Ket

The Kets are the only surviving Yeniseian-speaking people, heirs of an ancient population once widespread in central and southern Siberia; their self-name ket means man. When Russians reached the middle Yenisei they found them scattered in small taiga clans, living by fishing, hunting and some reindeer breeding. Some bands belonged to the Skewbald Horde; Russians lumped them with other river peoples as Ostyaks, later Yenisei Ostyaks.

Their incorporation into the Russian state in the seventeenth century met resistance, answered by deportations that broke up their patriarchal clans. Debt, famine and introduced diseases shrank their numbers, until by the nineteenth century they depended on state food supplies.

They kept a shamanist religion with animal helper spirits and household spirit images dressed in scraps of cloth. Their isolated language was first described by the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in 1788.