Nenets

The Nenets are the northernmost Samoyedic people, whose self-name nenej nenetsj means real humans. Their traditions tell of ancestors moving north from the Siberian interior before the twelfth century and spreading across the tundra from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei. They lived in clan camps of conical tents called mya, hunting, fishing and keeping reindeer as draft animals.

Pomor traders from the White Sea reached them in the sixteenth century, and in 1601 the Russians built Mangazeya on the Taz River, named from a Nenets ethnonym, where they paid yasak tribute in sables.

Mangazeya was abandoned in the 1670s, and after a Nenets attack on tax collectors in 1679 its tribute post moved to New Mangazeya on the Yenisei. Large-scale nomadic reindeer herding developed in the eighteenth century, when the Nenets remained masters of the Yamal and Taymyr tundra.