Across Three Countries, and Under Three States

The Evenki are spread across a territory larger than most countries, from the Yenisei to the Pacific and south into Mongolia and northeastern China, in scattered groups that were never politically united. Their language is Tungusic, and the numbers speaking it are now small and falling in the Russian Federation, while a distinct community continues in Inner Mongolia.

G. V. Ksenofontov, a Yakut scholar who collected accounts of shamans from Yakut, Buryat and Tungus informants in the 1920s, assembled the fullest record of practitioners describing their own calling. It is a source produced at the last possible moment. Ksenofontov was executed in 1938 during the purges.

Soviet policy then moved the Evenki into collective farms and permanent settlements, sent children to boarding schools, and suppressed the shamans directly, with practitioners imprisoned and killed. Russian Orthodox mission had already been present for two centuries and had produced a mixed observance rather than a replacement. Since 1990 there has been revival on both sides of the border, alongside the wider pressure of industrial extraction on the taiga, and the Evenki appear in the atlas as a living people whose religious history includes a deliberate attempt by a state to end it.