Mansi

From Free net encyclopedia

Template:Ethnic group Mansi (obsolete: Voguls) are an endangered indigenous people living in Khanty-Mansi autonomous district, an autonomous region within Tyumen Oblast in the Russian Federation. In Khanty-Mansi district, the Khanty and Mansi languages have co-official status with Russian.

The Mansi have been in contact with the Russian state at least since the 16th century when most of Western Siberia was brought under Russian control by Ermak. Due to their higher exposure to Russian and Soviet control, they are generally more assimilated than their Northern neighbours, the Khanty.

In the 1960s, exploitation of the rich oil deposits of Khanty-Mansi district began, causing the Soviet Union's largest internal migration wave since the Second World War. This led to a dramatic marginalisation of the Mansi and Khanty who today constitute slightly more than one percent of the district's population. At the same time their homeland has been massively devastated by 30 years of oil extraction.

As for most other Northern indigenous peoples of Russia, the Soviet state ordered the creation of a "national literature" for the Mansi people which consisted mostly of works hailing the enlightenment and progress brought to the Mansi by Lenin's revolution. The most prominent Mansi representative of this genre was the writer Yuvan Shestalov, who after the breakup of the Soviet Union converted from communism to shamanism. Since then he claims that the Mansi are in fact the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a claim hardly shared by anyone else.

Together with the Khanty people, the Mansi are politically represented by the Association to Save Yugra, an organisation founded during the Perestroika of the late 1980s. This organisation was among the first regional indigenous associations in Russia.