Soyot

The name Soyot is from the endonym 'soyyt.' The Buryat call them 'hoyod' and the Tofalar call them 'hazut' which is derived from the name of the largest Soyot clan, the Khaazuut. ==History==

Origin According to Larisa R. Pavlinskaya, a Russian ethnographer based in St. Petersburg, Russia, the ancestor of the Soyots (and the closely related Tofalars, Tozhu Tuvans, and Dukha) were proto-Samoyedic hunter-gatherers who arrived in the Eastern Sayan region from Western Siberia at the end of the third millennium BC and the beginning of the second millennium BC. At the beginning the first millennium AD, Turkic speaking cattle and horse breeders migrated from the Inner Asian steppes and would go on to significantly influence the Samoyedic, Ket, and Tungus populations of the Eastern Sayan Mountains. The newly arrived Buryats adopted some Soyot customs, such as taking up yak breeding and seasonal migration. He later wrote and published a book entitled Beasts, Men and Gods recounting his experiences. After the civil war, Petri was involved in planning changes in the economic lives of the minorities of the greater Altai-Sayan and Buryatia regions, including the Evenk, Soyot, and Tofalar. He was later accused of spying for British and German intelligence and establishing contacts with Buryat nationalists, leading to his execution in 1937. In 1963, the Soviet government labeled traditional nomadic reindeer-herding unprofitable and disbanded the herd. ==Language==

The Soyot language is a member of the Turkic family, and is closely related to the Tofa language; the Soyot language has many Buryat and medieval and contemporary Mongol loanwords. The Sorok secondary school, a state boarding for Soyot children, then began to teach the Soyot language to its students. ==Reindeer herding==

Reindeer herding was a large facet of Soyot life. It enabled them to travel through vast territories of mountainous taiga and were indispensable for hunting; it also provided them with clothing, shelter, milk, meat, and various other household items. He argued that Sayan reindeer-herding was "the oldest form of reindeer-herding" and associated with the earlier domestication of the reindeer of the Samoyedic taiga population. He went so far to propose the Sayan region as the origin of the economic and cultural complex of reindeer hunters-herdsmen seen among the Evenki groups and peoples of the Sayan area. Part of the efforts to revive Soyot culture involve reintroducing reindeer-herding. To date, there are approximately 20 Soyot engaged in reindeer-herding. ==Religion==

The religion and shamanistic practices of the Soyots show influence from both Khalkha Mongols and Altai Turkic peoples. They share many cultural and religious similarities with the Tofa people, some of which are not seen in neighboring Turkic peoples. Soyots have been exposed to Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhism since the mid 1700s, but many only began to properly follow Buddhism in the 1800s and 1900s. According to Rassadin, Buryat Buddhist lamas attempted to put an end to Soyot shamanism. ==See also==