Teleut

The Teleut are a Turkic people of the upper Ob region, whose speech is a dialect of Southern Altai. They originated among the Tiele confederation and were once subjects of the First Turkic Khaganate.

By the late sixteenth century they roamed between the Irtysh and the Ob with about four thousand tents, nominal vassals of the Oirats. In 1618 Cossacks from Tomsk built the Kuznetsk ostrog on the Tom inside their grazing lands, and the Russian grip tightened until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Teleut became tsarist subjects.

Most were nomadic or semi-nomadic herders, living in conical bark-covered yurts, while some lived by taiga hunting. One offshoot, the Kalmaks, moved north in the seventeenth century, mixed with the Siberian Tatars and adopted Sunni Islam; the main body converted to Russian Orthodoxy while keeping shamanic customs.