Tubalar

The Tubalars, who call themselves tuba kizhi or forest people, are a Northern Altaian Turkic people living along the Biya and Lake Teletskoye. They formed from Turkic clans merging with taiga natives during the age of Yenisei Kyrgyz dominance.

When the Mongols conquered the Altai in the thirteenth century, the Tubalars withdrew into the forest and were gradually made to pay tribute in squirrel and sable skins. In the seventeenth century they were tributaries of the Altyn Khans and then the Dzungars, while resisting Russian Cossacks until their defeat in 1627 to 1629; many paid sables to the tsar and iron kettles and tripods to the Dzungars.

Organized in hereditary seok clans, they became Russian subjects in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. They hunted in the taiga, later gathered cedar nuts, venerated the cedar as sacred, and kept shamanic practices alongside Russian Orthodoxy.