Selkup

The Selkup are a Samoyedic people of western Siberia, formed in the middle Ob basin from the meeting of native Yeniseian hunters with Samoyedic groups moving north from the Sayan Mountains early in the first millennium. They lived by fishing, hunting and reindeer herding along the Ob and its tributaries around Tomsk, travelling the rivers in dugout canoes.

In the thirteenth century they came under Mongol overlordship, and after Russian Cossacks reached the region around 1628 they were subjugated and rose in unsuccessful revolts.

During the seventeenth century part of the Selkup migrated north to the Taz and Turukhan rivers, while Russian settlers of the eighteenth century encroached on their hunting grounds and the state pressed conversion to Orthodox Christianity, though older beliefs and customs survived.