The Khamnigan

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In the Buryat-Mongol tongue there is a word for an Evenki — a Tungus of the northern forest, one of the reindeer people of the taiga. The word is qamniɣan. It is the ordinary Mongol name for the whole of that Tungus-speaking world to the north, the way a language names the neighbors it knows. And it is also, fixed and capitalized and carried into the ethnographic record, the name of a particular people who live not in the deep forest at all but out on the open grass of the Transbaikal, east of the cold sea of Lake Baikal, along the Onon and the Argun rivers. The Mongol-speaking world looked at them and saw Tungus, and called them so. They were Tungus. They were also Mongol. The name they answer to is the name of what they came from, spoken by the people they became.

The word for the forest people

The Khamnigan reach the record as a fusion, and the fusion is old. Across the Transbaikal steppe, from roughly the sixteenth century, clans of Tungus-speaking Evenki settled among Khalkha- and Buryat-Mongol neighbors along the Onon-Argun grasslands and, over generations, took on the language and much of the life of the horse peoples around them. The ethnographic and linguistic literature names them, with a phrase that carries the whole history in it, an ethnic community of “Mongolized Evenks” — Evenki in origin, Mongol in a great deal of what they became. It is a formation, not a tribe descended whole from a single stock, and its seam is still visible.

What set them apart from their northern kin was the animal they chose. The forest Tungus are reindeer people; they breed and ride the deer that alone can carry a rider over the lichen-ground of the taiga, and their whole economy is a hunting life mounted on a small intimate herd. The Khamnigan let the reindeer go. Out on the Onon-Argun steppe they took to the horse and to the herds of the open country — cattle and sheep, and in the drier reaches the camel — and became pastoralists of the grass rather than hunters of the timber. For this their neighbors and, after them, the Russian and Soviet ethnographers gave them a second name that fixed the difference: the “Horse Tungus,” or the “Steppe Tungus,” Tungus who had come out of the forest and onto the plain. The name marks a real crossing. A people of the reindeer had become a people of the horse, and had done it without ceasing to be Tungus.

Their historical clans lay along a seam of a harder kind, the seam between two empires. The most famous case is the princely house that reaches the record as the Gantimurov. Its founder, Gantimur — a lord of the Nerchinsk country, variously reckoned in the sources a Tungus (Evenki) or a Mongolic-speaking Daur, the ambiguity itself a mark of the border he lived on — crossed in 1667 from the allegiance of the newly risen Qing back to his ancestral lands on the Nercha, and there offered himself to the tsar. The Russians, who understood the value of such a man, took him in; he was baptized Peter, ennobled as a knyaz, and set to command and to collect tribute from the Tungus and Mongol clans of the region. His crossing became one of the sore points behind the Treaty of Nerchinsk itself. That a single lineage of this country could move between Moscow and the Qing, and be claimed by both, is the Khamnigan standing in miniature: a people whose home ground was the line where the Russian and Chinese worlds met, and who were never wholly on one side of it.

The Onon river in Zabaikalsky Krai, Russia — part of the Onon-Argun basin east of Lake Baikal where the Khamnigan settled as steppe herders. Photograph by Vladimir (undugun), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Two tongues

The fusion is most legible where it is hardest to fake: in speech. The Khamnigan are natively bilingual, and have been for centuries, carrying two inherited languages at once. One is Khamnigan Evenki, a Tungusic dialect of the Evenki language — the old northern tongue, kept but weighted now with Mongol loanwords, a forest language spoken by steppe herders. The other is Khamnigan Mongol, and it is the more surprising of the two.

For a long time the outside classifiers, Russian and Mongolian alike, filed Khamnigan Mongol away as a dialect of Buryat, or of Khalkha, a minor variant of a larger Mongol tongue. The linguist Juha Janhunen, editing The Mongolic Languages in 2003, argued that this was wrong twice over. It is not a dialect of its neighbors but a distinct Mongolic language in its own right; and far from being a worn-down offshoot, it is by his account the most conservative of all the living Mongolic tongues — little changed from Middle Mongolian, the language of the thirteenth-century empire, preserving old features that Buryat and Khalkha have long since let go. A people the record kept demoting to a subgroup turn out to carry, in one of their two everyday languages, an unusually old form of Mongol speech. The mixture that made them Tungus on one side made them, on the other, keepers of something very close to the Mongol of the Secret History.

Neither tongue is a museum piece. Khamnigan Mongol has on the order of two thousand speakers, and its center of gravity is no longer the Russian side, where use has thinned under a century of Russification, but the Chinese side — the Chen Barga, or Old Bargu, Banner of Hulunbuir in Inner Mongolia, where both Khamnigan Mongol and Khamnigan Evenki are still spoken with vigor. That a small Tungus-Mongol people scattered across three states should keep both of its inherited languages most robustly in China, of all places, is one of the quieter facts of their survival.

Herders of a double country

To be Khamnigan is to read a landscape that is neither the deep taiga of the forest Tungus nor the pure open steppe of the Khalkha, but the seam between them. The Onon-Argun basin and the Aga steppe are grassland threaded with river-valley and edged with forest, a country of pasture and of woody hills, and the Khamnigan economy answered to both faces of it. After about 1880 the Russian-side Khamnigan lived as semi-nomadic herders, moving their cattle, sheep, camels, and horses across the grass with the seasons — a full steppe-pastoral round, run by a people whose grandparents’ grandparents had been hunters of the timber. They kept the mobility of the nomad and the herds of the plain, on ground where the forest was never far.

And they kept, without having to choose, both of the great religious inheritances that meet in this country. From the Tungus side the Khamnigan hold shamanism in its Evenki form — the calling that seizes a person and remakes them, the drum that is the specialist’s mount between the worlds, the housed ancestral spirits, the seance that binds the clan to the sky-powers of the upper world, the tengri, and to the masters of earth and water in the middle one. The very word for that specialist is a Tungus word: saman, from which, by way of Russian and the travelers’ reports, every European language took shaman, and the Khamnigan are among its rightful bearers. The ancestral spirits kept in the household — the felt or wooden figures set by the door, the ongon in which the dead of the line are housed and fed — belong to this world; they are the near presences of a religion whose farther reaches the shaman alone can travel.

The Hulunbuir grasslands of Inner Mongolia, China. In the Chen Barga (Old Bargu) Banner of this region the Khamnigan keep both of their inherited tongues most vigorously. Photograph by Sergio Tittarini, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

From the Mongol side the Khamnigan received Tibetan Buddhism. It spread among the Transbaikal Mongol peoples from the eighteenth century, carried north out of Mongolia through the datsans, the monastery-temples of the Gelug school, and among the Khamnigan of the Aga and Nerchinsk steppes the lama and his liturgy took a place beside the shaman and the drum. They did not sweep the older religion away. The coexistence that resulted is not a confusion, and not a half-conversion to be pitied as an unfinished job of the missionaries; it is the coherent religious life of a border people, in which the sky-father and the earth-owners of the shamanic cosmos and the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the datsan are honored by turns and by occasion, as the matter at hand requires. A household in trouble might bring it to the one or the other, or to both. This same doubleness runs through the great narrative inheritance of the Mongol-speaking world, the epic of the heaven-sent hero Geser, which the datsan-Buddhism and the shaman’s cosmos both claim in their different ways. What looks from outside like a people caught between two religions is, from within, a people who have two, and are no less whole for it.

The Khamnigan meaning, in the world of the Baikal-Sayan peoples, lies just here. They are the standing case that a people can live fully on a frontier — Tungus and Mongol, forest and steppe, shamanist and Buddhist — carrying both of everything, and be a complete people rather than a half of two. Where their neighbors to the west, the reindeer Soyot of the Oka valley and the Tofalar of the Sayan taiga, hold to one language and one forest home under the pressure of the modern centuries, the Khamnigan hold two of nearly everything and have made the holding itself their identity.

An outsider’s record

The written record of the Khamnigan is, almost entirely, a record made by others. Russian, then Soviet, then international ethnographers and linguists set them down; the Khamnigan did not write themselves into it. And for most of that record’s length they appear in it not as themselves but as an instance of something else — a “Tungus” tribute-population to be counted, a subgroup of the Buryats or the Evenki, a curiosity of the language maps. It must be read the way the whole ethnography of Inner Asia must be read, with the collector’s lens kept in view: the people described were living and are living, and the strangers who described them were serving states with interests in the counting.

Their history, as that record has it, is one of pressure from every side, because the ground they held was wanted by everyone who reached it. In the early sixteenth century the Evenks of Transbaikalia — the Khamnigan-to-be — were tributaries of the Khalkha Mongols to their south, folded into the Mongol tribute system. Through the seventeenth century, as the Russian advance reached the Baikal country, the clans around Nerchinsk and out on the Aga steppe were caught in a vise: Cossack fur-collectors demanded the tribute in pelts, the yasak, from the north and west, while the Khori-Buryats, themselves under pressure, pushed onto Khamnigan pastures from another quarter. A people can bend only so many ways at once. Some Khamnigan clans enrolled in the Cossack regiments of the Selenge valley, taking service with the empire that pressed them; others were driven south, off their grass and over into Qing territory. The border they lived on was not a line on a later map but the shifting front of two expanding empires, and it ran straight through their pastures.

The Soviet century

The twentieth century fell on the Khamnigan as it fell on all the peoples of the Baikal country, and harder for their being few. First the border itself moved through them again. From 1918, in the chaos of the Russian Civil War, whole Khamnigan communities fled across the frontier — south into Mongolia, and east into Hulunbuir in Inner Mongolia — carrying their herds and their languages out of Soviet reach. It is this flight, on top of the older scattering, that made the Khamnigan the transboundary people they are now, split among three states that would spend the century with hard borders between them.

For those who stayed inside the new Soviet order, the pressure was of a different kind from anything the empire had brought. Collectivization broke the semi-nomadic herding round, gathering mobile households into fixed enterprises and pulling a pastoral people off the move. And the double religion that had been the Khamnigan’s particular achievement was struck at from both sides at once: the antireligious campaigns of the 1930s bore down on the shaman and the lama alike, treating the boo and the datsan-clergy together as enemies of the new world, to be dispossessed, silenced, in many cases killed. The drum and the liturgy were driven underground together. Alongside the outright repression ran the slower work of Russification — schooling that carried children away from their languages — which thinned Khamnigan speech on the Russian side until, of the two thousand who still hold Khamnigan Mongol, the firmest ground is across the border in China. The damage was done, as such damage usually was, in the name of progress; it was no less damage for the name.

A people of three states

They did not vanish. The Khamnigan are a living people, present-tense — perhaps ten thousand in all, though any count of a people split by three closed borders and long filed under other names is necessarily loose. They are Russian citizens of Zabaikalsky Krai; they are Mongolians of the Khentii and Dornod provinces, and of the Selenge valley their forebears once soldiered in; they are Chinese of the Chen Barga Banner of Hulunbuir, where their two tongues are strongest. One people, three passports, two languages, two religions: the Khamnigan multiply the border rather than resolving it.

They enter the wider record in individual figures, too. The most celebrated is Semyon Nomokonov (1900-1973), a hunter of Khamnigan heritage from the Transbaikal who became one of the deadliest Soviet snipers of the Second World War — a man who brought a forest hunter’s eye to the Eastern Front, and whose fame is one of the few threads by which the Khamnigan name reached a general public at all. It is a characteristic way for such a people to surface: through one figure, in someone else’s war, under the flag of the state that governed them.

The slow correction has come, when it has come, through the scholarship. It was the linguistic work — Janhunen’s above all — that finally treated the two Khamnigan tongues as languages of their own rather than as errors or dialects of something larger, and in doing so treated the Khamnigan as a people of their own rather than a fraction of the Evenki or the Buryats. That is a small justice, and a late one, and it is being done in the same outsider record that so long got them wrong. But it points the right way. The people who carry, as their very name, the fact that others saw them as Tungus, and who answered by being both Tungus and Mongol and keeping the whole of each, are at last being written down as what they always were: not a border between two peoples, but a people made of the border.

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