Enets

The Enets, who call themselves Encho and were long known to Russians as the Yenisei Samoyeds, are a small Samoyedic people of the lower Yenisei, close to the Nenets and Nganasans. They formed from local north Siberian tribes merged with Samoyedic groups from the middle Yenisei, and were organized into patrilineal clans such as the Moggadi.

A late fifteenth-century Novgorod document calls them the mongolzei after the Moggadi clan, whose name means forest and named the Russian fort of Mangazeya, founded in 1601.

In the seventeenth century they wandered the Taz and Turukhan basins, until by the century's end pressure from the Nenets, Selkups and Kets pushed them to the eastern bank of the lower Yenisei around Dudinka. There they lived by reindeer, hunting and fishing, revering earth, sun, fire and water, and were slowly touched by Orthodox teaching.