As far back as the sources go, the czarist administration sees the Tungus as ìfated to disappearî, like most of the ìlittle peoplesî of Siberia. It also judges them to be particularly elusive and rebellious, wonderfully skilled at using the taiga as a fortress. It has difficulty grasping their mode of organization (in moieties subdivided into non-localized clans), their territorial distribution and the reasons for their moves, which it deems excessively frequent. To be sure, those who live by hunting nomadize in small groups that do not correspond to clans and which usually contain members of both moieties, and their composition changes with the seasons. Among the nomadic hunters, the administration distinguishes those who go ìon footî or on ski, west of the Lena, and those who are ìmountedî (on reindeer or more rarely on horses), east of the Lena, but it also creates a class of ìwanderersî (Vasilevich 1969: 5ñ6, 181).
The 1728 charter requires the ìlittle peoplesî to conform to the clan model so as to facilitate the work of the administration, assigns the clan a management role and hands out favors to the new clan heads while forbidding anyone (i.e. men, in these patrilineal societies) to change clans. The function of clan head would be declared hereditary in 1813 (Kudrjavcev 1940: 180). At the end of the revision entrusted to him, in 1822 Speranskij drew up a new ìCharter for the administration of the indigenous peoples of Siberiaî, which would remain in force until 1901, but would seldom be applied. One of the reasons for this was that there were no legal dispositions concerning the territorial rights of these nomadic groups in the event they sedentarized. Yet the prohibition on their changing campsites and the influx of Russian settlers seeking to occupy the most fertile regions forced them either to sedentarize or to retreat to ever more remote regions (Patkanov 1906: 99; for the Evenk, Anisimov 1936, 1958).