Indigenous peoples of Siberia


is a vast region spanning the northern part of the Asian continent and forming the Asiatic portion of Russia. As a result of the Russian conquest of Siberia and of the subsequent population movements during the Soviet era, the modern-day demographics of Siberia is dominated by ethnic Russians and other Slavs. However, there remains a slowly increasing number of Indigenous groups, accounting for about 5% of the total Siberian population, some of which are closely genetically related to Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

History

In Kamchatka, the Itelmens' uprisings against Russian rule in 1706, 1731, and 1741, were crushed. During the first uprising the Itelmen were armed with only stone weapons, but in later uprisings they used gunpowder weapons. The Russian Cossacks faced tougher resistance from the Koryaks, who revolted with bows and guns from 1745 to 1756, and were even forced to give up in their attempts to wipe out the Chukchi in 1729, 1730–31, and 1744–47. After the Russian defeat in 1729 at Chukchi hands, the Russian commander Major Dmitry Pavlutsky was responsible for the Russian war against the Chukchi and the mass slaughters and enslavement of Chukchi women and children in 1730–31, but his cruelty only made the Chukchis fight more fiercely.
A war against the Chukchis and Koryaks was ordered by Empress Elizabeth in 1742 to totally expel them from their native lands and erase their culture through war. The command was that the natives be "totally extirpated" with Pavlutskiy leading again in this war from 1744 to 1747 in which he led to the Cossacks "with the help of Almighty God and to the good fortune of Her Imperial Highness", to slaughter the Chukchi men and enslave their women and children as booty. However this phase of the war came to an inconclusive end, when the Chukchi forced them to give up by killing Pavlutskiy and decapitating him.
The Russians launched wars and conducted mass slaughters against the Koryaks in 1744 and 1753–54. After the Russians tried to force the natives to convert to Christianity, different native peoples such as the Koryaks, Chukchis, Itelmens, and Yukaghirs all united to drive the Russians out of their land in the 1740s, culminating in the assault on Nizhnekamchatsk fort in 1746. After its annexation by Russia in 1697, around 100,000 of 150,000 Itelmen and Koryaks died due to infectious diseases such as smallpox, mass suicides and the mass slaughters perpetrated by the Cossacks throughout the first decades of Russian rule.
The genocide by the Russian Cossacks devastated the native peoples of Kamchatka and exterminated much of their population. In addition to committing genocide, the Cossacks also devastated the wildlife by slaughtering massive numbers of animals for fur. Ninety percent of the Kamchadals and half of the Vogules were killed from the 18th to 19th centuries. The rapid genocide of the Indigenous population led to entire ethnic groups being entirely wiped out, with around 12 exterminated groups which were named by Nikolai Yadrintsev as of 1882. Much of the slaughter was brought on by the Siberian fur trade.
In the 17th century, Indigenous peoples of the Amur region were attacked and colonized by Russians who came to be known as "red-beards". The Russian Cossacks were named luocha or rakshasa by Amur natives, after demons found in Buddhist mythology. The natives of the Amur region feared the invaders as they ruthlessly colonized the Amur tribes, who were tributaries of the Qing dynasty during the Sino–Russian border conflicts. Qing forces and Korean musketeers who were allied with the Qing defeated the Cossacks in 1658, which kept the Russians out of the inner reaches of the Amur region for decades.
The regionalist oblastniki were, in the 19th century, among the Russians in Siberia who acknowledged that the natives were subjected to violence of almost genocidal proportions by the Russian colonization. They claimed that they would rectify the situation with their proposed regionalist policies. The colonizers used massacres, alcoholism and disease to bring the natives under their control. Some small nomadic groups essentially disappeared, and much of the evidence of their obliteration has itself been destroyed, with only a few artifacts documenting their presence remaining in Russian museums and collections.
The Russian colonization of Siberia and conquest of its Indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization in the United States and its natives, with similar negative impacts on the natives and the appropriation of their land.
From 1918 to 1921, there was a violent revolutionary upheaval in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Russian Cossacks under Captain Grigori Semionov established themselves as warlords by crushing the Indigenous peoples who resisted them. The Czechoslovak Legion initially took control of Vladivostok and controlled all of the territory along the Trans-Siberian Railway by September 1918. The Legion later declared its neutrality and was evacuated via Vladivostok.
Today, Kamchatka is largely populated by a Russian majority, although decreasing, with a slowly increasing indigenous population. The Slavic Russians outnumber all of the native peoples in Siberia and its cities except in Tuva and Sakha, with the Slavic Russians making up the majority in Buryatia and the Altai Republic, outnumbering the Buryat and Altai natives.

Overview

Siberia is a sparsely populated region. Historically it has been home to a variety of different linguistic groups. According to some estimates, by the beginning of the 17th century, Indigenous peoples numbered 160,000. In the 1897 census, their number was 822,000. The 2021 census recorded 1,620,000 Indigenous Siberians.
File:Жители Новой Земли Архангельской губернии.jpg|thumb|A Nenets family in Novaya Zemlya
  • * Some estimates put the population of Siberian Tatars at 200,000.
  • ** Some estimates put the population of Kamasins at 21.

    Ainu people

are spoken on Sakhalin, Hokkaido, the Kurils, and on the Kamchatka Peninsula, as well as in the Amur region. Today, Ainu is nearly extinct, with the last native speakers remaining in Hokkaido and on Kamchatka.

Mongolic peoples

The Buryats number 461,389 in Russia according to the 2010 census, which makes them the second largest ethnic minority group in Siberia. They are mainly concentrated in their homeland, the Buryat Republic, a federal subject of Russia. They are the northernmost major group of the Mongols.
Buryats share many customs with their Mongolian cousins, including nomadic herding and erecting huts for shelter. Today, the majority of Buryats live in and around Ulan Ude, the capital of the republic, although many live more traditionally in the countryside. Their language is called Buryat.
In Zabaykalsky Krai of Russia, in Mongolia and China, there are also the Hamnigans—a Mongolic ethno-linguistic group as Mongolized Evenks.
In Altai Republic and Altai Krai of Russia there exists a community of Altai Oirats. The government does not write them in as a distinct ethnic group and misidentify them as Altaians or Kalmyks. They mostly live in the steppe part of the Altai Republic or around Barnaul in the Altai Krai. They number about 2,000-4,500.

Paleosiberian peoples

Four small language families and isolates, not known to have any linguistic relationship to each other, compose the Paleo-Siberian languages:

Chukotko-Kamchatkan

Nivkh

Yeniseian

Yukaghir

Tungusic peoples

The Evenks live in the Evenk Autonomous Okrug of Russia.
The Udege, Ulchs, Evens, and Nanai are also Indigenous peoples of Siberia, and are known to share genetic affinity to Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Turkic peoples

The Turkic peoples include the following ethnic groups:

Ob-Ugrians

The Khanty and Mansi live in Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, a region historically known as "Yugra" in Russia. By 2013, oil and gas companies had already devastated much of the Khanty tribes' lands. In 2014 the Khanty-Mansi regional parliament continued to weaken legislation that had previously protected Khanty and Mansi communities. Tribes' permission was required before oil and gas companies could enter their land.

Samoyeds

Samoyedic peoples include:
is spoken in two mutually unintelligible varieties in the lower Kolyma and Indigirka valleys. Other languages, including Chuvantsy, spoken further inland and further east, are now extinct. Yukaghir is held by some to be related to the Uralic languages in the Uralic–Yukaghir family.
The Yukaghirs are people in East Siberia, living in the basin of the Kolyma River. The Tundra Yukaghirs live in the Lower Kolyma region in the Sakha Republic; the Taiga Yukaghirs in the Upper Kolyma region in the Sakha Republic and in Srednekansky District of Magadan Oblast. By the time of Russian colonization in the 17th century, the Yukaghir tribal groups occupied territories from the Lena River to the mouth of the Anadyr River.
The number of the Yukaghirs decreased between the 17th and 19th centuries due to epidemics, internecine wars and Tsarist colonial policy. Some of the Yukaghirs have assimilated with the Yakuts, Evens, and Russians. Currently Yukaghirs live in the Sakha Republic and the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug of the Russian Federation. In the 2002 Census, their total number was 1,509 people, up from 1,112 in the 1989 Census.