Tavgi

The Tavgi, or Tavgi Samoyeds, were the easternmost Samoyedic reindeer hunters of the Siberian tundra. Their Russian name came from tavgy, the Nenets name for the Nganasans. They arose when Samoyedic groups moving onto the Taymyr Peninsula merged with older Paleo-Siberian hunters, and the Tavgs' speech became the basis of the Nganasan language.

Their clans ranged east from the Taymyr tundra, following wild reindeer herds on seasonal migrations of hundreds of miles. Russian tribute collectors reached the Avam River after 1600, and from 1618 the Tavgi paid sable yasak, rising in 1666 to ambush and kill several tax parties.

Isolated beyond the reach of missionaries, they were never baptized and kept their clan-based, shamanist way of life through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, when smallpox epidemics first cut deeply into their numbers.