care and left offerings of ribbon, and the shaman's drum is within living memory. Kinship still runs through the seok, literally the bone, the patrilineal clan a person marries outside of. In 2000 the state added the Tubalar to its register of indigenous small-numbered peoples, less a compliment than a tool: it carries priority rights to hunt, fish and gather on ancestral ground. Those rights are what the argument is about now, with the same forest wanted for timber and the same lake for visitors. The autumn cedar nut harvest, whole families camped in the taiga knocking cones down with a wooden beater, is still the fixed point of the year.