The Tofalar

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Where the taiga of the Eastern Sayan thins toward bare rock, the path turns to loose stone and steep pitch, and a horse can no longer keep its feet. A reindeer can. It climbs under a saddle, sure-footed on the scree, and behind it come more — twenty, perhaps thirty, roped nose to tail, some loaded with the season’s furs, one bearing a rider. The rider is a hunter, and he is after sable: the small dark forest cat whose pelt has been the wealth of this country for as long as anyone has kept count. This is the whole of the thing that sets the Tofalar apart. Almost nowhere else on earth was the reindeer ridden and packed into high mountain country after fur, and almost no people who did it were so few.

They call themselves Tofa. The older Russian records call them Karagas, a name taken from one of their own clans, the Kara-Kash — the “black-browed” — and it clung to the ethnographic and administrative literature for the better part of three centuries before the people’s own word for themselves came into use. Their homeland is Tofalariya, in the southwest of the Nizhneudinsky District of Irkutsk Oblast, a wedge of high taiga and mountain crest in the Eastern Sayan. It is a country of river valleys — the Uda, the Biryusa, the Gutara, the Iya — running down out of the peaks, and of forest that climbs toward the timberline and stops. By the count of the Russian census the Tofalar are among the very smallest of all Siberia’s indigenous peoples: 762 in the whole of the Russian Federation in 2010, and 719 in Irkutsk Oblast in the census of 2021.

The names, and the reach into the record

The genealogy of so small a people is written mostly by outsiders, and it has to be read as such. The deepest layer of it rests on linguistic reconstruction rather than on any word the Tofalar themselves have handed down, and where it goes back before the written record it is properly counted as contested. Its outline, as the linguists have drawn it — the Buryat-Mongolian scholar Valentin Rassadin foremost among them — is a story of layering. The earliest ancestors of the Tofalar are reckoned to have been proto-Samoyedic hunters and gatherers who reached the eastern Sayan by roughly the close of the third millennium and the opening of the second millennium BCE. Over the Old Turkic centuries they were Turkicized: they gave up the Samoyedic tongue — the Mator language, of the same family as the languages of the far northern tundra — and took on a Turkic speech of the Sayan mountains, with a Yeniseian and later a Mongol layer folded in over time.

The result is that the Tofa language today is Turkic, and of a very particular kind. It belongs to the Sayan-Turkic, or Siberian Turkic, branch, and it forms a dialect continuum with the Tuvan language spoken across the mountains to the south — closest of all to the speech of the Tozhu, the reindeer-herding Tuvans of the taiga. It stands, in other words, inside a small cluster of Sayan taiga peoples who share both a way of life and a common linguistic ancestry: the Tozhu Tuvans, the Soyot of the Oka valley to the east, and the Dukha — the Tsaatan — reindeer herders across the border in the far north of Mongolia. To grasp the Tofalar is to grasp them as one node in that cluster, a family of high-mountain reindeer peoples sprung from a shared root and scattered along the crests. Their kinship with the Soyot is the nearest of these, a matter of neighboring valleys and all but the same herding life; together with the Soyot, and with the Khamnigan of the country toward Lake Baikal to the east, the Tofalar are among the smallest of the indigenous nations of the Baikal-Sayan uplands, each holding a distinct language and a distinct history in a shared high land.

They enter the written record with the Russian advance to the east. In 1648 the Cossacks raised the fort of Udinsk on the river Uda, and with the fort came the tsar’s authority and its price: the yasaq, the fur-tribute, which the Karagas were made to pay and which was reckoned, here as across the Siberian fur frontier, in sable pelts. The tribute was not fixed by any settled law the payers could hold the state to, and by the record its demands were often raised at the collector’s discretion. On the eve of the Soviet reordering the Tofalar were organized into five patrilineal clans — the nyon — though an older memory counted seven, and each roamed a stretch of the Sayan taiga as a self-governing band. It was a society without towns, without fields, without a settled center: a people of the mountain forest who moved with their reindeer through the year.

A group of Tofalar reindeer herders in the Nizhneudinsk district of Irkutsk Governorate, photographed in the early twentieth century. Unknown photographer, from the collection of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The reindeer, and the world of the taiga

The distinctive fact of the Tofalar is the reindeer, and the reindeer they kept was not the reindeer of the tundra. Far to the north, other Siberian peoples drove great herds of hundreds or thousands across the open barrens for meat and hide. The Tofalar did nothing of the kind. A household kept a small band — twenty to thirty animals — and the animals were not eaten so much as ridden and loaded. A Tofa reindeer was a saddle-and-pack beast, trained to carry a hunter or a burden up the stony pitches of the high country where a horse would founder, and to stand and browse the lichen while its owner worked the trap-lines. This was reindeer husbandry turned to the mountain forest rather than to the plain, and it is one of the rarer forms the animal’s long partnership with people has ever taken. It made the reindeer, for the Tofalar, the indispensable instrument of the hunt — the thing that carried them up into the country where the fur was.

The Eastern Sayan mountains, the range whose high taiga is the country of the Tofalar. Photograph by Mikhail Babttrakinov, 2023, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 (public domain dedication).

And the hunt was the year. The Tofalar took sable above all, and with it ermine, the Siberian polecat, and squirrel — the small fur-bearers of the taiga, whose pelts were both the food of the family, traded on, and the coin of the tribute. They took larger game too, deer and bear, and fowl and fish in their seasons, and they gathered what the forest gave. Reindeer, hunting, and gathering, turning with the year through the valleys and the crests: this was subsistence, exact and complete, and it kept the Tofalar for centuries in a country the farming world could not use. The sable at the center of it was, from the first Russian contact, both livelihood and burden — the same pelt that fed and clothed a family was the pelt the tribute-collector counted, so that the wealth of the taiga and the reach of the distant state ran along the same trap-lines. The reindeer carried the hunter to the sable, and the sable carried the tsar’s authority back into the mountains.

Over that practical order lay a reading of the taiga as a living order of powers. The forest and its game were not a neutral stock to be drawn down at will; they were held and given by masters and spirits, the owners of the animals and the places, with whom the hunter stood in a relation of respect and exchange. In this the Tofalar belonged to the oldest circumpolar stratum of belief, the one in which the reindeer itself is more than a beast of burden — a creature able, in the order of the cosmos, to bear a spirit up into the worlds above. The people were shamanists. Alongside a Russian Orthodoxy laid over them from the outside, they kept the taiga cosmology of the Sayan, and at its center was the boo, the shaman — the word itself is the term of the Tungus-speaking peoples to the north, the saman, borrowed across the whole of Siberia and beyond — the one called and set apart to travel between the worlds on behalf of the living.

That cosmos had a lower world as well as an upper one. In the Tofa reckoning the dead passed into the realm of Erlik, the lord of the underworld, and the underworld was a country where everything ran the wrong way round — reversed, back to front, the mirror of the world of the living. From this belief came one of the sharpest and best-attested of Tofa customs: the grave-goods buried with a person were deliberately broken or damaged before they were laid in the ground. A thing whole here would be a thing ruined there; a thing broken here would serve the dead, made whole again, in the reversed country below. It is a cosmology of exact symmetry — an upper world and a lower one answering each other across the boundary of death — and it is the frame from within which the whole of the Tofa reindeer-and-sable life is to be read: not a bare economy, but a way of living rightly among the owners of the forest and the powers of the three worlds.

That this can be described at all is owed, in large part, to the narrowness of a single window in time. The office of the shaman survived among the Sayan peoples — the Samoyedic and the Turkic alike — late enough that a foreign ethnographer could still reach it before it closed. The Hungarian Vilmos Diószegi, drawn by an old idea about the shamanic inheritance of his own people, made a series of journeys into southern Siberia in the late 1950s and after — expeditions in 1957, 1958, and 1964 — and among the Karagas of the Sayan he was able to sit with shamans who no longer practiced, to record their personal memories and their songs, and to gather their surviving paraphernalia. A shaman’s pebble-amulet from the village of Alygdzher, the resonator of a shaman’s drum from Nerkha, the song sung at the dedication of a shaman’s dress and drum: these passed, through his hands, from a living memory into the record just as the living practice was ending. The knowledge of the Tofa spirit-world that can be set down here rests on that late, outsider’s ethnography, and it should be held as such — a description at the public distance, an account of what the tradition meant to those who kept it, and never a manual for its working.

From tribute to resettlement, and the edge of survival

The reception of the Tofalar in the modern age is a small, sharp instance of a much larger Siberian story, and its Soviet chapter has to be named plainly. Under the tsars they had been tribute-payers, their sable-yasaq subject to arbitrary increase. What came after arrived in close order and changed everything. The fur-tribute was abolished in 1926. New hunting regulations followed in 1927. Between 1929 and 1931 the Tofalar were collectivized, their reindeer and their hunting grounds gathered into three kolkhozy, the collective farms of the new order. In 1930 a Tofalar national district was drawn up, with the village of Alygdzher — the name is said to mean “wind” in the Tofa tongue — as its center. And in the same years the shamans were suppressed: by 1930 the office that Diószegi would find only in memory a generation later had been put down by the Soviet state.

Then, in 1932, came the act that undid the old life at its root. The once-nomadic Tofalar were resettled wholesale into fixed villages — Alygdzher, Nerkha, and Verkhnyaya Gutara chief among them — and pressed toward a sedentary existence, their herds and grounds held in common, their hunting hedged and their shamanism discouraged and then forbidden. The colonial and Soviet framing that justified all this cast the Tofalar as “backward,” a people to be lifted out of a primitive past into the settled modern world; that framing is a distortion, a thing done to the Tofalar by a state, and it is named here only to be rejected. What sedentarization did in fact was to sever a people from the economy that had defined them. Mountain-taiga pack-reindeer herding, the rarest thing the Tofalar had, could not survive the loss of the nomadic round that sustained it. By the account of those who have followed it, Tofalar reindeer numbers fell from several thousand in the early 1990s to a few dozen — under fifty animals — within a generation, and the herding that had once been the mark of the whole people contracted, by the early 2000s, to a bare remnant reportedly kept by a single family.

The language followed the herds toward the edge. As Russian became the tongue of school and village and work, the transmission of Tofa from one generation to the next broke; children ceased to learn it at home, and the speakers grew old. The Tofa language is classified Critically Endangered in the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The count of those who still command it has fallen steeply — from something like forty speakers of varying fluency around the turn of the century to the 67 recorded in the census of 2020, and by the severest recent assessments to no more than a handful of elderly fluent speakers. It is the near-silencing of a whole way of speaking the world.

Against this loss stands a genuine, if fragile, recovery. In 1989 Valentin Rassadin — the linguist whose reconstruction underlies much of what is known of the Tofa past — created a Cyrillic-based writing system for the language, giving it, for the first time, a settled script. Through the 1990s Tofalar activists won the teaching of Tofa in the village schools of Tofalariya, part of the broader recovery of indigenous language and tradition across the Baikal-Sayan region after the Soviet collapse. The reindeer, too, have not vanished altogether: the community at Alygdzher has worked to hold and rebuild a small herd, some hundreds of animals kept into recent years, and the reindeer remains the emblem of Tofalariya and of the Tofa themselves — a people sometimes glossed, in their own reckoning, as the people of the deer.

They are, in every case, a living people. Some 762 Tofalar were counted in Russia in 2010, 719 in Irkutsk Oblast in 2021 — present-tense inheritors of the mountain-taiga country, of the reindeer that climbs where no horse can go, and of a cosmology in which the dead cross into the reversed kingdom of Erlik below while the shaman walks between the worlds. The herds are thinned and the fluent voices are few, and neither of those facts is softened here. But the Tofalar have not passed into the record; they stand at the edge of it, holding what can still be held.

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