Kumandin

The Kumandins, who call themselves Kumandy, are a Turkic people of the northern Altai foothills, living along the Biya and lower Katun rivers and speaking a Northern Altai language. Ethnographers treat them as a federation of seok clans of mixed descent: Kipchak-Cuman steppe herders, taiga hunters and Nenets reindeer breeders.

The name Kumandin has been linked to the Cumans, whose confederation once reached from the Altai toward the Danube. By the seventeenth century the Kumandins lived on the Charysh near its junction with the Ob, and when the Russians demanded the yasak fur tribute they withdrew deeper into the Altai rather than pay.

They were first and foremost taiga hunters, adding cedar-nut gathering in the nineteenth century, and dwelt in polygonal log and bark yurts. Over the imperial period most were baptized into Russian Orthodoxy, which coexisted with the older shamanic cults.