The Soyot

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In the early 1990s a Soyot family drove a small herd of reindeer over the passes of the Eastern Sayan and down into the Oka valley. The animals — sixty-three of them — had been bought from the Tofalar on the far side of the mountains, one of the last peoples in the whole Sayan country who still kept reindeer at all. The herd that had once carried the Soyot across their own high forests was thirty years gone by then; a Soviet decree had pronounced it unprofitable in 1963 and dissolved it, and the last of the animals had died out within a decade. What crossed the passes in the 1990s was not a herd so much as a seed. From it, and from a language reckoned all but silent, a people that the state had spent the twentieth century counting as somebody else set about the work of becoming itself again.

The Soyot are a small indigenous people of the Oka valley — the Oka-Saian, in the older spelling — in the Okinsky district at the roof of the Republic of Buryatia, in the Eastern Sayan mountains of southern Siberia. Oka is the heart of that mountain country, a district of some twenty-seven thousand square kilometers of taiga, alpine pasture, and volcanic upland where the rivers run down toward Lake Baikal. Because the people and the valley are so nearly the same thing, ethnographers commonly call them the Oka Soyot. There are, by the most recent count, a little over four thousand of them, and they are — a point the record itself once denied — a living people with a recovered name.

The name and the layered descent

The endonym reaches back into a cluster of clan-names that lie scattered across the whole Altai-Sayan world. The Soyot call themselves by a form of the clan-name Soyan or Soyon, and the same name recurs among their neighbors under barely altered spellings: Soyan among the Tuvans, Soyong among the Altaians, Soyan among the Khakas, Soyeng among the Khalkha Mongols. Scholars trace the whole cluster, in the end, to the name of the Sayan range itself — the mountains that gave the people and their kin a shared address before they had a shared history. One linguistic reading, recorded in the Russian state atlas of the small-numbered peoples, takes the name to describe a ridge of peaks standing up like the fangs of a wolf, hoyoo in the Buryat-Mongolian; the mountains are named for their teeth, and the people for the mountains.

Beneath the Turkic surface of the name lies an older stratum. Researchers connect Soyan/Soyon/Soyot to a Samoyedic layer of the Sayan population — a connection borne out, among other things, by the sizable Soyta clan that survives to this day among the Tundra Enets far to the northwest, and by the reckoning that the very word Sayan rises out of that same Samoyedic ground. The Soyot are read, accordingly, as a people of doubled descent. Their remote ancestors are held to have been proto-Samoyedic hunter-gatherers who came into the Eastern Sayan from western Siberia at the turn of the third and second millennia BC; a Turkic tongue and Turkic clan-organization settled over that base later, and later still, perhaps three and a half to four centuries ago, Soyot groups moving eastward from the neighborhood of Lake Khövsgöl crossed into Buryatia and took up their present valleys, where they were drawn by degrees into the Buryat-Mongol world of the Baikal region. A Samoyed-then-Turkic core of reindeer-and-mountain hunters, folded at last into the Mongol south: that is the shape most scholars give the Soyot past.

The clans preserve the reckoning. The principal one is the Khaasuut — Khaazuut in another romanization — so much the largest that the Tofalar name for the whole people, hazut, is simply the clan-name generalized. The Irkit and the Onkhot are the smaller two, and here too the names travel: Irkit and Khaasuut and Onkhot recur among the reindeer-herding, Sayan-Turkic peoples generally, a lattice of shared clan-names binding the small mountain nations together across the passes. The Soyot’s nearest kin are the Tofalar — the Tofa — on the Irkutsk side of the Sayan, and the Tsaatan, or Dukha, of the Darkhad valley in northern Mongolia. With these the tie is not only historical but linguistic and to the marrow: the Soyot language, the Tofa language, and the speech of the Dukha are close dialects of a single Sayan-Turkic reindeer-herders’ tongue. That tongue is classed in the Sayan-Turkic branch of the Turkic family, alongside Tuvan and Tofa and Dukhan and the extinct Tuba, and of its living relatives Soyot stands closest to Tofa.

Almost everything written of the Soyot before the last generation was written by outsiders. The record is a Russian and Soviet one — the ethnography of the tsarist and then the Soviet state, and the census, both to be read with the collector’s lens kept in view. It was only from the 1990s that the balance shifted, when the Buryat-based Turkologist Valentin I. Rassadin turned his fieldwork and his lexicography to the language and gave the Soyot, for the first time, a written record largely their own.

View from Mount Nukhu-Daban toward Munku-Sardyk (Mönkh Saridag), the highest peak of the Eastern Sayan, in the Okinsky district of Buryatia — the high country of the Oka Soyot. Arkadiy Zarubin, edited by Julian Herzog, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The reindeer, the yak, and the in-between country

Before all else, in their own reckoning, the Soyot are the reindeer-people of the high Sayan. The point is practical before it is anything else. The domestic reindeer is the one animal that will carry a rider and a load across the upper taiga of these mountains — the wet, broken, larch-and-moss country of the forest zone where no horse, no ox, and no camel can go. On its back a hunter can reach reaches of mountain forest that are otherwise simply closed, and it is this that made the reindeer the frame of the older Soyot life: the herding of the animals and the hunting they open up, worked together in the upper forest, is the ground on which the whole identity stood. A Soyot without reindeer was, in the traditional understanding, a contradiction — which is exactly what the twentieth century, for a while, produced.

But the Oka is not only taiga, and the Soyot were never only foresters. Below the tree line, on the alpine meadows and along the steppe fringes of the valley, they took up the animals of the herder-steppe as well: the yak, well-suited to the cold high pasture, along with horses and cattle. The lifeway migrated with the seasons between the zones — up into the reindeer-forest, down onto the grazing lands — so that a single people spanned two economies that elsewhere belong to two different worlds, the reindeer-hunter of the taiga and the stock-herder of the open country at once. This straddling of ecological zones is the signature of the Soyot way, and it runs through everything, including the religion.

The Oka plateau in the Okinsky district of Buryatia — the volcanic upland and alpine pasture where the Soyot keep yak, horses, and cattle below the reindeer-forest. Jim Luhr, Smithsonian Institution (1991), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Soyot religion is of a piece with that in-between country: a Sayan shamanism interwoven with Tibetan Buddhism. The shamanism itself faces two directions, tracking the split in the economy. Ethnographers describe the central Soyot — the cattle-and-horse keepers — as carrying distinctly Khalkha-Mongol features in their shamanism, while the western, steppe-dwelling groups stand nearer to the shamanism of the Altai-Turkic peoples; the tradition leans one way toward Mongolia and the other toward the Altai, as the people themselves lean between forest and steppe. Its powers are the spirits and the masters of the sacred places of the Eastern Sayan — the owners of particular mountains, waters, and stretches of taiga, to whom the reverence proper to a landscape one lives inside is owed. This is not a diffuse feeling about nature but a reckoning with specific masters of specific places, the peak above the valley and the river through it each having its owner to be honored.

Over that shamanic ground came the Buddhism of the south. From the middle of the eighteenth century the Soyot were exposed to Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhism, the datsan religion that reached the Oka from the Buryat and Mongol lands, and through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many came to follow it in earnest. What resulted was not the erasure of one faith by the other but the characteristic arrangement of the whole Baikal region: the coexistence of shamanism and the yellow-hat teaching, each keeping its own offices, worked out here among a reindeer people at the northern edge of the Buddhist world. The mountain-masters are honored, and the datsan is attended, and neither cancels the other. To flatten the two into one, or to read the Buddhism as a mere veneer over an older shamanism, would misdescribe a settlement the Soyot have long since made.

What all of this carries — the meaning folded into the reindeer and the yak and the offerings to the mountains — is a single proposition about what it is to be Soyot: to keep the reindeer, to keep the yak, to speak the language of the fang-shaped peaks, and to render the mountain-masters their due. It is precisely this bundle that the twentieth century set about pulling apart, thread by thread, and precisely this bundle that the present generation has been knotting back together.

The century of erasure

The unraveling began long before the Soviet state, and quietly. Through the nineteenth century the Soyot lost ground steadily to the Buryat who surrounded them and vastly outnumbered them. Intermarriage and the daily pull of the larger society drew Soyot families toward the Buryat language and the Buryat name — a slow Buryatization that, by the opening of the twentieth century, had left most Soyot speaking Buryat rather than their own tongue. The reindeer-herders’ language, cut increasingly from the mouths of the young, thinned toward the margins of use. Assimilation of this kind leaves little behind in the documentary record; it is a disappearance by absorption, hard to date and harder to protest, and it had already gone a long way before anything more violent arrived.

The Soviet century then did in decades what absorption had been doing over generations, and did it by decree. In the 1930s the reindeer of the Soyot, like the herds of every pastoral people in the Union, were collectivized — gathered off the families and into the collective farm. Through the late 1920s and the 1930s the mountain households were pressed down into fixed settlements and turned toward Buryat-style stock-raising. Then in 1963 the state reached its verdict on the reindeer themselves: the collective Soyot herd was judged unprofitable and disbanded. The animals were dispersed and not replaced, and within the 1960s and early 1970s the domestic reindeer of the Oka Soyot were gone altogether — the single creature on which the older life had turned, legislated out of existence. A people defined by the reindeer was left, for a generation, without a single one.

The name went the way of the herd. From 1940 the Okinsky district was constituted as an aimag whose entire population was officially recorded as Buryat, and from that year until the turn of the millennium the Soyot were not counted as a distinct people at all. For sixty years they existed, in every register the state kept, only as Buryat. By the time an inventory of Siberia’s endangered languages came to be made in the 1990s, the Soyot language was reckoned all but extinct — by 1996 effectively without a community of everyday speakers, remembered by the old and unlearned by the young. On paper the Soyot had ceased to be: no herd, no language, no name of their own. It is the sort of erasure that is easy to mistake for a natural death, and the twentieth-century record — collectivization, the 1963 disbanding, the six decades of non-recognition — is best held soberly for what it was, a set of things done to a people by a state, and named as such.

The recovery

That the story does not end there is the substance of the Soyot present. The recovery has been deliberate, documented, and — for a people so nearly written off — remarkably concrete.

It began with organization. In 1993, as the Soviet order gave way, the Association of the Soyot Nation was founded, drawing together at the outset some eight hundred and twelve members who claimed the name the state had suppressed. Almost at once the reindeer followed. The account is set out in the Cultural Survival record of the Soyot herd: in the early 1990s the district administration, with the backing of a United States-based non-governmental organization and support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, bought sixty-three reindeer from the still-viable herds of the neighboring Tofalar and gave them to a Soyot family, with two paid Tofalar herders brought in to teach skills that a generation had lost. Over four years the little herd acclimatized and grew past a hundred head. The gains did not all hold — today perhaps twenty people herd somewhere between thirty and fifty reindeer — but the thread was rejoined; there are once again Soyot who move through the high forest behind their own animals. The sources differ on the exact year of the purchase, giving 1992 in some tellings and 1994 in others, and it is safest to place it simply in the early 1990s.

Then came the restoration of the name in law. In 2000 the People’s Khural — the parliament — of the Republic of Buryatia acted to restore the Soyot as a distinct people, and in the same year they were entered on the federal Common List of Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East, approved on 24 March 2000. The Okinsky district was recast administratively as the Soyot National Aimag, the homeland given back its people’s name. The effect on the count was immediate and telling: where the late Soviet censuses had recorded the Soyot as a bare handful of self-identifiers, once the category existed again the numbers rose sharply — 2,769 in the census of 2002, 3,608 in 2010, and 4,368 in the census of 2021. The figures record, more than a change in population, a change in what people were permitted to call themselves.

The language has been the hardest and most patient work, and it rests very largely on one scholar. At the request of the government of Buryatia, Valentin I. Rassadin devised a Cyrillic-based Soyot alphabet in 2001 — a script for a language that had never had one. On its basis he published, in 2002, a Soyot–Buryat–Russian dictionary of over 4,500 entries, assembled from recorded speech and from comparison with the related Sayan-Turkic tongues, and much later, in 2020, a Soyot children’s picture-dictionary carrying Russian, Mongolian, and English alongside. On that foundation the language re-entered the schools of the Okinsky district. Teaching began at the Sorok boarding school, which was reorganized as a state institution for Soyot children, and Soyot is now taught to the young of the district — a language classed as extinct that is, in the strict and hopeful phrasing of the specialists, revitalizing.

The Soyot thus join a small company of Sayan-Baikal peoples remaking themselves in the post-Soviet decades — the Tofalar who sold them the reindeer, the Tungus-Mongol Khamnigan astride two inheritances, and the wider indigenous world of the country that drains toward Lake Baikal. What sets the Soyot case apart is how nearly complete the erasure had been, and how literal the recovery: a herd rebuilt from sixty-three borrowed animals, a language rebuilt from an alphabet that had to be invented, a name restored by a vote. A people the record had filed as assimilated is, in the present tense, herding reindeer in the Eastern Sayan and teaching its children words that a quarter-century ago were nearly no one’s — the fang-shaped peaks, and the masters who own them, learning to be spoken of again in the tongue that named them first.

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