Also known as the Nentsy, Samoyed, and Yurak, the Nenets inhabit northwestern Siberia, from the Kanin Peninsula on the White Sea to the Yenisey River Delta. This is a region of wet tundra, or treeless plains. Under the tundra is permanently frozen ground called permafrost. Farther south are tundra and taiga, a type of moist evergreen forest.

Apparently the ancestors of modern Nenets moved into this area from the south during the early centuries of the first millennium A.D., replacing or assimilating the original hunting-and-gathering population with one that relied on reindeer herding. These newcomers practiced herding techniques that seem to have been adopted from ones used by horse and cattle breeders to the south.

Like other Siberian groups, the Nenets developed a migratory lifestyle fully adjusted to tundra existence. In autumn they moved with their herds from the coast to taiga, and in spring they went back to the tundra. The Nenets became well known as expert breeders of reindeer large enough to be ridden like horses, a fact that caused their animals to be widely sought after by other groups.

The Nenets' encounters with the Russian Empire and the later Soviet Union were hostile and fraught with uprisings, a situation that did not improve with the sovietization of the 1930s, when the government tried to force all cultures to live in a similar way. Their millennia-long history as successful herdsmen did not yield easily to the concepts of collectivization, which advocated settling farmers on group farms.

The Nenets' home area has since become of the focus of the chemical and oil industries, and nuclear testing has posed grave dangers to the health of indigenous peoples. During the 1989 census, 34,665 Nenets were counted, more than 70 percent of whom still speak Samoyedic, a language related to Turkic. Their life expectancy is now reckoned at only 45 to 50 years.