Yakuts in the context of "Tengrism"

Reindeer herding is when reindeer are herded by people in a limited area. Currently, reindeer are the only semi-domesticated animal which naturally belong to the North. Reindeer herding is conducted in nine countries: Norway, Finland, Sweden, Russia, Greenland, the United States (Alaska), Mongolia, China and Canada. A small herd is also maintained in Scotland's Cairngorms National Park.

Reindeer herding is conducted by individuals within some kind of cooperation, in forms such as families, districts, Sámi and Yakut villages and sovkhozy (collective farms). A person who conducts reindeer herding is called a reindeer herder and approximately 100,000 people are engaged in reindeer herding today around the circumpolar North.

The Buryats are a Mongolic ethnic group native to southeastern Siberia who speak the Buryat language. They are one of the two largest indigenous groups in Siberia, the other being the Yakuts. The majority of the Buryats today live in their titular homeland, the Republic of Buryatia, a federal subject of Russia which sprawls along the southern border and partially straddles Lake Baikal. Smaller groups of Buryats also inhabit Ust-Orda Buryat Okrug (Irkutsk Oblast) and the Agin-Buryat Okrug (Zabaykalsky Krai) which are to the west and east of Buryatia respectively as well as northeastern Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, China. Traditionally, they formed the major northern subgroup of the Mongols.

Buryats share many customs with other Mongolic peoples, including nomadic herding, and erecting gers for shelter. Today the majority of Buryats live in and around Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryat Republic, although many still follow a more traditional lifestyle in the countryside. They speak a central Mongolic language called Buryat. UNESCO's 2010 edition of the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classifies the Buryat language as "severely endangered".

Kumis (/ˈkuːmɪs/ KOO-mis, rarely /ˈkʌmɪs/ KUM-is), alternatively spelled coumis or kumyz, also known as airag (/ˈaɪræɡ/ EYE-rag), is a traditional fermented dairy product made from mare milk. The drink is important to the peoples of the Central and East Asian steppes, of Turkic and Mongolic origin: Kazakhs, Bashkirs, Kalmyks, Kyrgyz, Mongols, and Yakuts. Kumis was historically consumed by the Khitans, Jurchens, Magyars, and Han Chinese of North China as well.

Kumis is a dairy product similar to kefir, but is produced from a liquid starter culture, in contrast to the solid kefir "grains". Because mare's milk contains more sugars than cow's or goat's milk, when fermented, kumis has a higher, though still mild, alcohol content compared to kefir.

The Tungusic languages (/tʊŋˈɡʊsɪk/; also known as Manchu–Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people (Ewenki) used by the Yakuts ("tongus").

The East Siberian Sea (Russian: Восто́чно-Сиби́рское мо́ре, romanized: Vostochno-Sibirskoye more; Yakut: Илин Сибиирдээҕи байҕал, romanized: İlin Sibiirdeeği bayğal) is a marginal sea in the Arctic Ocean. It is located between the Arctic Cape to the north, the coast of Siberia to the south, the New Siberian Islands to the west and Cape Billings, close to Chukotka, and Wrangel Island to the east. This sea borders on the Laptev Sea to the west and the Chukchi Sea to the east.

This sea is one of the least studied in the Arctic area. It is characterized by severe climate, low water salinity, and a scarcity of flora, fauna and human population, as well as shallow depths (mostly less than 50 m), slow sea currents, low tides (below 25 cm), frequent fogs, especially in summer, and an abundance of ice fields which fully melt only in August–September. The sea shores were inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous tribes of Yukaghirs, Chukchi and then Evens and Evenks, which were engaged in fishing, hunting and reindeer husbandry. They were then absorbed by Yakuts and later by Russians.

Uriankhai (/ˈʊriənˌxaɪ/ UUR-ee-ən-KHY) is a term of address applied by the Mongols to a group of forest peoples of the North, who include the Turkic-speaking Tuvans and Yakuts, while sometimes it is also applied to the Mongolian-speaking Altai Uriankhai. The Uriankhai included the western forest Uriankhai tribe and the Transbaikal Uriankhai tribe, with the former recorded in Chinese sources as Chinese: 兀良哈; pinyin: Wùliánghā.