Chelkans

The Chelkans, who call themselves Chalkandu, are a small Turkic people of the northeastern Altai taiga, speaking a Northern Altai tongue. They took shape from Turkic clans mingling with Ket, Samoyedic and other indigenous Siberian hunters, a process already under way when the Yenisei Kyrgyz dominated the region.

From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century the area passed under Mongol and later Dzungar rule, and in 1756 the Chelkans submitted to the Russian Empire together with the other Altai peoples.

Hunters rather than herders, they lived by chasing fur game in the mountain forests, adding cedar-nut gathering in the nineteenth century, and made their homes in polygonal log and bark yurts with conical bark roofs. Russian Orthodoxy gradually spread among them, but older shamanic practices remained alive.