Soïotes

The Soyot are ethnic group of Turkic origin who live mainly in the Oka region in the Okinsky District in the Buryatia, Russia. According to the 2010 census, there were 3,608 Soyots in Russia. Their extinct language (partly revitalized) was of a Turkic type and basically similar to the Dukhan and closely related to the Tofa language. The Oka River, the largest river flowing down from the Western Sayans into the Angara is called the Ok-hem meaning "an arrow-river" by the Soyots of the Oka River basin. They live dispersed among the Buryats and now speak the Buryat language. According to Larisa R. Pavlinskaya, a Russian ethnographer based in St. Petersburg, Russia, "The ancestors of the Soyots (and of 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." In 1726 Tunka Valley Buryats spoke of a people who self-identified as Soyot but who the Buryats called Kosogol Urianghai. At that time the Soyot herded reindeer on the upper Irkut River, a river in the Buryat Republic and Irkutsk Oblast of Russia to Lake Khövsgöl, Mongolia. Approximately 350–400 years ago, the Soyot people moved to Buryatia from the area of Khovsgol Lake. The traditional lifestyle of the Soyot people, like others in the Taiga group, was characterized by reindeer-breeding and hunting but by 2009 most people were living in villages. In 1940 the Okinsky Region was designated as an aimag and officially recognized all residents of the Okinsky region as Buryat. Soyots lost their official identity as an ethnic group until 2000. Bernhard Eduardovich Petri, (1884-1937) Professor of ethnology at Irkutsk University, member of the British Anthropological Society, the USSR State Academy of the History of Material Culture, and full member of the American Anthropological Association undertook research with the indigenous peoples of Siberia.