Evenk

The Evenki are the great Tungusic people of the Siberian taiga, ranging from the Yenisei and Lena across Baikal to the Amur and Okhotsk. Their ancestors may be the Shiwei recorded between the fifth and ninth centuries. By 1600 the Lena and Yenisei Evenki herded reindeer and the Solons bred horses.

They travelled with pack reindeer, lived in conical birch-bark tents, hunted elk and sable with bows until eighteenth-century firearms spread, and ordered the world through animist spirits and shamans.

The seventeenth century brought Cossacks and the yasak fur tax, collected through clan hostages; many bands fled east as far as Sakhalin. Other Evenki faced the Manchu, who enrolled them as Solons in the Eight Banners and in the eighteenth century moved banner companies to Hulunbuir. Nominally converted to Orthodoxy in that century, taiga Evenki kept their shamanic rites.