Khanty People

Khanty People

E. D. PROKOF'YEVA, E.D., CHERNETSOV, N. and PRYTKOVA N.F. The Khanty and Mansi.

FORSYTH J.A. J. A History of the Peoples of Siberia. Russia's North Asian Colony. CUP 1992.

Kretzmann, S. & Wright, S. 1998 - Drilling to the ends of the earth./Survival International. Rainforest Action Network.1998.

Lukina N.V. & V.M.Kulemsin. . Tomsk State University. 1970.

The present-day territory of residence of Khanty lies to the east of the Ural Range along the Ob' and its tributaries. This territory is mainly covered by vast swamps, numerous rivers and lakes, richly forested.

During the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, forest-steppes of Western Siberia were inhabited by nomadic groups, horse-breeders. These nomads are considered the early Ugrian tribes. The horse-breeders and hunter-fishermen from the North contacted closely. From these wooded steppes the Magyars left in the ninth century AD to Central Europe and founded the Hungarian nation. Other Ugric ethnoses moving north changed the culture and lifestyles into hunting, fishing and rain-deer breeding.

First in the XV century - the Great Novgorod republic and later in the XVI century the Moscovite state had already encroached upon Finno-Ugrian peoples of the west of Ural, founded outlying trade towns and established nominal suzerainty over Khanty and Samoyed inhabitants of the region around the mouth of the Ob.

Khanty, who may have numbered, together with Mansi, about 16,000 at a time when the population of Moscovite Russia was perhaps about 10 million, were not nations with a single ruler or a sense of common identity, but belonged to many separate clans, each with its own hereditary chieftains. The territory occupied by the Khanty extended from the mouth of the Ob and the northern Urals for 400 miles up the Ob to the confluence of the Irtysh, and from there a further 400 miles eastward into the heart of Siberia.

The tribal priests - shamans presided over religious rites in these sacred places, sacrificing horses, reindeer or other animals under a tree and smearing the mouths of spirit effigies with blood to "feed" them. In early times human beings were sacrificed in this and other ways.

Despite all the anti-religious measures employed by the Communist Party, shamans and shamanism continued in Siberia till nowadays.

Finding themselves at best disregarded, but frequently exploited and abused by the invaders of their territory, the native Siberians living to the north seeking escape from the destruction. At the beginning of the twentieth century the peoples of the North, pushed back from the intensively colonized zone of the railway, lived as separately from the 'white men' as did the Indians of North America.


Siberian Tribe Struggle for Land Rights
by Kathryn McCann

In the 1930s the Khanty people of Siberia were persecuted by the Soviet regime. They were taken from their ancestral lands, the adults put to work in state farms and the children sent to boarding schools. The shamans were killed in an attempt to crush the people's spirituality and break their roots to their past.

By the 1960s many of the tribe had managed to move back to the Siberian Taiga and re-establish their traditional semi-nomadic way of life, herding reindeer, hunting, fishing and gathering berries.

But then came a new threat.

Oil, gas and mining companies, seeking to exploit the hidden riches of the land, have wreaked havoc in the delicate arctic environment, polluting water sources, degrading forests and killing or scaring away the animals. In places the land is so damaged that it would take a century to recover enough to support the Khanty's precious reindeer.

The prospectors trick families into surrendering their land - moving in without their knowledge, promising compensation that never comes or making them believe they have no right to refuse. As a result the people are often driven from their land into 'native villages', where they are forced to depend on the state to survive. In desperation many seek solace in the vodka brought in by the oil men or even resort to suicide.

In fact until recently, according to Russian federal law, the people had the right to live and hunt in their traditional lands, the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. And in 1994 those who were still living in the traditional way received official land documents from the local administration, giving them the right to deny entry to prospectors. Now, however, a new Land Code has come into force that invalidates the previous laws, leaving the Khanty with no protection from those who want to exploit their land.