The Kamasins (; Kamassian: ) are a collection of

tribe The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide use of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. The definition is contested, in part due to conflict ...

s of Samoyedic peoples in the

Sayan Mountains The Sayan Mountains (, ; ) are a mountain range in southern Siberia spanning southeastern Russia (Buryatia, Irkutsk Oblast, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Tuva and Khakassia) and northern Mongolia. Before the rapid expansion of the Tsardom of Russia, the mou ...

who lived along the Kan River and Mana River in the 17th century in the southern part of today's

Krasnoyarsk Krai Krasnoyarsk Krai (, ) is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject (a krai) of Russia located in Siberia. Its administrative center is the types of inhabited localities in Russia, city of Krasnoyarsk, the second-largest city in Siberia after ...

. In the Russian

2010 The year saw a multitude of natural and environmental disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the 2010 Chile earthquake. The 2009 swine flu pandemic, swine flu pandemic which began the previous year ...

and

2021 Like the year 2020, 2021 was also heavily defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the emergence of multiple Variants of SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 variants. The major global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, which began at the end of 2020, continued ...

censuses, two people identified as Kamassian and listed under the subgroup "other nationalities".https://rosstat.gov.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/Documents/Vol4/pub-04-02.pdf Also, 21 people, comprising 0.5% of the population of Sayansky District, are declared as Kamasins and their descendants by the district administration in the official tourist guide (2021).

History

The origins of the Kamasins remain obscure but it is believed that they are descended from Proto- Samoyed tribes. Around the 17th century, the Kamasins moved and settled along the Kan and

Mana Mana may refer to: Religion and mythology * Mana (Oceanian cultures), the spiritual life force energy or healing power that permeates the universe in Melanesian and Polynesian mythology * Mana (food), archaic name for manna, an edible substance m ...

rivers. Later on the Kamasins were partly Turkicized.

The Taiga and Steppe Kamasins

In the late 19th century, the Kamasins were split into two groups: the Taiga and the Steppe Kamasins, each with their own distinct dialect. The

Taiga Taiga or tayga ( ; , ), also known as boreal forest or snow forest, is a biome characterized by coniferous forests consisting mostly of pines, spruces, and larches. The taiga, or boreal forest, is the world's largest land biome. In North A ...

Kamasins engaged in

hunting Hunting is the Human activity, human practice of seeking, pursuing, capturing, and killing wildlife or feral animals. The most common reasons for humans to hunt are to obtain the animal's body for meat and useful animal products (fur/hide (sk ...

, reindeer breeding and

fishing Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish. Fish are often caught as wildlife from the natural environment (Freshwater ecosystem, freshwater or Marine ecosystem, marine), but may also be caught from Fish stocking, stocked Body of water, ...

. The Taiga Kamasins spoke the Kamass dialect of Kamassian until the early 20th century. The

Steppe In physical geography, a steppe () is an ecoregion characterized by grassland plains without closed forests except near rivers and lakes. Steppe biomes may include: * the montane grasslands and shrublands biome * the tropical and subtropica ...

Kamasins engaged in

cattle breeding Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, management, production, nutrition, selective breeding, and the raising of livestock ...

horse breeding Horse breeding is reproduction in horses, and particularly the human-directed process of selective breeding of animals, particularly purebred horses of a given Horse breed, breed. Planned matings can be used to produce specifically desired chara ...

farming Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created ...

, and hunting. They spoke the Koibal dialect of Kamassian, a Samoyedic language, until they adopted the

Khakas language Khakas, also known as Xakas, is a Turkic language spoken by the Khakas, who mainly live in the southwestern Siberian Republic of Khakassia, in Russia. The Khakas number 61,000, of whom 29,000 speak the Khakas language. Most Khakas speakers are ...

in the mid-19th century, which is still used today.

Later history

Many of the Kamasins had assimilated into the

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

peasantry A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasan ...

by the early 20th century. Other Kamasins were assimilated into the Koibal subgroup of the Khakass and underwent Turkification. The Kamasins are now ethnically classified as Koibal Khakass or Russian. In 1989, Klavdiya Plotnikova, the last native speaker of the Kamassian language, died. She was half Kamassian.

Population

, in a 1999 essay on the Kamassian language, indicates that there are no more than 50 descendants of Kamasins. In the All-Russian population censuses of

and

, 2 people indicated being of Kamasin ethnicity. The unified tourist passport of the Sayansky district of the

(developed by the local administration in 2021) shows the ethnic composition of the district's population. 0.2% of the total population of 10,500 people (=21 people) are attributed to the Kamasins, the indigenous people.

References

External links