Nganasan people

No people in Eurasia lives further north than the Nganasan, a small Samoyedic-speaking nation of the Taymyr Peninsula in Arctic Siberia. For centuries they hunted wild reindeer across the tundra, kept their shamanic religion largely free of outside influence, and stayed semi-nomadic until the 1970s. Today they number somewhere between about 700 and 1,000, and their language is seriously endangered.

Most ethnographers think the Nganasan formed when Samoyedic groups moving north onto the Taymyr met and absorbed older Paleo-Siberian inhabitants. The Soviet ethnographer B. O. Dolgikh traced several strands: Samoyedic bands that mixed with local peoples between the Taz and Yenisei and on the Pyasina, and Tungusic groups, among them the Tavgs of the Khatanga and Anabar basins, who adopted Samoyedic speech. Fur tribute paid in sable, an animal of the forest rather than the tundra, shows that their ancestors once lived further south. By the mid-17th century pressure from Tungusic peoples pushed these groups north, where they merged as the Avam Nganasan; the Tavg dialect became the basis of the modern language. Later arrivals, including a Tungusic group in the late 19th century and a Dolgan whose descendants formed their own clan, were also absorbed.

Nganasan country stretched over more than 100,000 square kilometres, from the Golchikha River to Khatanga Bay and from Lake Taymyr south to the Dudypta. Unlike the neighbouring Nenets, who herded reindeer, the Nganasan lived mainly by hunting wild herds. They wintered at the northern edge of the forest and in summer followed migrating reindeer far to the north, sometimes as far as the Byrranga Mountains. Russians knew them as Tavgi Samoyeds; their own names include nya-tansa, "comrade tribe", among the Avam Nganasan.

Their religion, animist and shamanic, is often cited as an unusually well-preserved form of Siberian shamanism. Shamanic practice was still part of everyday life in the early 20th century, and anthropologists filmed séances by a notable shaman in the 1970s.

The Nganasan met Russians in the early 17th century and, after some resistance, began paying sable tribute to the tsar in 1618, at the Avam winter quarters where the settlement of Ust-Avam now stands. They often dodged payment by giving collectors different names, and in 1666 they ambushed tribute parties three times, killing 35 men in all. Missionaries never reached them, and they were never baptised. Trade brought alcohol, tobacco, tea and tools, but contact also brought smallpox, with major outbreaks in the 1830s and in 1907–1908.

In the 1930s the Soviet Union collectivised reindeer into kolkhozes, or collective farms, and the Nganasan had to build up domestic herds they had previously kept only for transport or famine. They kept moving with the herds until the early 1970s, when the state resettled them, with Dolgans and Enets, into three new villages: Ust-Avam, Volochanka and Novaya. Herding ended by 1978; men hunted wild reindeer for the state enterprise supplying Norilsk, and women worked as teachers or seamstresses. Living standards were relatively high by the late 1980s.

The 2002 census counted 862 Nganasan in Russia and the 2021 census 687, though researchers who work with them often put the figure nearer 1,000. Many now speak Russian as their main language, and estimates of Nganasan speakers range from about 125 to at most 500, with little fluency among the young.

Our 1530 and 1600 maps draw an approximate Nganasan territory across the Taymyr Peninsula, with the Enets to the west. See also Russia.